Awareness
of Existence
God's
greatest miracle is the human body. Although everything that exists is made up
of atoms, a living being has the capacity for consciousness and self-awareness
whereas inert matter does not. Scriptures
say this capacity is characterised by a force, popularly termed as the “Life
force”.
We
all take our bodies for granted not realising what flexibility we have. Just
watch a tennis match, ice skating or a ballet performance – amazing flexibility
everywhere. Again,
consider the human fingers. They can knit, paint, sculpt, perform surgery, and play
all kinds of musical instruments, to name a few. The famous scientist Newton
once exclaimed, “The thumb alone is enough to prove that God exists”.
We
agree that the human body is packed with innumerable wonders; but in what way
does that prove the omnipresence of God. This is where evolution comes in. The
universe is a constantly evolving system and as far as we are concerned, there
are three distinct stages of evolution that matter. We will concern ourselves
with the third stage. About three billion years ago, life first appeared on
Earth. Life slowly evolved from lower forms like plants and insects to more
complex forms like fish, birds and animals. And, at the end, came man.
For
every species of life form, there is a “gene”. At the molecular level, the gene
holds all the information about the species and the particular individual in
the series. For example, in the human being, the human genome not only holds
all the characteristics that identify the being as human, but also the
characteristics of the individual, such as the colour of the skin, eyes, facial
features etc. This
molecular arrangement can be disturbed by many factors, including radiation,
and when that happens, we say the gene mutates. It could happen that the
mutated gene could be the beginning of an entirely new species, evolution of
species at a molecular level. Mutation is widely believed to be a random
process. Charles Darwin said of evolution that “only the fittest of the newly
emerging species survive, and evolution is thus a sequence of species that
survive, coming one after the other”. This became better defined once the
structure of the DNA was unravelled.
to be continued
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