Haven’t we all met someone who has said, ‘I can’t believe in Christianity or go to church because I believe in science’?
And what do we say? We fumble about for some kind of answer – that we also believe in science – but then we appear to abandon our faith to some obscure private domain of irrationality. Do we really sell the Good News to anybody with regards to science and faith?
I want to use these few words to present to you a new view of creation and a new understanding of evolution. Genetics is the key to this new idea and Incarnation is the sign.
Science today tells us that everything has simply evolved. No need of a Creator God. No need of purpose, no meaning and no message.
Over the past 150 years the church has, by and large attenuated this stark conclusion by claiming that evolution was God’s method of creation. Each Sunday we proclaim God as maker of heaven and earth, but it is unclear to most people what this means.
I had been studying science, genetics and biological evolution, and reflecting upon creation for 14 years when the Lord showed me the implications of the Incarnation:
At the overshadowing of Mary by the Holy Spirit, God performed a miracle that allowed Jesus to be fully human and yet be born from a virgin. Mary provided an egg that started to develop without fertilization from a human father. This means that Mary provided all of Jesus’ DNA and all of his genes. But there was one gene that no female can provide. It is a gene on the Y chromosome called TDF. If God had not directly created this one gene, TDF, as a minimum requirement, the Messiah would have been female, not male.
This shows – at least to us Christians – that God is able to create genetic codes – genes made of DNA. I am not a six literal days Creationist, but I know this great truth: God created life.
I propose that God created life by creating the genetic code at the microscopic, nanoscale level of cells. This new way of seeing creation opens the way to a new understanding of evolution. The science of genetics is now revealing – and this was not known before – that modification of traits through the processes of evolution is almost always based on mutations that switch off genes. Mutation is error in the replication of DNA. However, and this is the very big however – switched-off genes can sometimes bring about useful traits in the physical bodies of plants and animals. When these new traits are useful, they are selected by natural selection. The natural processes of evolution allow plants and animals to adapt, be modified and diversify into many different species.
God does not create through error. Mutation which is error simply modifies what God has created in perfection.
A new understanding of evolution shows that its source is in creation, and a new view of creation shows that life was created to adapt and evolve. The genetics of the Incarnation shows that the genetic code within cells is the message, the message that carries life and the message that proclaims God as Creator.
October 2018
Read more in the article ‘Genetics and the Incarnation’ on the Incarnation page of this website.
The Principles of Creation 