Metadynamics Ministry

metagenesis

The Beginning

¹Before the beginning, amidst the unseen, abided God:
incomprehensibly wise; incomprehensibly powerful;
God, the inventor, architect, engineer, craftsman and carpenter;
God, the dreamer, poet, painter, sculptor, and playwright;
God, the sovereign ruler, minister, shepherd, father, and mother;
God, unfathomable, who conceived Creation as a labor of love.

²And in the beginning^,i God's seed was a firework:
meticulously planned, meticulously assembled, and placed in a dark void.
³And God said, "Let there be light",ⁱⁱ
and Creation emerged as subatomic exotica, as energy and as light,
rapidly filling the void and commencing God's journey.
⁴And from the dark void came radiant dawn-the first day.

⁵Creation expanded, cooled and in part coalesced into nebulas of gas,
seed nurseries for star systems, where nurturing gas blankets
confined and compressed their embryonic interiors,
until their diatomic eggs matured to their critical state
and ignited in fusion, giving birth to the stars.
⁶And from the dark nebulas came the stars' first light-the second day.

⁷The newborn stars followed God's intrinsic orders and created the elements
by successive fusions and fissions and secondary reactions.
⁸They populated the periodic table in proper abundances, forming planetary seeds,
and then the stars gave birth to their planets, by some fiery delivery,
bringing forth diverse systems like our own, orbiting their mother stars and spinning.
⁹And from the veiled newborn stars came planetary dawn-the third day.

¹⁰Amidst Earth's primordial seas and magma flows, in some unknown fragile puddle or vent, God's hand created a biological nursery of lipids, amino acids and nucleotides.
¹¹The nursery formed varieties of protocells, which engulfed more primitive cells as nourishment and occasionally as precursors to organelles, and they replicated, first by mitosis then meiosis.
¹²And thus God created the archaea, the bacteria and the eukarya, the first living cells.
¹³And from God's nursery came the dawn of life-the fourth day.

¹⁴God endowed life's seeds with self modifying tendencies;
eukaryotes developed internal structures and extracellular matrices
and they engulfed mitochondria and chloroplasts as new organelles.
¹⁵Soon flagella and cilia propelled them; scaffolding protected them.
¹⁶Receptors detected nourishment and threat, and later, adjacent cells.
¹⁷And from protist diversity came multicellular dawn-the fifth day.

¹⁸The eukaryotes that had engulfed chloroplasts to form primitive algae
fed off sunlight and flourished near shores, eventually invading land
and giving rise to all the flora of the earth. ¹⁹The land produced vegetation:
plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed
in it according to their kinds. ²⁰And God saw that it was good.ⁱⁱⁱ

²¹Other eukaryotes that had formed tubes, became primitive worms, which grew appendages and deposited minerals on external scaffolding to become shellfish and arthropods, like the clams, crabs, shrimp and lobsters, which flourished at sea, and then invaded the shores as scorpions and then spiders and ground insects that later took flight. ²²And the flying insects nurtured and spread the vegetation. ²³And God saw that it was good.ⁱⁱⁱ

²⁴And the primitive worms also diverged from the arthropods by depositing minerals on internal scaffolding to form skeletons, becoming eels and fish, and then limbed fish
that could survive shallow waters, that later became amphibians, then reptiles, that later became the mammals and the birds. ²⁵Still later, some mammals returned to the seas,
while others learned to take flight. ²⁶So the water and land and sky teemed with living creatures. ²⁷And God saw that it was good.ⁱⁱⁱ

²⁸So as God had imagined, amidst the other branches of the great genome of the tree of life,^iv God created humankind:

First as God's firework seed, then as a gaseous nebula, then as a newborn star,
then as a newborn planet,

Then as the protocells of life, then as the first living cells, then as tubular cell clusters,

Then as primitive round worms, then as primitive fish, then as primitive amphibians, then as primitive reptiles, then as primitive mammals,

Then as primitive primates, then as primitive great apes, then as primitive hominids, and finally as humankind, always together male and female.^v

(Please see footnote [vi] regarding this figure
and the one below it)

²⁹And God blessed humankind, for God knew they would soon rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.^vii ³⁰And God blessed humankind, for God knew they possessed sacred gifts that would unleash new dimensions of God's unfolding plan. ³¹And God blessed humankind, for God knew they would struggle with the dual nature of these gifts. ³²And God blessed humankind, for God knew the path ahead would lead them beyond innocence. ³³And after these blessings, God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.^viii ³⁴From the descent of life came humankind's dawn-the sixth day.

³⁵God had finished the work God had been doing; so on the seventh day God rested.^ix ³⁶Creation's great journey had created the richness of the Earth and had bestowed on humankind many natural gifts. ³⁷During this day of rest, humankind lived in total harmony with God, much like newborn lambs lying down in the lush green pastures of God's garden, Earth. ³⁸God protected the meadows for these newborn infants, innocent and pure: never having spoken; never having sinned. ³⁹And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy,^x because on that day God rested and reflected on the profound harmony of Creation and on the Earth's future to come, when newborn humankind would reach the dawn of civilization-thus ending the seventh day.

Richard Malina
Metadynamics Ministry
rmalina@wi.rr.com

With my acknowledgments to the assistance of Ambulocetus.

__________

i    Genesis 1:1
ii   Genesis 1:3
iii  Genesis 1:12
iv   Genesis 2:9
v    Genesis 1:27
vi   As appealing as the figure is, and perhaps, as historically
     important, it is misleading to depict evolution as a series of more
     and more humanlike organisms. This early theory, which is called
     "orthogenesis" in biology, is now a discredited idea. The
     "cladogram" shown below this figure is a bit more accurate,
     depicting evolution as more of a tree or bush.
vii  Genesis 1:28
viii Genesis 1:31
ix   Genesis 2:2
x    Genesis 2:3