Time, Life and the Colonization of the Land. Time How do we fit God within the concept of time ? Like CS Lewis I believe we can not. There is much controversy between creationism and evolutionists but such a simple dichotomy is probably unnecessary if we consider a few basics. The Earth has undoubtedly been in creation for over 4 billion years. Man’s ascent confined to at best a few million years but to dent the validity of Scripture based on these facts is absurd.

There is no dichotomy once we accept that God almost certainly exists outside of time and that the actual evolution of man is in itself hotly debated. In this chapter we will provide the temporal underpinning for the ten part discussion of the God and Nature series. We will look at the temporal frameworks as they stand, then some of the theories of how life originated and where life originated before moving on to the rise of man.

Time is a component of a  measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of  religion, philosophy and science but defining time in a noncontroversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars. Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the  universe a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other “times” persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line.Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of “container” that events and objects “move through”, nor to any entity that “flows”, but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure  within which humans sequence and compare events.

This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled. Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and was a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined in terms of radiation emitted by caesium atoms.

Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value  - time is money –  as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human lifespans. It is necessary to consider the nature of time when considering the nature of God. Life The history of the Earth covers approximately 4.6. billion years (4,567,000,000 years), from Earth’s formation out of the solar nebula to the present. This chapter presents a broad overview, summarizing the leading, most current scientific theories. The details of the origin of life are unknown, though the broad principles have been established. Two schools of thought regarding the origin of life have been proposed.

The first suggests that organic components may have arrived on Earth from space – Panspermia, while the other argues for terrestrial origins. The mechanisms by which life would initially arise are nevertheless held to be similar. There are several main theories of how life originated. Let us take these in rough chronological order. Firstly the theory of Panspermia. It was thought that micro-organisms had arrived on Earth from another part of the universe carried by meteorites or comets.

Secondly, since there was no real evidence for panspermia chemical theories of the origin of life arose and are more plausible at our current level of knowledge. Here the theory is that life arose from chemical reactions between organic molecules abiotically (not manufactured by organisms). Herman Muller felt that the first life forms must have been genes that replicated themselves and mutated allowing them to evolve. In 1923 Alexander Oparin hypothesized that over evolutionary time molecules within droplets of mixed oil/water became complex, with enzymes forming to organize other molecules into metabolic cycles. Genes would form later. JBS Haldane broadly agreed with this view. These ideas modified when scientists realised that genetic master code professional in the form of DNA had to come first and an energy source such as sunlight or lightening was also pr