The Origin of Life on Earth involved Divine Intervention

We live in a unique galaxy and location in the universe and it’s not a coincidence. Just imagine how many essential conditions are required and must occur collectively in order to support life here on Earth. If any one of these conditions (parameters) are a small fraction “out of range” or didn’t occur, life on Earth could not exist. For example, the percentage of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere or the precession in the Earth’s rotational tilt on its axis. The following probability estimate demonstrates life on Earth could not have happen by random chance but must have involved divine intervention. 

A "list of parameters" is located at the very bottom of the page naming 322 parameters and the probability for attaining the necessary characteristics is in the range for a life supporting body.  This number has grown to 676 parameters from new discoveries (see section Creation Events). To better understand the magnitude of the numbers below we've provided a couple of basic examples: 

(A)  10^5 = 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 100,000

(B)  10^(-5) = 10 ÷ 10 ÷ 10 ÷ 10 ÷ 10 = .00001

Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters ≈ 10^(-388)

Dependency factors estimate ≈ 10^(96)

longevity requirements estimate ≈ 10^(-12)

Include dependency factors: -388+96-12 = -304

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Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters = 10^(-304)

Maximum possible number of life support bodies in universe = 10^22

Thus, there is less than one chance in 10^282 (million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion) that even one such life-supporting body would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles. 

Below we examine one of these characteristics in great detail to display that life could not have been random.

Hugh Ross

 Ph.D. in Astronomy, University of Toronto, B.S. Physics, University of British Columbia 

 All the references in "Fine-Tuning of Physical Life Support Body"

Pasadena, CA: Reasons To Believe, 2002

The anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect", is the hypothesis, first proposed in 1957 by Robert Dicke, an American astronomer physicist and atheist, that the range of possible observations that we could make about the universe is limited by the fact that observations could only happen in a universe capable of developing intelligent life in the first place.  Anthropic reasoning is often used to deal with the notion that the universe seems to be finely tuned for the existence of life.

At the end of each section, ask yourself the following: 

a. "Do you believe all these events occurred randomly or they involve divine intervention?" 

b. "What are the odds that all these things just happened by chance?"

"Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance."

― Sir Isaac Newton

In the following sections below we will examine just one of the 322 characteristic needed for a life-supporting body. We've chosen the earth’s rotational axis tilt to analyze the impact it has in supporting life on earth.

Earth's temperature changes are primarily caused by the tilt in our earths axis as it rotates. This tilt is caused by the tidal interaction by the moon and the sun which also causes seasons. Our earth's tilt is (+) or (-) 2 degrees (22 - 24 degree range) over a time scale of about 41,000 years. The tilt is minimal. This slight tilt is not true of other planets like Mars where their axis tilts any where's from 60 to 90 degrees. A dramatic tilt fluctuation, as in the case of Mars (60 degree), causes extreme seasonal shifts where there is no possibility of animal life on the planet. 

Mars and Earth are both continually bombarded with comets daily (which are 85% frozen water). This water replenishes the water on earth and life could not exist without it. The reason why we don't see see large ice caps on Mars like we do on earth is because of the drastic change or instability of Mars axis tilt. Mars' 60 degree tilt exposes its ice cap to warmer radiation to the sun which causes it to evaporate much faster. This is one reason we don't see life on Mars.

What prevents earths rotational tilt from being more than only 2 degree in fluctuation is that we have a gigantic moon orbiting a small planet. A gigantic moon and small planet causes our rotation axis to be very stable. If we look at the mass of our moon compared to the mass of the host planet, it's 50 times greater than the mass of it's host planet. We are living on the only known plant-moon system where the axis tilt is stable. The moon's proximity to the earth is also plays into the axis stability (the moon is only ~239 thousand miles from earth).

• "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place." Psalm 8:3, also see Psalm 89:37

The 2-degree tilt variation is also the primary reason why we have a planet with an Ice Age Cycle where the coverage of ice on the earth's surface varies between 10% to 23% on a time scale of 40,000 to 100,000 years. A 10% ice coverage it is called an interglacial ice age which is the phase we are in currently. The other thing that causes a variation in the temperature of our plant's surface is the variation in the shape of our orbit. When the orbit become more elliptical, we become warmer, when it becomes less elliptical, we become colder. This is secondary effect driving an ice age cycle. We live in a fine-tuned planet.

The Moon is currently 60.3 Earth radii away from us or take to radius of the Earth and multiply it by 60 times to get the distance it's orbiting the Earth. When the Moon formed it was 3.8 Earth radii away from Earth 4.498 billion years ago. The Moon is gradually moving away from the Earth at a rate of 3.78 centimeters (1.48 inches) per year. This means that as we move into the future we will see fewer and fewer total solar eclipses and primarily, they will be annular eclipses. The tidal interaction between them is causing them to separate. The moon spiraling away will continue for the next 40 billion years. At that point they will have the identical rotation rate of ~40 days and then the separation will reverse. In 80 billion years from now the Moon will collide with the Earth.

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

― Galileo Galilei

Physicist & Astronomer

For the past 2.58 million years the earth has experienced extreme climate instability until the past 9,500 years where we now experience extreme climate stability. Below we cover all the fine-tuning events that occurred in history in order for global civilization to flourish.

The first graph shows the mean temperature readings for the last four ice age cycles. Notice how the global mean temperature goes up and down from 2° to -8° centigrade depending on whether its the beginning or end of the cycle. We can also tell that each cycle becomes more sever each 100,000 years. This explains why the temperature shifts so dramatically causing the ice sheets to expand and contract at such rapid rates. This also explains why humans living 35,000 years ago couldn't launch global civilization with dramatic temperature fluctuation by +-18°F over just a few centuries.

The third graph shows how stable the global mean temperature has been for the past 9,500 years as we came out of the last ice age which launched global human civilization. The human workforce has moved from spending 98% of their time on farms harvesting crops for food to doing more productive things to benefit civilization. Today, less than 1% of the workforce producing more than enough food to feed all the rest of us. This has allowed the other 99% of civilization to do other jobs like advancing technology so we all can all carry around Smart phones and read this Website. This is all happened because we have climate stability.

We also see that global warming always brings on global cooling. From the first graph, if the temperature were to  increase 2° centigrade past where we are today, it would melt the polar ice caps. When you melt polar ice caps, instead of 60% of sun light being reflected away, only 6% reflected away igniting an ice age cycle. This means that the artic ocean absorbs solar heat which makes water vapor which falls on Siberia and Canada as snow. What has prevented this from happening this time is the Younger Dryas (named after an artic flower) cooling event (temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming). This stopped the typical dramatic warming that melts the polar ice caps from our bright sun.

In fact, our axis tilt has been declining which means that the earth is becoming colder and colder. Our global mean temperature over the past 9,500 years has decreased .8° centigrade. The global mean temperature should have declined by 15° centigrade when you factor in the most recent Greenland asteroid event (see Asteroid Collision Events below). This was prevented by human activity which caused the planet to warm. Domestication of cows, rice irrigation, deforestation, etc. These activities have a huge warmings effect by releasing large quantities of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The amount of methane has doubled since humans launched global civilization. This didn't quite balance the cooling effect yet. In the past 70 years human activity has increased, the global mean temperature has increased by 1° centigrade. If it goes up another 1.5° centigrade we will melt the polar ice caps and kickoff an ice age.

Managing future warmings effects involves a very "convenient truth" that we are enjoying a period of extreme climate stability. We have the knowledge to sustain it for another 1,000 years without draconian economic sacrifices. This "know how" will restore climate stability and boost the world economy. We live in a planet designed by our Creator that when we face issues we are to obey His commands that He gave us in the Book of Job and Genesis to manage the planet for our benefit and the benefit of all life. He will provide solutions to our ecological & environmental crisis that will benefit all life. We need to look for those solutions. 

A team of scientist lead by Matthew Osman for the first time used surface temperature proxies exclusively from all the oceans of the world producing by far the most comprehensive and accurate temperature record for the past 24,000 years. Temperatures tend to become more and more unstable as we go from sea level to the higher elevations. This study gives us the most reliable insights by using surface temperatures only to reveal the impact of greenhouse gases like carbon soot produced by humans from burning coal, wood, oil and brush fires. The study does show that since 1900 the global mean temperature has risen ~ 1° centigrade. In conclusion, we are in fact experiencing global warming at a small degree over the past century due to multiple factors. This increase is not dramatic enough to bring us into another ice age cycle. It would take an additional increase of at least 2°-4° centigrade to melt the polar ice caps triggering an ice age cycle, so the earth would get a whole lot colder, not warmer (explanation covered above).

Article below featured in Nature Magazine, Volume 599, pages239–244 (2021)

"Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum" 

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

―  Carl Jung

Psychiatrist (26 Jul 1875-1961) 

We've already seen that it's critical that we live during an ice age cycle. Otherwise, we could not produce enough food to support a large civilization. If you just want a few hundred humans living in a small region, you might not need an ice age cycle. What requirement would we need to support billions of humans on earth? There are three primary requirements:

1. Must be at the end of an ice age cycle

2. Sun must be exactly middle-aged or 4.57 billion years old (minimum flaring, stable luminosity)

3. Must be when there is and episode of extreme climate stability 

The past 9,500 years have been the most extreme climate stability our earth has ever observed. This period we have been living in has been an extreme exception. Climate instability has typically been the norm. It is critical that we live in an ice age cycle where a civilization's of billions of people can exists, otherwise we would still be living in stone age technology. We are living in the most beautiful and scenic moment in the history of our planet. 

Below are some benefits of an ice age cycle:

• Melting glaciers left over from the last ice age waters the soil rich plains. This water allows us to irrigate the vast plains in The Americas and grow large quantities of food we export.
• Ice that recedes causing wind-blown nutrient rich dust to be dumped and fertilizes the plains.
• Receding ice from 15,000 years ago ignited volcanic eruptions dump nutrient rich dust & ash all over the world which in turns into soils ready for growing food.
• Lakes, rivers and canyons formed by receding ice produced an abundance of hydropower  capabilities (electricity).

There are now 11 different reasons why a human civilization sustaining billions of humans would be impossible if it were not for us living at the end of a highly fine-tuned, ice age cycle. A scientific research team has discovered a twelfth reason (1). An especially strong ice age cycle, like the one we are in now, generates many large gravel-bed river floodplains, which prove to be ecological bonanzas.

An ice age cycle where the amount of ice coverage on Earth’s surface is between 10% to 24% has only been in effect for only the last 0.00057 part of Earth’s history. It came about as a result of the sun reaching the midpoint of its burning history and five simultaneous very rare and very dramatic tectonic events (2). However, until just 800,000 years ago, the ice age cycle’s period was too brief to produce the benefits required for launching a global human civilization. Furthermore, only the last deep ice age in the cycle yielded all the benefits necessary for global human civilization to be possible. We are living in the only interglacial period in the ice age cycle and for that matter, in the entire history of the earth during which billions of humans could live and receive God’s gift of redemption.

This ice age cycle produces many long-lasting gravel-bed river floodplains. Such floodplains only occur in glaciated mountain landscapes. Melting glaciers, especially valley glaciers, in mountain ravines and canyons result in water, rocks, gravel, and silt spreading out in valleys below the mountains. Such landscapes are characterized by four, highly differentiated seasons. These seasonal differences produce “dynamic fluvial processes that constantly change and renew the surface and subsurface of the river’s valley floor (3).

For the first time, an interdisciplinary research team—that involved hydrologists, avian ecologists, fresh water biologists, and large mammal ecologists worked together both to study the geological and ecological dynamics of gravel-bed river floodplains and to take an inventory of all the benefits such floodplains bring. They found that these floodplains support an unexpectedly high number of species. Specifically, they determined these floodplains are “focal points for biodiversity in maintaining viable aquatic, avian, and terrestrial populations (4).”

The following is a list of the unique benefits accruing from gravel-bed river floodplains that the research team has discovered to date:

1. Floodplains provide a unique habitat that sustains a much larger number of aquatic, avian, and terrestrial species than the surrounding regions.
2. Serve as a connectivity zone linking surrounding habitats and the species they contain.
3. They efficiently recycle life-critical nutrients.
4. Nutrient-rich waters below and lateral to the main water channels support a complex web of abundant microbes, insects, and crustaceans, which in turn sustain large populations of fish, amphibians, birds, and mammals.
5. Downwelling water from the surface channels into the gravel beds below carries large amounts of dissolved and particulate organic material that sustains microbial decomposers releasing biologically available nitrogen and phosphorus.
6. Floodplains yield nutrient-rich resources that sustain aquatic insects and other invertebrates that inhabit the gravel beds from valley wall to valley wall of the floodplain, which provide a food chain base for fishes, amphibians, bats, birds, and both small and large mammals.
7. Periodic flooding and groundwater-to-surface-water exchanges generate optimal spawning habitats for a wide variety of fish species.
8. Trees that fall into the river and stream channels as a result of cut-and-fill alleviation events create shaded water pools that protect fish and other species from harmful summer heat.
9. Combination of large-scale floods, cut-and-fill alleviation events, and wildfires create a highly productive, highly diverse vegetation community that sustains large-bodied mammal herbivores and large-bodied mammal carnivores.
10. Compression of elevation differences within small areas establishes large moisture gradients that further enhance the diversity of plant species.

The team further noted that without floodplain habitats, many large-bodied mammal species—for example, moose, beaver, and river otters—would not survive. They also observed that top predators, such as wolves, critically depend upon gravel-bed river floodplains for their food. They estimated that 40% of all kills by wolves occur on gravel-bed river floodplains.

1. F. Richard Hauer et al., “Gravel-Bed River Floodplains Are the Ecological Nexus of Glaciated Mountain Landscapes,” Science Advances 2 (June 2016): e1600026, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600026. 
2. Hugh Ross, “Ready for Occupancy,” chap. 15 in Improbable Planet (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016).
3. Hauer et al., “Gravel-Bed,” 1.
4. Ibid. Ross, “Ready for Occupancy,” chap. 15 in Improbable Planet.

Did you ask yourself if you believe all of these events occurred randomly or did they involve divine intervention? 

What are the odds that all these things just happened by chance to support life? It's a zero chance and we really don't need to bother with the math! None of these events were by accident. Every single event played a key role in making it possible for billions of humans to exist on the earth at one time. God fined tuned our universe, galaxy and planet so that billions of humans could be redeemed. He has fine turned our universe over the past 13.8 billion years is to bring about the complete eradication evil and suffering.

A entire universe was created in order to support 1 planet where human life can exist. Make the universe any smaller or bigger, life can't exist. The laws of physics, the size and mass of the universe, and even the space-time dimensions were all designed to be tools in the hand of the Creator to completely eradicate evil and suffering, while human freewill is being enhanced.

• "This is what the Lord says—  your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb:  I am the Lord, the Maker of all things, who stretches out the heavens, who spreads out the earth by myself" Isaiah 44:24

• "This is what God the Lord says— the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it. Isaiah 42:5

To the left is an image of what North America looked like during the glacial ice age 26,000 years ago. As you can see North America experiences the most effects of an ice age cycle. Approximately, 55% of the planet was covered with ice at its height. Notice Canada is completely frozen over. 

• "The birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas."  Psalm 8:8 written 960 B.C.E.
  

This verse inspired Matthew Maury to discover and make many important new contributions to charting winds and ocean currents, including ocean lanes for passing ships at sea. 

Matthew Fontaine Maury 

The Father of Modern Oceanography and Naval Meteorology

1806, Spotsylvania County, Virginia

The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855) 

•  "Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are'?". Job 38:35 written 1473 B.C.E.

This verse describes light waves and radio waves. It says that light can be sent and manifest itself in speech. All electromagnetic radiation from radio waves to x-rays travels at the speed of light. This is why we can have instant, wireless communication with someone on the other side of the earth. The fact that light can be sent and manifest itself in speech wasn't discovered by science until 1864, or 3,300 years later by Scottish scientist, James Clerk Maxwell who suggested that electricity and light waves were two forms of the same thing.

James Clerk Maxwell

1832, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Founder of the Modern Electrical Engineering

A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865)