And God said, “Let there be DNA”

Secularists consider the Genesis story about creation to be a simpleminded fable. Maybe it's time to update the story.

For some, the literal truth is that God created Earth and us in six days. For others, it is baloney. Might as well argue that Earth rests on the backs of elephants and a giant turtle.

But, the Biblical version was written for a time when human understanding of existence and the universe was fairly, well, primitive. Early humans had no concept of a round Earth, the Solar System, evolution, species, atomic structure, the Big Bang or any up-to-date science.

So if the Bible were written today to take into account known science and technology, the Genesis story would be astonishingly different. To wit:

In the beginning all the universe was formless and void, with the entirety of mass and energy compacted into a tiny dot. So, God created the Big Bang.

And thus God organized mass into an harmonious quilt of atoms, nuclei, protons, neutrons and electrons, quarks and the four elemental forces of gravity, the weak and strong force as well as electromagnetism. From this hodgepodge, God formed supernovae, galaxies, stars, comets, solar systems, planets, moons and more. Yet, God cloaked much of the universe’s mass in Dark Matter and Dark Energy—phenomena as befuddling and mysterious today as the reality of stars was to the ancients.

And God pronounced it good.

Skipping ahead: From this unfathomable mass, He fashioned a planet that had all the essentials for life—oceans filled with water, organic compounds, amino acids, a virtual primordial soup. Or maybe not. Prideful scientists, offering up conflicting theories, remain stumped by exactly how life was created.

Thus saith God: “Let there be evolution,” creating a pathway for the tiniest of microbes to eventually emerge as plants, animals and, ultimately, rational, humanoid creatures.

Modern explanations for creation and evolution invoke incredibly unlikely and magically fortuitous luck. Genes, by nothing more than chance, failed and changed in just the right way, to take life in the direction that we now find ourselves. Billions, trillions and quadrillions of random genetic mutations created intricate systems of thought and more. How many such modifications were required for to create complex organs such as sight and hearing? What genetic flub created the first mammal, without which there’d be no us. What genetic blunder established sexual reproduction as the prevailing means of generational succession instead of parthenogenesis?

It all beats me. But I see the argument for a randomly created existence to be no more persuasive than creation that was directed by a higher power. I find it wonderful that a powerful force—I’d call it God—has created creatures endowed with intelligence and free will.

I find it more refreshing, if not more rational, than the idea that we stumbled into life.