In Lake Huron, Michigan, is the Middle Island Sinkhole, a dark pit reaching 80 feet down and filled with ooey-gooey, slimy, stinky bacteria. Based on findings in that sinkhole, there is now a team of researchers, with members hailing from Michigan all the way to Germany, which has contributed yet another hypothesis to evolutionary theory.
The theory of evolution, science’s mainstream belief, states that all life came from the simplest form and then evolved into all its variety of complex forms. According to this concept, planet Earth was somehow formed by accident from leftover driblets off the sun. There are multiple possibilities as to how this may have happened.
Then, after Earth became a planet, life somehow began on it. There are dozens more possibilities as to how this happened. But with them comes one of the many head-scratchers the theory of evolution has produced: the oxygen problem.
For life to begin in accordance with the evolutionary model, scientists have realized that Earth’s atmosphere would need to be devoid of oxygen. But in order for life to be sustained, Earth’s atmosphere would need to have oxygen, in fact, precisely the amount of oxygen it has. In other words, “If there was oxygen, life could not start. If there was no oxygen, life could not start.”
It is, admittedly, “one of the great mysteries in science.”
The patch to this conundrum is the assertion that Earth began with no oxygen but that at two different points, billions and then millions of years ago, there somehow occurred two separate Great Oxidation Events that each produced a rapid increase in the atmosphere’s oxygen, thus paving the way for all kinds of complex life forms to eventually evolve. It is presumed that cyanobacteria caused this massive change through the process of photosynthesis, a cycle whereby, in very simplified terms, sunlight is used to emit oxygen into the atmosphere.
But lots of questions still remain, among them the issue of time. What explanation is there for these huge jumps in oxygen levels if the cyanobacteria were just sitting there, doing their thing, over eons? Well, this team thinks it may have a possible answer.
And Then There Was … Light?
According to its study, published on August 2 in the online journal of Nature Geoscience, the team experimented on bacteria extracted from the Middle Island Sinkhole and found—not surprisingly—that the more light these unicellular organisms got, the more oxygen they produced.
The researchers chose the Lake Huron bacteria for a reason. To them, they resembled the early life forms on planet Earth. Said one of the lead scientists Judith Klatt, “We actually imagine that the world looked kind of like the Middle Island sinkhole for most of its history.”
The sinkhole had created an environment that was “rich in sulfur and low in oxygen.” Living in the sinkhole are two different kinds of bacteria, “white sulfur-eating bacteria,” which breaks down oxygen, and “purple cyanobacteria,” which makes oxygen through photosynthesis.
When the amount of sunlight is below a certain “critical threshold,” the white bacteria cover the purple cyanobacteria, impeding their oxygen production. But when the amount of sunlight crosses beyond the threshold, the white bacteria move beneath the cyanobacteria, leaving a clear pathway for photosynthesis to occur.
So the question is: How might these bacteria have gone from producing no oxygen to 21 percent of oxygen in Earth’s early atmosphere? Enter Brian Arbic, an oceanographer at the University of Michigan who believes that “the complicated physics of tidal friction and interaction with the moon” caused the Earth to rotate at a slower and slower pace. This means that the length of a day on Earth would have, over time, grown “from six hours to the current 24 hours.”
And when the day lengthened, the white bacteria uncovered the cyanobacteria and—voilà! Photosynthesis was able to occur for a much longer period of time, producing exponential amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere and becoming the conduit to all other life.
The Creator
Do you believe it? Do you believe that you came from “gelatinous carpets of bacteria, which smell like rotten eggs”?
The fact is that this hypothesis is built upon several previous assumptions, all based on the environment of Earth at its inception. But at the end of the day, it is also a fact that none of us was alive at that point. None of us saw the world when it was first formed. None of us was there to witness its origins of life.
But there is Someone who was. And it is He who asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!” (Job 38:4, 5). He is the Lord our God, the Creator of the universe, the Giver of your life
You were created in His image, “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27), “crowned … with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5). You do not exist by accident or chance. You were purposed by God, “who makes all things” (Isaiah 44:24), who made our world in six 24-hour periods of time, no more and no less. And moreover, He bids us throughout all of Scripture to know this certainty, that “in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth” (Exodus 31:17).
Anything other than this understanding of Creation is an affront to God’s perfect work and a denigration of His name.
Do you desire to find answers to the questions that really matter? Then check out Pastor Doug Batchelor’s presentation on “Evolution, Creation, and Logic.” God’s Creation is only the beginning of His marvelous plan for your life.