Ancient River of Eden

Copyright © 2018 Geoffrey A. Lindsay, Revised Edition.

Interior Illustrations by Tara C. Lindsay.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

1 (866) 928-1240

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-9736-1843-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-1842-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018901523

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/20/2018

Dedication

To the glory of GOD

To my wife and partner for life, Michele

To all my children and grandchildren

Contents

Prologue

While Growing up,

Ol’ Man River was Over the Rainbow

Introduction

Six Days? Or More…

The Format of this Little Book

Song of Seven Days

The First Day:     GOD Created the Heavens and the Earth

Spirit and Waters

And there was Light

But, GOD DID NOT REST

The Second Day:  GOD Divided Waters from Waters

The Third Day:    GOD Separated Waters and Dry Land

Be Born Again to Enter In

The Creation of Life on Earth

Fourth Day:         Information from Celestial Lights

Fifth Day:            Creatures of the Water and the Air

DNA, Proteins and Genes, Oh my!

The Morphing of Gene Pools

Evolution is Happening, BUT…

Humans are Accelerating Evolution!

Sixth Day:           Creatures of the Land

The Image of Humankind

Eat your Fruits and Vegetables

Seventh Day:        Rest on the Sabbath

Song of Adam and Eve

Genealogy

Wetting the Dust of the Ground

Age of the Ancients

Planting a Garden

The Rivers

Two Trees of the Garden in Eden

Animals of Eden

The Sacred Bond of Marriage

Naked and Unashamed

Lamenting a Bad Decision

The Deceiving Serpent

The Fall from Grace

The Cover-Up

Consequences

Protective Clothing

Out of Eden…Into the World

Epilogue

Isn’t 'Elohiym a Plural Word?

GOD’s Angels and Holy Spirit

Immanuel…Holy Spirit of GOD Embodied in the Son of Man

Trinity

Am I Free Indeed?

Faith

First contact

Appendix 1. Ancient Biblical Manuscripts

Appendix 2. Your Amazing Molecular Machines

Appendix 3. Religion AND Science

Appendix 4. Public Policies

Appendix 5. The Ten Commandments

Genesis

Have you ever wondered how it is we find ourselves on this tiny blue orb called Earth?

Our Goldilocks Earth as viewed from Apollo 17

Image courtesy Johnson Space Center, NASA

https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55418

We have this this lovely planet, covered with oceans and jungles, teeming with exotic life, but located in an utterly barren solar system. We orbit the Sun along with seven other planets (sorry Pluto).¹ These are interesting planets, but they are very lonely orbs, totally devoid of life.

Have you ever read Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss? We are the Who’s living on this tiny speck of blue dust orbiting a sparkling dot of light, nestled in the Orion Arm of our giant Milky Way Galaxy, which is dappled with more than a hundred billion, beautiful stars.

The Milky Way looks enough like the Andromeda Galaxy to be its twin. These spiral galaxies look like giant Frisbees® tossed into the darkness of space.

The Andromeda Galaxy

This Galaxy Evolution Explorer image is courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia04921

Our Universe is unimaginably large. The observable Universe is filled with a meshwork of hundreds of billions of galaxies! The Milky Way Galaxy is just a little dot in Laniakea, one of the many superclusters of galaxies in the Universe.²

For years now, Star Trekkers have been hoping to find a nearby star having a planet capable of supporting life. Astronomers have only recently developed methods powerful enough to detect them. And now, at last! Over three thousand ‘exoplanets’ orbiting nearby stars have been detected. However, to support life as we know it, the planet must have liquid water. Therefore, this planet must be not too hot or not too cold, and orbiting a star that does not flare-up!³ Orbiting around one of the stars in our Milky Way Galaxy don’t you think there might be a few goldilocks planets hiding out there? Once we find a planet in the habitable temperature zone, the next thing to look for is oxygen gas in its atmosphere, because oxygen could be a harbinger of life.

Is Earth the only lucky planet in our Universe to harbor intelligent life? You and I may never know because even the nearest stars are so far away it would take thousands of years to travel there in a space ship. Oh, for an interstellar wormhole! But there is another way to tell. Some day we may receive messages from outer space sent by extra-terrestrial beings. These messages would likely have been sent using a large antenna operating at radio frequencies—and we have been looking for these signals for many years.⁴ It would take only four years for signals from the nearest star system to reach Earth because radio signals also travel at the speed of light. But so far no ‘intelligent’ signals have been detected—only random noise. So, maybe there is no other life out there (or at least no advanced civilization), because if there were, shouldn’t we have been receiving their signals by now?

In any case, we are always left with the big question: how did that first speck of life materialize? Did you ever notice how even the tiniest living organisms are astoundingly complex? Speaking of specks of life, from a chemical point of view, there is an incredibly huge amount of information packed into every large biological molecule in our bodies, such as the proteins and the double helix of DNA (my favorite molecule). If you are thinking like me, the Universe and life must have been created by an exceedingly intelligent Being.

Our DNA holds the code, the blueprint if you will, that determines how to build your body (from small chemicals), and how your body will regulate its operation. The DNA in every cell of our body contains about the same number of atoms as there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and that is a true statement— billions and billions of atoms!! God bless Carl Sagan. But I would have to say to him, if he were still here today: I can’t swallow your argument that it was just dumb luck that these fantastically complicated molecules self-assembled by a random process, and that is the reason we are living on this tiny blue orb so miraculously suited for life. Everything we know from science continues to convince me that our Universe was created, not randomly, but from a Master Plan.

When I think about the complexity of life, and the extreme difference in size between the extent of the Universe and the tiny atom, no words can express my sense of awe, not even OH…MY…GOD …and I am talking to GOD, the Creator of the Universe. Perhaps some of you are thinking there is no Creator, and the Universe has been here forever. The universe is almost 14-billion years old according to scientists, which certainly seems like forever. But of course, you are free to believe whatever you want to believe in the good old U.S.A.

This little book is about the creation and the Creator. The name we use for the Creator likely stems from our cultural background and how we were raised as a child. I have heard that Buddhists are not concerned about who created the Universe or how old it is. But to me it matters. Some cultures refer to Allah; some refer to Brahma; some refer to God; some refer to the Guy Upstairs; and others just refer to ‘Nature’ or ‘Providence.’ Whatever name you use for the Creator or whatever you believe, please read on because this book is addressed to people of all persuasions.

Prologue

…principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science. — Frances S. Collins (Head, National Institute of Health), taken from his book: The Language of God, published by Free Press in 2006

While Growing up,

I had read parts of the Bible as a young lad, but when I tried praying to GOD, He never replied to me, nor had He given me a sign, as far as I knew—and I am even part Irish! Furthermore, having read the Genesis creation story, and having attended a modern school system, I was faced with this puzzling, gaping gulf in time: If the creation unfolded over billions of years, why does the Bible say that GOD completed the creation in only six days? Why does the Bible indicate that Adam and Eve were created about six thousand years ago in one day? I did not want to reject what I learned in science class, nor did I want to reject what the Bible says.

Growing up in rural Ohio, I found fossils and became quite interested in ancient life forms. I read about fossils of gigantic dinosaurs and how to calculate the age of rocks by measuring radioactive decay rates of elements trapped in them. In the mid 1960’s, at Ohio State University, I took a course in anthropology. In his early life, my professor (Leo Estel) mined coal for a living and he too became fascinated with the fossils he found in the mines. As a professor, he subscribed to the theory that humans originated in Africa and later roamed throughout the Earth. Evidence of humans migrating ‘out of Africa’ is discussed later in this little book.

As a young man, I dismissed the possibility that the Bible’s creation story could be a literal story. How could there be such an incredible error in so many scientific measurements that point to a much older Earth? If the truth be told, however, this quandary was only one of the reasons that I remained agnostic past middle age. But the nagging feeling that there must be a Creator kept coming back to me.

As I grew older and more educated in the physical and biological sciences, I became more and more amazed at the incredible complexity of all living organisms, like the tiny fruit fly. Did you know that a fruit fly has nearly the same number of genes in its chromosome as a human?

From the vantage point of a chemist, I continue to read about new scientific discoveries in biochemistry. Every month amazing new discoveries are published that unveil fantastically intricate structures and interdependent chemical feedback mechanisms found in all forms of life that enable life to thrive and propagate in hostile environments. I now have become firmly convinced that life could never have spontaneously self-assembled from complete disorder, not even in a hundred billion years. There must be a Master Planner who created the Universe and created living organisms.⁵ But, who is this amazing Being?

Ol’ Man River was Over the Rainbow

Sometimes it seems like the Creator just isn’t paying attention to all the troubles of this world. Life just keeps rolling along as we ‘suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’⁶ That sentiment was captured in a song that I dearly love called Ol’ Man River as sung by Paul Robeson. Here are a few lines:

Ol’ man river,

Dat ol’ man river,

He mus’know sumpin’

But don’t say nuthin’

He jes’ keeps rollin’

He keeps on rollin’ along.⁷

If there is a loving, all-seeing, all-powerful Creator, why are there so many troubles in this world? After his experiences on the battle fields in Europe during World War II, that question haunted my father for the rest of his life. He would never talk about it. But we can read between the lines in the letters he sent home to my mother. When he came home from the war, my mother said he was so nervous that he could not even sit still in the barber’s chair. What causes all the troubles in this dog-eat-dog world? Why are there are so many unanswered questions?

When I contemplate the big questions of this world and find that the answers are veiled in clouds, I think of another song that cheers me up and makes me feel optimistic that things will get better. It’s a song about a land that I heard of once in a lullaby. That song was Somewhere Over the Rainbow.⁸ Here are a few lines that I am sure you have heard before:

…Someday I’ll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That’s where you’ll find me.

Someday, I know I’ll get to that place over the rainbow. But for now, I want to try to make sense of my present life on Earth, and try to improve things on this side of the rainbow. Without delving into the details of my midlife crises years, I’ll just say they were miserable years for everyone involved, and I am the one to blame. Today, I feel very fortunate to have a wonderful blended family, even though life still has its ups and downs.

One day, I decided to take a trip ‘down the yellow-brick path’ to find the Wizard who made this fantastic Universe. I had carefully read the Holy Scriptures straight through, quite a few times. I studied several versions of the Bible. It took many years. I also read an English translation of the Quran and a book on Buddhism, but, in comparison with the Bible, I found little resonance with those writings.

I started to read Genesis looking for contradictions with the peer-reviewed scientific literature on the age of the Universe. While keeping within the proper bounds of a Hebrew-English