Ciência Confirmando a Bíblia - Top 7 Casos

Na relação entre ciência em fé, em geral, eu costumo confiar no padre Stanley Jaki. que tinha doutorado em física e em teologia, e que definia ciência quase exclusivamente à física, se esta se detivesse apenas em questões quantitativas. O resto das disciplinas lidava com questões filosóficas e deveria evitar considerações com previsões matemáticas (estou resumindo o pensamento dele, leiam a obra extensa dele para entender). Jaki está no patamar de Copérnico, Mendel e Lemaitre em matéria de católicos que foram cientistas.

Em todo caso, como católico que possui PhD, eu me interesso por pesquisas científicas de ciências naturais ou sociais,  especialmente aquelas relacionadas à teologia.

Muito recentemente, eu tenho acompanhado pesquisas biológicas muito modernas que mostram que as espécies da vida terrestre nasceram todas muito próximas no tempo, em pequeníssimo espaço do tempo. Isso derruba completamente a evolução de Darwin (se bem que muitos outros cientistas já derrubaram Darwin em diferentes aspectos sem precisar dessa pesquisa recente).

Hoje, eu li no blog do Scott Smith sobre top 7 casos em que a ciência está confirmando o que diz a Bíblia.

É bem interessante. Nada está confirmado, nem quando a ciência nega a Bíblia, nem quando aparece aceitá-la, em todo caso, eu gosto do assunto. E o Smith Scott traz um análise interessante.

Os 7 casos são 

1. O Big Bang e o Padre que Descobriram, Padre George Lemaître, Confirmam a Criação do Universo por Gênesis
2. Adão do cromossomo Y e visualização mitocondrial: a ciência está confirmando a genética?
3. Prova do dilúvio de Noé no Mar Negro
4. Abraão e Camelos: Prova Arqueológica de Abraão
5. O reino não tão pequeno do rei Davi e as rotas comerciais do Abraão: confirmando a importância geopolítica do antigo Israel
6. A ressurreição de Jesus é comprovada pelo Sudário de Turim?
7. Milagres de Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe são investigados e confirmados cientificamente?

Eu vou colocar aqui a parte da genética (item 2), vejam o resto clicando no link do Scott Smith. Se tiver algum biólogo aqui gostaria de ouvir a opinião de vocês:

Y-Chromosome Adam & Mitochondrial Eve: Is Science Confirming Genesis?

SCOTT SMITHFEBRUARY 18, 2019

First, they said Genesis, Eden, and Adam and Eve were just a "miserable myth". Then something strange started to happen ...

Evidence started to stack up that all mankind originated in the same place: the "Out of Africa" model. Genesis was still just a myth though regarding our common ancestry through Adam and Eve. Then something strange started to happen ...

Genetic evidence started to stack up for a common matrilineal ancestor: "Mitochondrial Eve" or mt-Eve, mt-MRCA. Genesis was still just a myth though regarding Adam. Then something strange started to happen ...

Genetic evidence started to stack up for a common patrilineal ancestor: "Y-chromosome Adam" or Y-MRCA. Genesis was still just a myth though because Adam and Eve were still separated by huge gulfs of time, if not geography and distance. Then something strange started to happen ...

Evidence began to stack up that Adam and Eve may have lived on the planet at the same time. But Genesis was still just a myth because Adam and Eve were certainly not the only humans around at the time and certainly never met. Then something strange started to happen ...

Can you guess where this is headed?

Science's Unsuccessful Assassination of Adam and Eve 

G. K. Chesterton begins Orthodoxy by describing a man who sets sail from England to discover a new land. The adventurer accidentally gets turned around and returns to England, but he believes it to be the new land he had sought to discover. The adventurer finds himself looking at familiar things as if seeing them for the first time.

Science, in the person of Charles Darwin, set sail from England on the H.M.S. Beagle in 1831. A very similar adventure followed. Science quickly abandoned the reigning conception of mankind's origin in the common ancestors of Adam and Eve.

Roger Ingersoll, "The Great Agnostic" orator of the 19th century, said that after Darwin and Huxley, "The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth."

Common Ancestry is Important! One Common Human Family

It should be noted that there is something profoundly anti-racist about the entire human race originating with Adam and Eve. This means were all one family!

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (par. 842) makes this point regarding the Church and non-Christians:

All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. His providence, evident goodness, and saving designs extend to all against the day when the elect are gathered together in the holy city.

Not only does this render racism ridiculous. Our common origin speaks to our common destination.

From Polygenism to Monogenism: Just how many Adams were running around?

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, science had a big problem believing that all races had a common origin. People just couldn't or believe that blacks and whites were descended from the same ancestors.

This belief in multiple ancestors is called Polygenism. The predominant strain of polygenism was Co-Adamism which can be traced back to Paracelsus in 1520[1] and even to the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate.[2] Co-Adamism is the claim that there were multiple Adams or small groups of men, which were created at the same time but in different places around the globe. This is how the different races would have been separately created.

Notice that we're going back to the 1500s and 300s. It should be no surprise that the science of man's origins pre-dates Charles Darwin by a long shot.

Polygenism has traditionally been a belief of non-Christians, as it appears to contradict the Bible. The Church, through the findings of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, explicitly rejected the idea of polygenism in 1909.

Multi-Regional Hypothesis to "Out of Africa" Theory

The rejection of common ancestors was the scientific standard model until the time of Darwin. Over time the various threads of polygenism coalesced into the Multi-Regional Hypothesis (MRH) or the polycentric hypothesis.

MRH and polygenism persists even to this day.[3] This may be because the opposite of polygenism, monogenism, comes far too close for comfort to the original Biblical understanding.

However, the predominating scientific theory of human origins is now the "Out of Africa" Theory. This is the theory that our species originally came "Out of Africa" and that such happened fairly recently.

Darwin was an early proponent of the "Out of Africa" Theory. Darwin wrote in the Descent of Man that "it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere."

The "Out of Africa" theory was later confirmed by anthropologists' discovery of fossils of small-brained hominids in East Africa, such as the Leakey's discoveries in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.  

Mitochondrial Eve: Genetic science weighs in 

We receive our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers. Mitochondrial Eve, therefore, is the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line traced back by their mitochondrial DNA purely through their mothers. Eventually, all the lines trace back to one woman: Mitochondrial Eve.

In 1987, research from Allan Wilson, Mark Stoneking, Rebecca L. Cann and Wesley M. Brown was published in Nature. This was the first demonstration of the existence of Mitochondrial Eve. Wilson, Stoneking, Cann, and Brown found that mutation in our mitochondrial DNA happened unexpectedly fast and much faster than that of nuclear DNA.

After analysing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 147 people from around the world and charting their genetic relationships, they were able to construct a molecular clock. A molecular clock is a tool used to calculate when lifeform's lineage diverged. They used the molecular clock to estimate Mitochondrial Eve's age.

Studies keep coming out with new estimates of when Mitochondrial Eve would have lived. For example, here's a 2010 Rice University study, estimating that Mitochondrial Eve lived about 200,000 years ago. Here's a 2013 international study published in Current Biology, estimating that Mitochondrial Eve lived about 120,000-197,000 years ago.

Y-Chromosome Adam

First off, women have two X-chromosomes. A woman's genotype is XX. Men have one X-chromosome and one Y-chromosome. A man's genotype is XY.

Men have just one son on average. Evolutionary theory predicts that for any given man there is a high probability that his paternal line will eventually come to an end. That is to say, one of a man's grandsons, great-grandsons, etc. will eventually not have a son. Just ask King Henry VIII about trying to get a male heir.

Once the line of direct male heirs ends, all of a man's male descendants thereafter will have inherited their Y chromosome from other men. In fact, it is highly probable that at some point in the past, all men except one possessed Y chromosomes that by now are extinct. All men living now, then, would have a Y chromosome descended from that one man. This is Y-chromosome Adam.

Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam could have co-existed

At first it was assumed that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam were separated by a vast gulf of time. Then further scientific studies found something strange ...

Two recent studies of the age of Y-Chromosome Adam have yielded an age very close to Mitochondrial Eve's. These studies by Bustamante and Francalacci have concluded that "genetic Adam and Eve did not live too far apart in time."

Carolos Bustamante, a population geneticist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, led a team that sequenced the Y chromosomes of 69 males from around the world and uncovered about 9,000 previously unknown DNA sequence variations. According to the journal Nature, they used these variations "to create a more reliable molecular clock and found that Adam lived between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago." Analyzing the same men's mtDNA sequences suggested that Eve lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago.[4] 

A similar study by Francalacci of men on the island of Sardinia also suggested that Adam lived 180,000–200,000 years ago, similar to estimates of Eve’s age.[5]

Conclusion: Science moves from no where near Eden to next-door neighbors 

At first, scientific and evolutionary theories - polygenism, co-Adamism, and Multi-Regional Hypothesis (MRH) - believed that the human race had no common origin whatsoever, whether from a certain location, like Eden, or certain common ancestors, like Adam and Eve. 

Then, anthropologists discovered that mankind likely originated in a specific region of eastern Africa: Anthropological Eden.  

Then, geneticists discovered a common female ancestor: Mitochondrial Eve.

Then, geneticists discovered a common male ancestor: Y-Chromosome Adam. 

Then, geneticists discovered that our two common ancestors might have lived at the same time. 

Summary: science has confirmed that mankind has common ancestors, one male and one female, from the same time and place. 

Wow, that sounds pretty close to what Genesis told us 4,000 years ago.  

EXTRA: Archaeological Evidence for the Immortal Soul: Why would Homo Sapiens (humans) develop art and not other hominids?

To return to G. K. Chesterton for a moment, he said that "Art is the signature of man." Is there a connection between the capacity to behold and create beauty and the immortal soul? Perhaps we might see such a connection by comparing our ancestor to Neanderthals, our non-human cousins.

As recently as 40,000 years ago in Europe, the Neanderthals show almost no evidence of the symbolic thinking, such as art and sculpture, that is associated with language. This represents a stark difference compared to the Homo sapiens from the same era. 

40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had plentiful art, musical instruments, and specialized tools, such as sewing needles. Neanderthals likely didn’t even have sewn clothing - interestingly, Adam & Eve immediately started sewing clothing following the Fall. Instead of sewn clothing, Neanderthals would have merely draped themselves with skins.[6] 

And, despite evidence that between 1–5% of the human genome might be derived from human-Neanderthal matings, the Neanderthals went extinct as a species while we flourished.[7] Such matings might make one think of the nephilim of Genesis 6:1-4, who resulted from the mating of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men", thought to be the descendants of Seth and Cain, respectively.

Mitochondrial Eve: Genetics Confirming Genesis? Sources Cited:

[1] Graves, Joseph, The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2003, p. 25.

[2] Co-Adamism is also found in some Greco-Roman literature, including the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate. In Julian's "Letter to a Priest," he wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galilaens, Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germanics and Scythians were different in their bodies and complexion to the Africans.

[3] Scattered proponents of polygenism remained well into the 20th century. Carleton Coon, for example, thought as late as 1962 that H. sapiens arose five times from H. erectus in five places.

[4] Poznik, G. D. et al. Science 341, 562–565 (2013).

[5] Francalacci, P. et al. Science 341, 565–569 (2013).

[6] Pagel M., Wired for culture: origins of the human social mind, WW Norton & Company; 2012.

[7] Kuhlwilm M, Gronau I, Hubisz MJ, de Filippo C, Prado-Martinez J, Kircher M, et al. Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals, Nature, 2016; 530(7591):429–33. doi: 10.1038/nature16544.