From animals to gods, by mere blind chance?

A few weeks ago, I read a pretty interesting and insightful book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.

This book has many interesting ideas, and I want to mention a few of them:

1.- There was a cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago. This revolution dramatically changed how members of the Homo Sapiens species interacted with the environment, how communities were created, and how the language was used. An increased capacity to organize more and more Sapiens around shared interests represented an advantage that ended up dominating and eventually eliminating other species, such as the Neanderthal.

2.- Language development is key to the success of the Sapiens, particularly the ability to talk about inexistent or abstract concepts. The ability to create fiction enables the organization of Sapiens around powerful concepts such as empires and money. Think about it: Money has value only because humans have an inter-subjective consensus and believe in it.

3.- The agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago enabled the creation of larger groups of Sapiens but reduced the quality of life. Sapiens could grow their food, but now they were dependable on a good harvest. As hunter-gatherers, the diet of the Sapiens was more affluent, and it was possible to move to other areas looking for food. Agriculture also brought anguish about thinking about the future. In a few words, the quality of life of Sapiens was reduced with agriculture.

4.- We were hunter-gatherers for 2.5 million years; the last 70k years are not representative; evolution acts slowly; what does this mean? it means that our genes tell us to eat all we can when we see a fridge full of food, like when we found a tree full of fruits one million years ago. We are not adapted to the information era. As we cannot wait for evolution, we are finding ways to improve our genes by manipulating them. Genetically improved humans (the new gods) will ultimately surpass Homo Sapiens.

Let's assume that the theory of evolution is correct. This theory explains how life evolves: organisms better adapted to the environment survive and copy their genetic information to the next generation. Random modifications may result in improvements or failures. Failures are naturally eliminated, as those organisms will have less chance to survive.

The evolution theory describes how living organisms evolve but does not explain how life appeared in the first place.

This is a big gap.

There is a second book that may shed some light on this matter.?Seven Days that Divide the World?by John Lennox. The book offers a different version of the genesis. Instead of describing what God did in seven 24-hour days, the book's premise is that there were specific days when God spoke and created something different, that is, when a new level of complexity started to exist.

Now, by mixing these two books, we may try to describe the history of our world.

First, an event started everything; on the first day, God spoke, and the Big Bang occurred. 13.7 billion years later, God spoke again, and our earth took its first shape. Following this flow, what Yuval Noah Harari calls the cognitive revolution would have occurred as a consequence of God speaking again.

What do you think?

Happy New Year!