A Remnant of Eden

by Dave Layton

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground – Gen 2: 5-6

I believe that with God all things are possible – including science – DL

If life in Eden was without death then it had to be also without time. A day of Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden could have as easily been 300,000 years.  Likewise the time when no plants yet existed and the land was watered by a mist could have been 400 million years as easily as a day in a timeless dimension.

The Earth being first covered by water then the emerging land being watered by mist has scientific corroboration in fossil evidence that fungi ruled the land for hundreds of millions of years. Some fungi known as Prototaxites had massive fruiting bodies over twenty feet tall. They lived at a time when small green plants or animals were just arriving. A steady mist would ensure that fungi would grow unchecked, all the while decomposing the former sea floor and conditioning the soil for future life. Unfortunately for the existing fungi, future life included the giant trees of the Carboniferous period that smothered and poisoned the Prototaxes with indigestible lignin. Undigested wood pressed into today’s coal deposits. Eventually new kinds of wood eating fungi emerged, ancestors of the modern oyster mushrooms, enoke and many other wood rotting fungi that humans benefit from immensely.

I thought of ancient life on a wispy, misty day with the sun filtering through the trees on Willow Island. That day Sally and I came to a clump of wind damaged willows that were loaded with fungi. Some willows were leaning against others still standing and some were laying along the ground. Throughout the clump and even up high into the standing trees, Oyster mushrooms emerged everywhere. Next to the oysters on two logs was enoki. Hericium was also fruiting on a rotted log nearby. Looking all around I exclaimed to Sally: This is like a remnant of Eden. Indeed one willow had oyster mushrooms nearly covering its trunk over twenty feet high. They brought those giant primordial fungi to mind.  

The easy harvest and delicious meals those mushrooms provided made me think again of Eden. Adam and Eve definitely ate. That’s how they got in trouble. But also death wasn’t present before their eating problem. How is that possible? Don’t you have to kill to eat? No, mushrooms and fruit could provide complete nutrition without ever harming the living organism at all.  It was only when that wasn’t good enough that death changed everything including for fungi and other single cell organisms which now had to diversify into many roles in order to decompose all the dying life forms as well as keep other life forms alive long enough to reproduce.

Things I’ve recently learned about fungi have caused me to think about Eden in a different way. Fungi marches through time and space regenerating with new cells as it moves forward and leaving trails of old cells and enzymes so it can retrace its path if it reaches obstacles. Theoretically a single fungal organism regenerating into its future and leaving a trail to its past could be both immortal and vast. – Entangled Life, Sheldrake

Now we are uncovering evidence of this. Currently the largest known single organism is a fungal mat of honey mushroom covering 2384 acres of forest in Eastern Oregon. Likewise  incredibly ancient living fungi have been found. Endoliths are living organisms of bacteria, fungi and archaeon that were found in rocks and fossils a mile or more below the ocean floor by drillers. Endoliths are over a hundred million years old! Even older bacteria found in 250 million year-old Permian rock formations in New Mexico have actually been revived.

What if amazing fungi aren’t just a remnant of Eden but also a connection to it – a detailed network of life never ending, a complex map pointing to all that is and ever was alive on Earth, even to a time before death. For a creator who is intimate with such a detailed multi dimensional map, all existence that ever was would be as present as our current existence on the surface of time. As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be. World without end – amen.

Link to prototaxites article in Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-before-trees-overtook-the-land-earth-was-covered-by-giant-mushrooms-13709647/#:~:text=Long%20Before%20Trees%20Overtook%20the,Mushrooms%20%7C%20Smart%20News%7C%20Smithsonian%20Magazine

Link to largest living organism: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/

Link to Oldest living organisms: https://www.oldest.org/nature/living-organisms/