Flagella and Faith

Have you heard the big news? Scientists have found microbes that use arsenic in their genetic makeup instead of phosphorous! If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't fret. It didn't mean anything to me either until I learned a little more about it. Basically, all of life as we knew it uses six elements as its building blocks: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. This bacteria uses arsenic, a poisonous substance to most organisms, instead of phosphorous. It's kind of a big deal.

Well, it's a big deal for scientists and people interested in that sort of thing. So why am I writing about it here?

One of the greatest questions that people have pondered since the beginning of pondering is where we came from in the first place. I came from my parents who came from their parents who came from their parents and on and on. But, we can't follow that pattern back forever. There had to be a beginning. One of religion's jobs is to tell us where that beginning is. The Judeo-Christian tradition finds the answer in the book of Genesis: There were first parents and their names were Adam and Eve.

Okay, so where did Adam come from? Genesis answers that as well. God created them. Great. That settles that.

At lest it did settle that until Darwin had to come along with his little book on The Origin of Species. You probably know the rest of the story. These new ideas about evolution seemed to show, at least to some, that man was not created by God, but sprung from lesser beings through the mechanism of natural selection. And this mechanism does not need God (again, at least to some). Since then, religious people and scientific people have been engaged in a war over the minds of the people.

I see this new discovery as another battlefield in that war.

I read a book once called The Language of God by Francis S. Collins. Collins is an expert geneticist. In fact, he oversaw the Human Genome Project. He's also a Christian. And in his book, he wrote about being a believer while being surrounded by skepticism, and also some of the traps that believers can fall into when confronted with scientific evidence.

The one that is pertinent to my discussion here is what he calls the “God of the Gaps.” This is when people of faith see gaps, usually in the evolutionary record, that science can't explain and ascribe this gap's existence to God. For example, there is a bacteria that has a flagella (a tentacle like thing that it whips around to propel itself through water) and scientists can't find the evolutionary steps that would have had to occur in order to develop the flagella. “See,” believers will say, “there is God's fingerprint. It couldn't have developed through evolutionary means, therefore, it was created directly by God.”

Here is the problem with this tendency: scientists have this annoying knack for discovering things. To my knowledge, this flagella thing hasn't been figured out yet, but a lot of other gaps in the evolutionary time line have been filled in. So, if you find God only in these gaps, what do you have to stand on when there is no more gap?

DNA could have been one of these gap situations. As far as we could tell for a long time, life could only be based on six elements out of over a hundred. That makes life orderly in a chaotic universe. And order comes from intelligence. So, in the basic structure of life, we find evidence for God's existence.

But this discovery puts a kink in that argument. If life could develop to use arsenic in an environment that is heavily saturated with the poisonous element, what else could it use? Are there any limitations? Is it really chaos?

If someone's faith in God is based on this limited observation of the natural universe (life on Earth only uses six elements), then that person may not be able to answer those questions. Faith has to be based on something internal, not external. It has to be based on spiritual experiences, not physical ones.

After all, science and religion tell us fundamentally different things about the universe. Religion tells us that God created the world. Christians don't all agree about the defenition of creation used here, but we Mormons see it more as organizing existing chaotic matter into the organization that we see today. Religion also tells us that God created humans in his own image, which we Mormons understand to mean that we were made to look like God physically, or that God has the basic appearance of a man, albeit a glorified and perfected one. Religion also tells us why God created all of this stuff. In Moses 1:39, which is found in the Pearl of Great Price, on of the books of scripture that is unique to Mormonism, that God created the world “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

Religion does not tell us how God created the world. It doesn't concern itself with that because it doesn't matter for the ultimate purpose of creation. Knowing how God created the world will not make us better able to live his commandments and become like him. So, religion leaves that question to science. Which is exactly why people of faith shouldn't let any scientific discoveries affect their faith. After all, it's only studying God's creation.