Body And Soul

Our scientists have theorized that life arose on this planet through a series of happy accidents. There had to have been an accident, something miraculous, because, up to now, most scientists don’t understand how the chemicals necessary to support life were transformed into living material without intervention.  Science, to my knowledge, has not yet explained to us exactly how life emerged from the chemical soup that must have existed on the cooling planet that ended up as earth.

We have to start with a living cell, somewhere, somehow, if we are to accept the rationale of the theory of evolution. That theory insists that simple life forms progressed over millions of years, through the survival of the fittest process, through changing planetary conditions, to arrive at where we are now. There is evidence of that process taking place. Don’t we have to rule out visitors from another planet seeding our planet with living cells? In our probes of the universe, we have not come across other instances of intelligent life. (Maybe we haven’t looked hard enough, or something was alive millions of years ago?)

It is true we have found amino acids, and other compounds essential to life, in meteorites that have landed on earth. How could a living cell have survived such a journey? Where does the energy and purposefulness come from that would infuse raw chemicals, by accident, with the DNA that every living cell contains? Every living cell contains a million pages of instructions detailing with code every possible permutation of the cell’s nature. Even evolving over millions of years, with the complexity of DNA containing such codes, how could they happen by accident?

Then, we come to the question of soul.

Some have theorized that our universe originated with a Big Bang. They say that at some finite time in the past the universe was formed from the explosion of an incredibly dense point of matter. The universe continues to expand outward from that time. Was this an act of God as described in the Bible? That could surely explain the creation of a living cell to start off the evolutionary process. The arrival of human beings, each with their unique consciousness, each with a soul, could be seen as the Divine’s objective from this process.

Now some scientists no longer believe the theory of the Big Bang anymore. They suggest that the universe has an infinite age and an infinite existence in space. Of course that does not rule out the supernatural.  What does that do to the idea of the Divine bring order out of nothingness?

If you assumed there must be other intelligent species out there, and we are not alone. considering there are a billion billion galaxies, think of this. Some scientists believe that there must be at least 200 parameters to be met, and present, if a planet is to have the capacity to support human life. Even with all the planets out there in the universe, the odds, (too many zeroes to count,) of finding another planet out there like Earth, are infinitesimal. Indeed, the odds are that our own Earth cannot possibly exist.

But our Earth does exist. Is our planet is unique in the universe, that we humans are unique in the world?  We, the life we have, might indeed be the focus, the product, of a supernatural intervention by a Supreme Being. Our world does exist, something does exist, instead of nothingness. Where did that come from?

Could that also mean that, indeed, we, each of us, have a soul, and we will all face an accounting?

On the other hand, couldn’t it all mean that our small human minds cannot possibly imagine the scale of the numbers in question. The odds can be beaten by reality, as they were in the case of Earth. If it happened once, could it not happen again, and again, and again? Could that even explain the incredible complexity of DNA?

Whatcha think?