Eden Zoo

Adam was the world’s first ‘taxonomist’.  A taxonomist is a person who seeks to organise all the living organisms into a logical system. As well as the task of serving and guarding the Garden of Eden Adam had the great task of naming all the animals and birds. Eden became the first zoo. Taxonomy should not be dull and boring. It should be worship!

It is striking that Adam’s call to glorify God should involve him in caring for plants and animals. It seems that in a special way these living organisms display something of God’s glory which it is right we should examine and proclaim.

True Biology is worship.

God’s call to worship him in the study of living organisms does not end with Adam. When God answers Job it seems as if Job is again put in Adam’s position. God gives him a lesson in zoology:

He tells Job to ‘Look now at the behemoth….’ and asks him ‘Can you draw out the Leviathon?’

Jesus tells us to consider the ravens and the beauty of the lilies.

Prof. John Murray when he first observed a Giant redwood tree he slapped his knee and said with deepest reverence ‘Isn’t that grand!’

The primary sin of modern biology is not abortion, euthanasia or an attempt to redefine human sexuality. It is more fundamental. It is the sin of failing to worship the owner and creator of all life. In Acts 3:15 the Apostle Peter accuses the Jews gathered outside the temple of killing the ‘Architect’ of life. Modern biology does the same thing but in a different way.

The biblical view of life puts the mind and power of God behind the variety of life. It is true that all biology ‘under the sun’ is fallen biology and is all under enslavement to decay. (Rom 8:21) Nevertheless it still speaks of the glory of God. Modern biology however seeks to gag the testimony of biology to its designer.

Modern biology seeks to remove any intelligent and artistic input from a divine architect and attempts to join all of life together in a single family with all its variation caused by genetic mistakes combined with natural selection:

Atheistic Taxonomy does not work

Modern taxonomy however is struggling to make the reality of life fit into the materialistic evolutionary straightjacket that it is committed to.

Renowned biologist Lynne Margulis was known as something of a heretic in evolutionary circles. She regarded the neo-darwinist view of life as basically wrong. She described natural selection as simply a stabilising influence. She agreed with the geologists Eldredge and Gould that gradual change is absent from the fossil record and argued for rapid evolutionary change as a result of symbiosis (interaction between two different living organisms.) In an interview toward the end of her life she made a number of revealing comments.

She admitted that ‘The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.’

She described one of the moments which caused her to abandon neo-darwinism as the complete explanation for life:

‘Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it (neo-darwinism)—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.’

The tree of life keeps falling over.

Margulis became famous for proposing a radically different view of taxonomy to all that had gone before. She proposed that more complex cells had originated by engulfing simpler ones. Eventually her ideas became mainstream.

More recently a Scientific American article had the provocative title ‘Uprooting the tree of life’ and a still more recent New Scientist front page carried this heading: ‘Darwin was wrong—cutting down the tree of life.’

In June 2012 the prestigious journal Nature published a review of the work of Kevin Peterson who uses a new technique to classify organisms. His new technique uses a special family of genes which are thought to be able to give a good insight into the relationships between organisms.

In his description of his results he says ‘I’ve looked at thousands of microRNA  genes, and I can’t find a single example that  would support the traditional [evolutionary] tree,’

‘The microRNAs are totally unambiguous,’  he says, ‘but they give a totally different tree  from what everyone else wants.’

Surely the reason that modern taxonomy is having such a struggle to produce a settled single tree of life is that no such tree actually exists.

A new biology

According to our gospel not only will the single tree of life explanation ultimately fail but the whole of biology is set for a grand new start.

A solitary human death of a real man, who was more than a man, will not only redeem a countless multitude of human beings from sin and death but will also have glorious consequences for the whole of created reality. The Apostle Paul tells us of the final emancipation of creation, with a special emphasis on biology, which will be released from its current position of slavery to death and decay and will be swallowed up by life.

Psalm 8 speaks of the final glorious position of humanity, ‘crowned with glory and honour.’  It speaks of the second Adam with a restored new creation whose united voice, with all its multitude of restored living creatures, will bring glory to its maker:

O LORD our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth!