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anything else. Proteins consist of amino acids strung together in a specific sequence that has for a template, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)--which consists of a string of simpler molecules called nucleotides. Each amino acid requires three nucleotides to specify its place in the string that forms a protein molecule. What are the chances for that template DNA being strung together correctly to specify a single medium size protein? Calculation puts this at one chance in 10150 ---an impossibly slight chance.
A single protein molecule could not generate a self-reproducing, functional, living organism able to synthesize and operate a photosynthetic unit such as does the Cyanacae bacterium.
A human being is thought to have about 25,000 genes and between 80,000 and 100,000 functional protein molecules.2 The complexity of putting together a self-reproducing, photosynthetic Cyanacae cell would certainly require hundreds if not thousands of unique protein molecules. To do so by some kind of random selection of amino-acid sequence for its protein molecules is just not a possibility. Hence it appears that the Life Carriers were operative on Urantia way back more than 4 billion years ago. For reasons of their own, they simply have not told us about the real commencement of life on this planet.
It is quite apparent that Urantia required billions of years of planned preparation prior to introduction of higher life forms than the prokaryote bacteria. One reason was the need for an appropriate mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and also an ozone layer to protect life forms from the harmful rays of ultraviolet light from the sun.
The limiting factor for the increase of atmospheric oxygen appears to have been the level of soluble iron salts dissolved in the ocean water. These had to be oxidized by the oxygen from photosynthesis, likewise dissolved in the ocean water, to the insoluble ferric form before that oxygen could be released into the atmosphere. These reddish-brown, fully oxidized, sedimentary rocks were laid down up to the 1.7 to 1.8 billion years ago interval. Younger rocks have the characteristics of having formed in an oxygen rich atmosphere and thus provide evidence for the function of life--the photosynthetic Cyanacae bacteria--in the evolution of our planet and its atmosphere.1 Land plants, now the major contributors of oxygen to our atmosphere, did not appear until about half a billion years ago.
On page 660, The Urantia Book has: "Even in the later periods the continuing lava flows and the incoming meteors kept the oxygen of the air almost completely used up. Even the early deposits of the soon appearing primitive ocean contain no colored stones or shales. And for a long time after this ocean appeared, there was virtually no free oxygen in the atmosphere; and it did not appear in significant quantities until it was later generated by the seaweeds and other forms of vegetable life."
Modern science has the oceans appearing around 4 billion years ago, and the colored oceanic sediments disappearing by 1.7 billion years ago due to the presence of oxygen from bacterial photosynthesis. The Urantia Book's account has the first ocean appearing at 1 to 1.5 billion years ago and oxygen appearing in our atmosphere only after the Life Carriers' implantation of life forms 550 million years ago.
All the information so far contained in this article is available in current popular science journals as well as being accessible through internet search facilities.4,5
Only recently, with the aid of advanced technology, have we had an account of earth-moon relationships and early earth history in which we can have real confidence. And now that we have it we must accept that most of the account given by the Life Carriers for this earth-moon period prior to 550 million years ago is simply incorrect. Moreover, the Life Carriers who wrote this account must have known it is incorrect.
How can we explain such error in a revelation? The real answer to that question is to read all of the revelation and to discover what it really says.
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