You are right, this chapter is one of the toughest for traditional conservative Christians who have been taught that evolution is evil or that death came into the world 8000 years ago, that physical death was a result of a human action, and that death and life are sort of on the opposite extreme of things. But the truth is that death is very much part of life in biology, and all evidence suggests that it has always been that way. Of course, we all know that this is true intuitively, because if even the first bacteria ever to metabolize on the planet billions of years ago were to never die, it would have completely overrun the planet in just a few years, and no other life could have competed. (The mathematics are enormously revealing – a single bacteria, under optimal conditions become billions in just 24 hours)

What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to tell the unbridled real stuff of how biology/life works, and to lay the framework for a later argument that these understandings of physical life need not present problems for us, since as believers, we are primarily concerned with spiritual life. Even Jesus’ himself continually reminded his listeners that when they related everything to physical, they were not on the same page as he.

Out of death comes life. As repulsive as that may seem, is this not the message of Jesus’ life?

My hope is that believers and potential believers will not feel it necessary to reject well-established scientific/biological facts in order to believe in God. His calling is to a deeper level of existence than just the physical. Perhaps we are more than just our chemistry???

I think so.