The Great Oxidation Event and the Growth of the Soul

This afternoon, I watched a video on History of Earth’s YouTube channel about the Great Oxidation Event, the series of chemical fluctuations and turnovers about 2.4 billion years ago that likely caused a series of mass extinctions in the microbial life covering Earth at the time, which together constituted one of if not the most important changes in Earth’s biosphere. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/H476c8UjLXY?si=w0VyY0aRHIvs3Fqh

This seems to have been the period in time when the Earth underwent a very rocky transition from a world dominated by chemosynthetic bacteria or archaea to modern photosynthesis. It is impossible to overstate the impact of this transition. There is very much indeed about the world today which we take for granted which simply did not exist before this time. This transition to modern photosynthesis, and a modern microbiological ecosystem, is what created our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Without this oxygen, the chemistry which allows so much of the variety and wonder of our world to exist cannot happen. Remember walking through a mineral shop or through the gift store of a natural history museum as a kid, and seeing all the crystals and gems you could get for a few dollars apiece? Remember the colors and the textures of them, how different they all were—the shapes, the structures, how some were opaque and coral-like and others were filled with translucent depths of flashing color, others yet with a cloudy inner luminance, others with bands of soft whites like the atmosphere of Neptune. Remember why you wanted to take one home, why it was disappointing when Mom or Dad said, “not this time.” Very few of those beautiful and mysterious things could exist without free-floating oxygen interacting with the silicates, salts and metals that they are mostly made of. And the same is true of living things—without oxides, despite all the trouble they can pose to our delicate genetic materials and cellular chemistry, there is an awful lot that simply cannot be done.

I was struck while watching this video with an idea about growth, about a possible similarity between our own lives and what was happening with microbes over 2 billion years ago. The bacteria growing before the oxidation event were, I’m sure, very diverse and sophisticated in their own way. We have found that to be the case with extinct organisms, more and more, as we learn more about them—they were never just primitive blunders that life needed to get over with so it could move on to better things; they were their own unique creatures, that were very much alive and vibrant, and just as expressive of the creative energies of their Maker as anything alive today. And any devoted microbiologist, I’m sure—at least if they truly love their subjects—will tell you that this is just as true of microscopic organisms as of anything with complex multicellular anatomy. Creation is always far more beautiful, wondrous and deep than we ever give it credit for. But, I think it may also be fair to say, or at least speculate based on the impacts of oxygen on chemistry, both organic and inorganic, that much of the variety of life that eventually became possible and which makes our world today so detailed and fascinating would simply not have happened without the Great Oxidation Event, without this great disruption of the archaean ecosystem. Perhaps complex multicellular life of a kind could still have come about without it, but my gut sense at least—without being an expert in microbiology or chemistry at all—is that it would have seemed stagnant to us, and perhaps would have lacked some of the diversity which allowed complex life on our world to recover from later catastrophes, such as the end Permian mass extinction. Indeed, I think the fossil record might also offer a bit of tantalizing support for me here too, because if you pay attention to precambrian fossil life, you will see that complex organisms only just begin to show their faces (in the form of funny string-of-pearls and wiffle-ball-like shapes) in the ages following the Great Oxidation, and even then there is a gap as the new, oxygen-loving biota starts to figure out what it’s doing. Oxygen posed a terrible challenge to primitive life, but having mastered it, I think it proved invaluable in what came next.

Yet, it also seems to me that life somehow needed that long period of preparation, of stewing and fermenting and breeding, of learning to be life in a sense, before it could tackle the challenge of oxygen and start producing organized structures. Indeed, we begin to see the first traces of living things almost as soon as the Earth cools, when it is brand-new—almost four billion years ago—but, relatively speaking, we must wait almost until the present day before life develops into anything more sophisticated than some basic chain-link structures. It seems to me that human beings are similar. I recently got an audiobook copy of artist Makoto Fujiwara’s Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. He emphasizes, perhaps to a fault, how our modern philosophy of industrialism, utilitarianism and quick mass-production becomes soul-sucking and destructive, not least because this approach to life and work has infiltrated both faith and art, but faith most critically. It leaves us all with a sort of unconscious terror that we are not good enough because we are not producing enough useful things fast enough. Personally, I also find myself struggling with the feeling that if I do not immediately have a polished product ready to show at every possible instant—including in my spiritual life—I have failed and proven myself to be a useless waste of oxygen. Surely this counterproductive anxiety, which emerges from within the psyche rather than from an actual natural necessity, is a result of some kind of delusion, some kind of idol.

Over and over, I find that when I approach God with this sense of despair, because I have been trying for such-and-such length of time or with so much effort and still seem to be wallowing in the most basic inability to have faith or love, I am told to simply keep pressing forward, and reassured of His love for me—not that He endorses my failures, but that He genuinely and very deeply and earnestly desires that I come through it and succeed in the end even though He can see clearly where there is evil rooted in my person. What He generally does not do, despite my frequent frightened pleading to the contrary, is suddenly cause my sinful behaviors or thoughts or desires to evaporate so I can instantly live a godly life and without fear of condemnation. I do not know exactly why this is, but I think I sense that I have something in common with the bacteria. There is something about being a living creature in this world, at least in this life, and perhaps beyond even, which at the very least necessitates incubation as an aspect of growth, and requires meditation and tinkering before great deeds and constructions are possible. I even think it might be true that for every day of useful action, there are probably between ten and a hundred of incubation and meditation. In paleontology, there is a period of time in the Archaean, this microbe-dominated age, called the Boring Billion. For a thousand million years, nothing seems to change. Life carries on without any obvious advancement or anything very interesting occurring. I can’t help but compare it to the Shire at the start of the Lord of the Rings.

There is also a balance—the incubation period, the Boring Billion, has its place, but should not extend beyond its place. It is hard to tell where the line is between beneficial stillness and despondency, especially when in either case one feels inwardly driven by emotional or spiritual need. Perhaps part of how to tell the difference is in the beauty produced by the former. Stillness allows one to observe, to process, to begin to draw connections between things, and most importantly to pray with focus. Incubation in living things is not at all a stagnant period; in reality it is when an embryo is pouring all of its energies into developing the body parts and motor control it will need to function when it enters the world. It is truly a time of focus, of excluding certain activities so that one very important activity can be done well. Sometimes it is also a way of saving energy when times are too difficult to handle so that, when conditions improve, it is possible to suddenly burst forth and take advantage while the advantage lasts. I think it has something in it of an inner way of working versus an exterior way. Both are good, both are necessary, and so the trouble usually comes when we over-prioritize one or the other—when we make an idol either of hard work and productivity, or of meditation and stillness.

I suppose I haven’t written much of anything here that others haven’t written about before—there are plenty of blogs out there advocating stillness, work-life balance, prayer, or what have you—but I doubt any of them talked about ancient bacteria, so there’s that at least. I suppose there is just something satisfying about being able to communicate a thought like this even if it isn’t very original. Maybe it will be helpful to someone—or maybe someone will come along and see that I’ve made a mistake, and will show me the problem. Maybe the added content will make my website rank higher in Google search results, but from what I’ve heard recently you have to actually write content worth reading to get noticed these days, so I hope for both selfish and unselfish reasons that this was worth reading (maybe that’s too honest, I don’t know). I think most of all I hope that by sharing my musings, even if they are not completely in line with your own, you might walk away seeing a bit more wonder in the natural world and feeling more connected to it and to God. Personally, I think I’ve grown a little in my appreciation of the microbial world, which is good because microbiology was one of my least favorite topics in college. Maybe I’ll learn a little more about it here and there as I go.