I knew, because I was taught in church, that the earth was created in six days. I watched as the secular world of science brain washed my fellow classmates into believing that Earth and all of its lifeforms exist due to natural selection. Did I stand up to my teacher or speak out against this blasphemy? I sat in silence, alone.
The video continued to show how in the last billion years fish grew legs and became land dwellers. They in turn evolved into reptiles and dinosaurs. Giant insects roamed the earth. Eventually birds and then mammals walked the earth. About a million years ago, the first primates appeared and about 200,000 years ago the first humans walked.
Not only did this class teach that the Earth was not created in six days and that the order of the animals was incorrect, it taught that the timeline of the Bible was off by billions of years. Genesis was right. My faith taught me that. So science must be wrong.
During middle school I felt challenged to debate my science friends. I read books and watched videos about why evolution was wrong and how science actually proved Genesis literally true.
My sophomore year I had to take biology. I hated biology of all of the sciences because it, most of all, contradicted my beliefs. But I would endure just like I always have. My biology teacher was a Christian. I do not remember how I found that out, but eventually evolution came up and he spoke with great confidence. I was surprised and taken aback. How could a Christian believe in evolution?
That day, instead of leaving as soon as the bell rang, I stayed and walked over to his desk to speak to him. I asked him if he was a Christian and he said, "Yes." I asked him if he believed in evolution and he said, "Yes." I was stunned and responded with, "Okay. I was just wondering" and left class. He was wrong. He was breaking logic. Genesis specifically says that evolution is wrong so therefore, you cannot be a Christian, and believe that it is right.
With the Internet's boom, web sites soon popped up showing how evolution was wrong. Eventually I found a site called www.answersingenesis.org/. There was also a site called https://carm.org/. Both gave resources for learning about and debating evolutionists. I was armed and ready.
In 1999, I took Astronomy 101 in college. I learned about the speed of light, which travels at 186,282 miles per second. Having learned about trigonometry, I could see how we determined the distances to stars. Our nearest star as it turns out is Alpha Centauri and it is about 25.8 trillion miles away. If you take Alpha Centauri's distance and calculate how long its light takes to reach earth, you come up with 4.396 years.
Another method for calculating distance involves the shifting of colors, which I will not go into here, but you can find plenty of resources online. The farther a star is, the more it's color shifts toward red. We can use this calculation to determine great distances, even the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. I learned to calculate our position within the galaxy. It turns out that we are about 27,000 light years from the center.
Wait a minute. How can the light we see near the center of the galaxy be more than 6,000 years old? This violated one of the principles of the Bible.
The next year I took Geology 101. In there I learned about how to use radiometric dating to determine the age of rocks. Now, I already knew that scientists were using Carbon-14 to determine the age of very old things and I knew that it was not accurate over thousands of years. But now there were other elements like Potassium–argon and Uranium-lead that allowed us to calculate ages to millions and billions of years.
Clearly, if there was a conspiracy against the Bible, it included more than just biology. It now included two other major scientific fields. The more I researched, the more I understood that a new earth is inaccurate and does not reflect reality. I kept my faith and attempted to resolve the time difference.
I concluded pretty early on that the Hebrew word for day meant "a span of time." Thus, God created the heavens and the earth in 13.82 billion years. I would later change my mind about the word "day," though it still could be read that way.
It would be nearly a decade before the question of evolution would pop back up. I do not recall what sparked it. Maybe I had watched something on the Discovery Channel. I decided to revisit the topic and see if my views were still sound.
At this point, I would like to address the backfire effect. As a reader of mine, maybe you are a strong Christian and cherish your beliefs. Maybe you are not and just want to know the Christian perspective. Think about what you value in your life: family, career, friends, and uncovering the truth. As humans, whenever our beliefs are challenged, our natural tendency is to put up a wall and defend those beliefs, even if they are wrong. The only way around this is to acknowledge other values we hold like being a good father or mother, being a patriot, or living healthy. Think about what you value in your life. Afterward, I invite you to read information you may have never heard before. You do not even need to accept it.
My search, like many others began on Google. I eventually came across a great resource with common questions non-evolutionists have and answers to those questions. As I read them I found them respectful and even refreshing. I countered some of them and found others enlightening. The web site is http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html. It contains nearly every question I have either had or heard about the subject.
Some examples of responses include "Evolution is only a Theory," "Evolution is atheistic," and "Complex organs couldn't have evolved."
The list is exhaustive, but I will mention one here that got me thinking: The eye is too complex to have evolved.
"This is the quintessential example of the argument from incredulity. The source making the claim usually quotes Darwin saying that the evolution of the eye seems "absurd in the highest degree". However, Darwin follows that statement with a three-and-a-half-page proposal of intermediate stages through which eyes might have evolved via gradual steps (Darwin 1872).
"All of these steps are known to be viable because all exist in animals living today. The increments between these steps are slight and may be broken down into even smaller increments. Natural selection should, under many circumstances, favor the increments. Since eyes do not fossilize well, we do not know that the development of the eye followed exactly that path, but we certainly cannot claim that no path exists.
- photosensitive cell
- aggregates of pigment cells without a nerve
- an optic nerve surrounded by pigment cells and covered by translucent skin
- pigment cells forming a small depression
- pigment cells forming a deeper depression
- the skin over the depression taking a lens shape
- muscles allowing the lens to adjust
"Evidence for one step in the evolution of the vertebrate eye comes from comparative anatomy and genetics. The vertebrate βγ-crystallin genes, which code for several proteins crucial for the lens, are very similar to the Ciona βγ-crystallin gene. Ciona is an urochordate, a distant relative of vertebrates. Ciona's single βγ-crystallin gene is expressed in its otolith, a pigmented sister cell of the light-sensing ocellus. The origin of the lens appears to be based on co-optation of previously existing elements in a lensless system.
"Nilsson and Pelger (1994) calculated that if each step were a 1 percent change, the evolution of the eye would take 1,829 steps, which could happen in 364,000 generations."
Links: Lindsay, Don, 1998. How long would the fish eye take to evolve? http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/eye_time.htmlAs you can see, even addressing the eye takes up the equivalent of five paragraphs. If you are serious about really learning more about whether or not evolution could have happened, take a look at the Talk Origins site.
I clicked on references and links and investigated scientific studies. Before I realized it, I found myself on the other side of a large wall that I had built between me and the scientific community. I was, for the first time, an evolutionist.
Genesis begged for reconciliation. The days could be explained as epochs, but how on earth could the story of Adam and Eve and the creation of the plants and animals be reconciled? As I read through the story again, I noticed some interesting patterns. First of all, Genesis 1 reads more like the Psalms than it does the rest of Genesis. The sentence structures are poetic. And in the original Hebrew, the lines have rhythm. It is more of a song than a history.
It occurred to me that there might be another point of view to have about Genesis. I went to Jewish resources to see what they believed. It turns out that the Jewish community, including many Orthodox Jews, believe that Genesis is allegory for the creation of the Earth. They believe that it is a story that illustrates God's love and purpose for mankind.
I went to Catholic resources and found the same thing. It seemed that only a sect of Christians actually believed in a young Earth and the literal interpretation of Genesis. Even the Anglicans and Episcopalians believe in the non-literal interpretation.
In 2014, the evangelical church I attended said that they would be teaching on Genesis and to bring friends. "Ha!" I thought. My friends, especially the atheists, would not even make it through the first half of the sermon. During the week before the first sermon, I confided in a couple of Christian friends that I believed in evolution and that I was not looking forward to being demeaned that Sunday. They surprised me and said that even they were on the fence about the whole thing and that I would probably be surprised on Sunday.
The sermon began and I heard for the first time from a pulpit a pastor give at least three points of view on Genesis: that there were some scholars that believe Genesis is literally true, that Genesis is a literary device, or that Genesis is an allegory. He brought up a few respected names in the protestant community that supported each.
He said that in the church we have primary issues and secondary issues. Primary issues include things like "who God is" and "how we are saved." How God created the universe and how we came into existence is a secondary issue. You can still be a Christian and be saved and believe that Genesis is literally true or figuratively true.
I could not believe my ears. For the first time in years, I felt validated and not alone. My eyes began to water and I had to pretend to scratch my eye. No longer did I have to defend my scientist friends or feel alienated by my Christian ones.
As a Christian, you can believe in evolution too. It is not far fetched and it does not conflict with the Bible. Having such a belief will not answer all of your questions, but you can have peace knowing the Bible is true and so is the evidence you see around you.
