Worth Fourteen Billion Years

        Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog about my qualms in regard to the science being done in the area of Evolution. Hardly anyone read it because the moment I use a word like “qualms” on the internet, everyone rather reasonably thinks, “Sshh, Ginger, go study Chemistry or something.” But it helped me externally process, so that’s something. Well, here I am again after a year of taking several classes—some on religion, some on microbiology, some on history (because I’m nothing if not well-rounded, eh?)—and among other things I’ve found myself a convert to an old earth creation perspective.

            This not only sounds ridiculous to many of the people I know who don’t believe in God, but to many of the people I know who do. And it would sound ridiculous to the Ellie of five years ago. But in the last year I have come to realize that a four billion year old earth is not at all in contradiction to an exegetical interpretation of the Bible and certainly not at all in contradiction to good science.

The Struggle is Real

            I always struggled growing up with the infamous schism between science and “religion” or whatever you want to call my relationship with God, but because of the wee little part of me that enjoys rebellion, I ran headlong into the arguments. I am, in fact, equal parts Chemistry major and missionary (okay, maybe not exactly equal parts). And it was terrifying to look honestly at both naturalistic arguments for the existence of the Universe and a “literal” interpretation of the six-day creation account of Genesis and see little but cop-out explanations in both. Is no one in the world an objective, trustworthy source? Well, in a word, no.

            But I figured if (and admittedly that is a huge if!) the God of the Bible exists, then He is described as good and perfect. It doesn't make sense to me that a good and perfect God would lie in either His divine revelation to mankind (Scripture) or His creation (the Universe). I am convinced that we should be able to look at the world around us, and if we are using good observational skills, see evidence of this God whose intention is to be known without having to squeeze our observations through a weird theological loophole. That is, if He does indeed exist. Good science and good theology should both be rigorously true and mutually endorsed.

            I think everyone needs a little more honesty and a little more courage. Myself included of course. But I get it, it is truly terrifying to look at the evidence of a specific worldview with the honesty that would cause doubt and (God-forbid… literally) change everything I've ever believed. But I don’t want to believe something that is obviously not true regardless of how much nostalgia is attached to the idea. Truth—in the end, that is what matters (but according to Jack Nicholson, I can’t handle it). So I will test what I know, or what I think I know, until I arrive at what I believe to be objective truth. And then I’ll test it more, because if there’s one thing I know it’s that I know hardly anything.

Seeing the Beginning

            What I've found in this testing is a body of evidence from every different scientific field that points, with minuscule error bars, to a four billion year old Earth and a fourteen billion year old Universe. The beauty of astronomy is that it can directly probe the age of the Universe because of the nature of time. When we look out into the Universe, we see only the past because light takes time to travel--if we see a star that is ten light-years away, we are seeing the light from that star that began traveling towards Earth ten years ago. We're seeing the history of the Universe, and just recently we have been able to see the first moments of the Universe's existence.

           What I've seen often in Christian circles is a fear of science and a belief that all scientists who believe in Evolution or an old earth are personally trying to destroy our belief in God. Having been in the science field, I can say that the majority of scientists really don't care what anyone believes about God--they just want to do good, accurate science in their field and let the chips fall where they may. Do scientists come from a presupposition of naturalism? Sure, usually. But I come from a presupposition of the existence of God, and young earth advocates come from a presupposition of a specific interpretation of a specific passage in Scripture. I think it's virtually impossible to do science or any sort of rational thinking without coming from some sort of presupposition--the trick is to be able to test it and in humility change your perspective if you find that you are a believing a perspective that really doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

10,000 Years

          The Young Earth Creation perspective is based on an interpretation of the word “day” in Genesis 1 as a 24-hour period of time. But I find that in the Hebrew language, which contains significantly fewer words than the English language (on the order of 1%), understanding that word, “day” (yôm), as long periods of time is not a bad, cop-out interpretation of that passage of Scripture. There is no other word in the Hebrew language that describes what we would call an epoch--or a long, but finite period of time. Just one chapter later Genesis 2:4 says, "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created, in the day (yôm) that the Lord God made the Earth and the heavens." The same word day there is used as a period longer than 24 hours. Apart from how a person interprets the Bible, no scientist has ever come to the conclusion that the earth is only 10,000 years old unless they first hold to a 24-hour day interpretation of Genesis 1. However, there are scientists who have come to the conclusion that a divine Creator exists based on their studies of the Universe.

            My intention is not to give a rigorous argument against the Young Earth perspective. Many people would ask, “Does it really matter?” And in the end, no. It doesn’t matter really whether the world is ten thousand years old or four billion years old or how God has done anything! It is wildly humbling to me that you do not actually need to have intellectual integrity to believe that we are broken, sinful people, and that God offers us the gift of salvation through faith via the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Blessed are those who believe without seeing… It is not primarily an intellectual decision, but a matter of the heart and will. And thank God, because I am the unintelligentest. The things I don’t know astronomically outweigh the things I know, and the things I think I know are more probably not true.

Who Cares?

            So why talk about this at all? You might be asking yourself, “Why the heck am I reading this then??” I’d ask you the same question. But for me, the reason I care about brazenly seeking out the evidence of God’s existence in the cross hairs of the Universe and Scripture is because to me it is worship. In learning about the origin of a life-sustaining earth, I have fallen head over heels for the brilliant Creator who formed it ex nihilo. I am amazed that He took so much time, working through the minutest of details and waited patiently for the perfect timing to add imperative pieces of the puzzle. He prepared this place for us, and He did so with such wild beauty and organization. I don’t just believe that because it makes me feel good or gives me peace in life; I believe it because I've seen in science that there is significant evidence suggesting it to be true!

          It is scandalously overwhelming how much He loves us—and being able to believe Him and know Him with my brain makes me love Him with my heart. I wish more people could catch the passion of seeing God’s character within His creation of the cosmos if only to have some people with whom to externally process what I'm learning! And in having a couple wild moments of fearlessness—placing my faith and theology on the chopping block of objectivity and admittedly a perhaps unhealthy level of doubt—I have found that the Christian worldview (and the Old Earth perspective of creation) holds up remarkably well under scrutiny. Miraculously, I would dare to say. And of course it not only holds up, but also has satisfied me. I know, because I am alive to know it, that I am loved. And that knowledge fills me and overflows from me. So if I can use my passion for science to convince you of that knowledge too, then I will do everything I can to do that.

But there are several people who do a much more learned and eloquent job, one of them being Hugh Ross, whose website is www.reasons.org. He’s written several books, one of which I’ve read is The Genesis Question. Lee Strobel, in his book, Case for a Creator also writes from an Old Earth perspective although he doesn’t explicitly say so, and is a very good apologist.

The Upshots

So, my point: if the things I’ve been learning over the past year are trustworthy, they have rich and vibrant implications. It would mean that we can see how God used the chaos and entropy of the Universe to prepare the world for us, which shows us something about his redemptive nature. And it would mean that God meticulously planned out and formed the Universe over the course of about fourteen billion years, using all that time to prepare and build this beautiful, comfy nest for his prized image-bearers. Not because He had to—I have no doubt that in a moment, God could snap His fingers and come up with an equally breathtaking Universe—but perhaps because He wanted us to know that He finds us worth fourteen billion years. And he finds His ultimate plan of totally abolishing any (even possibility of) sin worth fourteen billion years. Because God Himself is worth fourteen billion years. And if we look at the rapidly growing discoveries in science regarding the history of the Universe, we can see some of the reliable hypotheses of how God did all these things. I’m telling you, it has incited more worship in me than nearly anything else! At the end of the day, since I believe in God, I get to believe that you and I are both infinitely valuable because we are infinitely and profoundly loved. And I know that because God has revealed that truth in what He’s done to take care of us.

I’d say that’s something worth looking into.

The City of Refuge

Three years later and I still remember it. I have played it over and over in my mind a thousand times and I can see his head hitting the rock, his arms splayed, his eyes widening as they changed from anger to terror. I remember feeling my heart drop from my chest and hit the ground and the strange combination of crushing regret and horrifying lack of it. In that moment I had murdered a man and yet—why couldn't I muster up enough regret?

Because I still remember the surge of anger as he reached for my younger sister, the sweetness of fury as I bore down on him and his lust-filled eyes. I placed my hands on his chest and shoved, my righteous anger tensing my arms and reaching down into my fingertips. And then I watched him stumble backwards. His foot caught—on a rock? on a dip in the ground? on his own foot? I don’t know. But he fell, onto that perfectly placed stone. Or horribly placed stone.

There are several cities of refuge surrounding my village. That’s where I am now; I was forced to run because according to law, the man’s father was obligated to avenge him. That meant, essentially, that he could murder me and it wouldn’t be murder. It would be rightful vengeance. And I understand that it would be justice. Intellectually I get it, but there are moments, the moments in which I hate myself the most, when I feel justified in what I did. Of course it wasn’t premeditated, I had no intention of killing him! I am a good man! But in my sickness I almost think that if given the chance, I wouldn’t change it.

The cities of refuge were set up so that people who had unintentionally murdered someone could live without the threat of their avengers. I am thankful for this place, but it has also been my prison for the last three years. The moment I step foot out of these walls, I am a dead man.  I missed my family, my wife and my two children, my friends, and just freedom. I miss freedom.

There is one—and only one—situation in which I can be free. The high priest, who is the only one who has authority to judge me before God would have to die. A life for a life… it just doesn’t necessarily have to be mine. I had watched several of my friends from this place walk out of the front gate because their high priest had passed away. There was always a weird mix of joy and mourning on their faces as they left. It seems almost scandalous that our freedom is bought at the death of another—even if it is a natural thing. This whole city is a complicated web of paradoxes.

 But today, my fate has changed. One of the elders, who stood at the gate, hearing the cases of the accidental murderers and admitting them into this city prison, approached me. His look was unreadable and the nauseating hope of another’s death filled my gut. Shame. It is the feeling of shame.

“Your high priest died this morning,” he said to me. I stared at him in disbelief. What do I do? How do I respond to that?

“What?”

“Your high priest is dead. But…” the elder shifted uncomfortably, eyes dropping to the ground. “Uh—"

“What?” I couldn’t get any other words out.

“Something is different.”

“What is different?” Just tell me!

“He…” he scrunched his face up, “killed himself.” I stood in silence.

“I don’t understand.”

“He was found this morning hanging on a tree, with a piece of parchment in his tunic.” The elder handed the piece of paper to me. I put it in my pocket without reading it. Somehow it felt heavy and I could not lay eyes on it with this man standing before me. Shame and hope and confusion muddled my insides. “You can go home now,” he said.

I nodded and stepped around him. I walked to the gate and wondered why I couldn’t feel my feet. Everything felt numb and unreal. I was free! I was free because someone died. I didn’t deserve that—I couldn’t even feel complete remorse over what I had done, but now my life felt impossibly expensive. I had taken the lives of two men, one of whom was undeniably a better man than I. Was this what grace felt like? I was taken aback by how much it hurt. It was dull and heavy and crushing and sweet.

I crossed the boundary and I am now standing outside the walls. This city of refuge that was my prison—I am free! The joy inside me threatens to rip me to pieces!

I take out the piece of parchment and unroll it. I close my eyes when it is open before me. Breathe in. Breathe out. I open my eyes.

I do not condemn you. I give you my life. Take it and be free.

(Based on Joshua 20, 21 and Numbers 35)

Check Your Pockets

It is terrifying to me that my pocket sin is the very sin that introduced a perfect world to death and suffering.

A what? A pocket sin? What is that?

A pocket sin is like sticking a receipt in your pocket, so that every time you reach for your phone you pull out this irritating slip of paper and you don't remember what it was for or why you didn't throw it away but for some reason you stick it back in your pocket. Every. Time. So that next time you reach for your phone, that trusty old receipt is there, being purposeless per usual.

A pocket sin is an attitude that is detrimental to your relationship with God that is just subtle enough that you never bother to throw it out. It might even be a "good" thing that just distracts you from fully grasping God's unrelenting love for you. Yes, I did just make that up, but I needed a word for it.

My pocket sin is my need to know.

Well that doesn't sound that bad, right? Learning is good. Truth is good. Education is good. Touche, but see, love is good too but when it's twisted into lust it gets really really ugly. That's kind of what sin is anyway--taking something beautiful and adding just a drop of self-worship, and suddenly beautiful is walking around in six inch heels in forty degree weather until your feet bleed and your ankles are swollen. And I've watched my need to know traipse around in stilettos for too long... I am tired.

I wanted answers to all of my questions. I would still like to know why God let some of the church's most central doctrines be decided at councils where the opposing side was excommunicated. I want to know if Jesus wrecked the temple tables before or after his ministry outside of Jerusalem. I want to know why He chose freedom at the cost of suffering over creating a garden without untouchable trees. And for goodness' sake I want to know how an electron can be simultaneously a particle and a wave!

While we're at it, why does math work?

I'm getting distracted. My point is: I don't know. There are a lot of questions for which I will never have satisfying answers. And that really grinds my gears! I want to know everything! But life is just not that simple--there aren't black and white lines drawn through everything and we don't have to take a stance on every single issue. Knowledge and faith form a complicated web swimming in doubt and truth and mystery and simplicity and at the end of the day we can just look to Heisenberg and know one thing: we just can't know everything.

In the midst of this web I realize that I've been holding God at an arms length, interrogating and investigating Him like knowing Him can be entirely exoteric. But if it is true that I was created with the purpose of delighting Him by living and enjoying the rest of His creation, then this whole objective approach to faith doesn't make any sense! He is continually whispering to me, "Life is not a text book." There absolutely is value to questions and academia and learning about God, but when my thirst for knowledge strips me of my satisfaction in His presence, I find myself biting into the forbidden fruit of my pride.

God's answer to Job's very legitimate plea for an answer as to why his life had suddenly come crashing down around his ears was not, "Well, I was thinking this situation would make you stronger and better able to handle situations in a godly way in the future... blah da dee blah blah." No, His response was a long string of rhetorical questions that basically said, "Job, who am I? Who have I revealed myself to be?"

God didn't give Job a good argument, He just gave him Himself. And Job is left without any more questions, replying simply, "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you" (Job 42:5).

So I guess, if for nothing else but the sake of practicality, I have to trust that some of the things I have learned and know are true. It would be a tragedy to bounce so far into the camp of I-don't-know-anything that I pull my foundation out from under me. I believe that I am a sinner, that the Bible is true, that God is real, that God is good and that Jesus is God because I've experienced those things to be true. For many things I don't have tangible evidence or a solid logical argument. I just have faith.

And imagine--what a miracle it would be if God made Himself knowable!

So right now I'll tell my heart to leave some room for mystery. Because on a scale of 1 to knowing everything about God and the Universe, I'm probably sitting around a 0.2. It's beautiful to me to think that we will spend eternity in heaven digging through the infinite character of God and the secrets of his history and his creation. I would love to sit down with Jesus and spend like seven hundred years learning about particle physics--I mean we'll have eternity, so why not? Until then, it's just humbling to know that I don't have it all figured out, and I don't have to. I am a broken, sinful, selfish person whose doctrine I'm sure is skewed and who's mental image of God is disturbingly shrunken. And in the face of all that God loves me. He takes immense joy in me.

He's just so ridiculous sometimes!

So. Let's toss those receipts, shall we?

The Room of False Associations

    Hello, friend. Step into my mind.

    AAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

         Just kidding, it’s fine. We’re all fine. But let’s be honest, here in this complexly (and female) analytical mind of mine, it can all feel a little overwhelming. Let me be your tour guide.

            Over here to your right is where I store everything I know about geography, history, politics, where I put my belongings, and how to catch flying objects. Oh look, a tumbleweed. Over to your left is my hippocampus, which seems to be eternally under construction and watch your head!... Phew, you almost got hit by a flying rogue Chemistry equation. But all is well; up ahead you can see the door that leads to where I hold all my emotions, but it’s kind of a neglected mess right now so we’ll save that for another day, shall we? Right across the hall you’ll find a room filled with a giant netted web… I like to call this the room of False Associations. Let’s camp out here for a while.

            Lately I’ve been realizing that some of the schemas I’ve created for moral concepts are a little sloppy. And I think these false understandings were much of the cause of frustration and exhaustion in which I found myself entangled last semester. To explain, here’s a little piece of my web:

            Selfless Acts à Difficult and draining

            Selfish Acts à Easy and help me to control my life

            Easy Things à Save up energy to do more difficult things later

            The Most Difficult Thing à The Right Thing

            So basically, all semester I’ve been thinking that if I do a whole bunch of easy, selfish acts I can control my life and save up my energy to do all the good, difficult, sacrificial things later. Right? Take care of me and then I can take care of everyone else.

            No! This is bad advice!

            First off, taking care of myself is not truly taking care of myself if it neglects Jesus, who is my identity. But more on that in a moment. Otherwise, selfless acts often turn out to be simple, far-reaching, and enjoyable whereas selfish acts turn out to be draining dead ends. Plus, doing easy things that I thought I could handle did not give me any more energy to be selfless and heroic later, they just cluttered my life with easy, controllable acts. I have also discovered that sometimes the right thing to do is the thing I most want to do. It might not always be easy, but at least it’s desirable!

            But ultimately, the unsatisfactions (that’s not a real word but whatever) and falsities I find in life always have the same heart-issue root. Sometimes irritatingly so. My overall joy in life is not resultant of my life situations—when my life has looked objectively sad, I was not sad; when my life has looked objectively fine, I was not fine.

            So what exactly is the affecting variable?

            Over break I realized something equal parts obvious and mind-blowing: joy is a fruit of the Spirit. See, all my life I’ve been thinking that fruit is this product I have to muster up with all my effort as some sort of certificate of achievement, proving that I have the Spirit living in me. The words of Christian speakers haunted me: "Do you see fruit in your life?" But all this mustering business has felt a little like spiritual constipation.

            But apple trees don’t have to freaking squeeze out apples!

            They just poof! have apples and it’s very, very natural. In fact, if apple trees started running around panicking or twisting themselves into knots in order to produce apples it would seem rather unnatural. And so joy is just something we get to grow—naturally—when we are walking in the Spirit.

            How wonderfully refreshing is that? When we spend time reading Jesus’ words and reflecting on Him in our daily lives, the result is effortless joy! And I’m not just telling you this because it’s a theological truth; it has been the story of my life for the last three weeks. God has just plopped joy like dollops of whipped cream into my life and I haven’t even done anything!

            So the only thing directly affecting my feelings about life is how closely I’m walking with the Spirit. When I’m being honest with myself and inviting Jesus in on it, I get joy. I get energy to be selfless and I find my desires focused on noble things. When I spend my time punching holes in the Christian faith, doubting God’s existence and character and capacity to make my life less oblivious, I am drained of joy. I walk around bouncing between narcissism and self-loathing and everything everything everything ever is turned in toward myself. I did kind of have to take care of myself before I took care of others, but that involved giving up some of my time to hang out with Jesus.

            So Jesus, it turns out, is yet again the answer. Funny how that always seems to happen.

            Thus, I have constructed a new web:

            Time spent reading Scripture à expanded energy and time

            Knowing how loved I am à the capacity to love out of pure overflow!

            Prayer à God’s desires become mine

            Walking in the Spirit à Joy and spiritual regularity

           Let's stop trying to squeeze out fruit.

Evolution

  I have committed intellectual suicide.

            At least, according to some professors and doctors in Chemistry and Biology and Molecular Genetics and Bill Nye The Science Guy. If I’ve learned anything in the past three years, it’s that the more I know, the less I know I know.

            I'm about to talk about Evolution--a topic charged with emotion and a conversation that so many people come to jaded. But it's a question I am asked so frequently... it's the elephant in the room. How do you reconcile Evolution (and science in general) with your faith? So this is my response, but as a disclaimer, I don't think this issue is very significant to faith relative to other issues--Christians often are able to reconcile Evolution with their trust in the historicity of the Bible and some find reason to believe otherwise. If someone is seeking God, this is the last place I would go in regards to evidence for the existence of God. However, I also think it's very important to be educated so that we are not speaking out of ignorance.

               Anyway, to begin, I am irrevocably biased. I am a Christian so the thought of a Creator comes with the territory. But as I said being a Christian does not so much affect my thoughts on Evolution except to suggest that either the Evolutionary process was guided by an Intellect with a purpose or individual species were created by an Intellect (the latter of the two is what I am more prone to believe). So any argument I might have would not be against Evolution necessarily, but against naturalism being the outside force guiding Evolution.


Hardy-Weinberg

         Here's a quick breakdown of the mechanism of Evolution: there’s this thing called the Hardy-Weinberg Principle, which names five cases in which evolution does not happen in a population:

1.     It’s a large population

2.     There is random mating within the population (also that every member mates and produces the same amount of offspring)

3.     There are no mutations

4.     There is no migration into or out of the population

5.     There is no natural selection

The suggestion is that by violating the Hardy-Weinberg principle in any of these ways, evolution occurs in a population. And while each of these cases could change the genetic makeup of a population, only mutations (#3) are capable of adding to the genetic makeup of an organism in such a way as to make it more complex.

To explain, let’s break this down starting with natural selection. Darwin claimed that natural selection is the driving force of evolution. This means that phenotypes, or physical traits, that help an organism to survive are selected for by causing those specific organisms to make more babies. In short, survival of the fittest.

Yay babies!

Here’s the problem with natural selection: it narrows the gene pool. For example (this is intentionally simplistic for the purpose of understanding), if there is an allele that codes for having opposable thumbs or not having opposable thumbs and the fact that opposable thumbs helps me to be more attractive or to survive longer and better than those non-opposable thumb people, then I will 1. Have a longer time in which to find a mate and 2. More people will want to mate with me and I will pass that trait on to my offspring. Thus, more babies with opposable thumbs! Sometimes, natural selection will just go ham and over time those opposable thumb people will not be physically able to reproduce with non-opposable thumb people. That’s called disruptive evolution and BAM! Ya got two separate species.

So what’s the problem? That sounds like evolution to me…

But see, we started out with both opposable thumbs and non-opposable thumbs. We didn’t form a more complex species, even if opposable thumbers do have a better chance of survival (huzzah for those guys!), all we did was form a more specific species. Natural selection does not put more genetic information into the world, it actually does the opposite.


New Genetic Information

There is a way, though, for genetic information to be produced. That brings us to number three. Mutations! Google’s definition of mutation is “the action or process of mutating,” which is just thoroughly unhelpful.

            Mutation is the only case in the Hardy-Weinberg model that actual creates new genetic information. Even migration of a population into another one does not create new genetic information; it just changes the face of what already existed in the world. So, there exists a mechanism by which evolution may have occurred, but it takes billions of generations of life randomly mutating nearly perfectly to arrive here.

          Until recently, the argument from creation advocates (including myself) has been that there could not be enough time for random point mutations, which are vastly more deleterious than beneficial, to evolve a specie without causing it first to go extinct. While this may be true, this has a tendency to be a straw-man argument because random point mutations where a single protein's function is changed is not where evolutionists believe evolution occurs.

         Recently, we've discovered new nuances in genetics where genetic variation can be produced. Evolution is believed to occur in duplicate parts of the genome that produce two copies of the same genes, leaving one gene free to undergo mutation and one gene intact and functional. So it's not necessarily mutations of individual proteins, but changes in gene expression or gene regulation--which can be easier to change and could affect multiple genes--that would be driving evolution.

         Granted, mutations that occur in these places are still vastly dangerous and rare, but the gist is that saying, "There is not enough time for these mutations to occur before the organism becomes extinct" is not a valid argument. Overall, talking about the adequacy or lack thereof of the theorized mechanism of Evolution on a molecular level is not an argument that can really go anywhere because we don't know exactly how genotype relates to phenotype--the argument is set up on information that we don't even have yet.

The Fossil Record

        There is one way to test if Evolution holds its own as a sufficient explanation for the genetic variation we see in the world: analyzing the fossil record.             

         Darwin, when he was forming his theory of evolution pictured a gradual process that took significant time to evolve from one species to an entirely new species. This makes a lot of sense according to the mechanism proposed through mutations and natural selection. But as he was writing, he was assuming that in the next several years there would a huge uncovering of “missing links” or these kind of in-between species within the fossil record evidencing the gradual changes. He himself said that if these transitional life forms weren't found, then his whole theory kind of fell apart. What we see in the fossil record instead are huge explosions of life with no evolutionary history. These are called "Evolution's big bangs", most notably the Cambrian explosion. 

Punctuated Equilibrium

            In response to the lack of evidence for gradualism in the fossil record, an alternative model called punctuated evolution or punctuated equilibrium was hypothesized. This model suggests that there were long periods of stasis in the historical span of a species with no evolutionary changes interspersed rarely with large bursts of change. The mechanism suggested for this explanation includes a small number of a species being isolated from the larger population and undergoing great environmental stress, thus requiring rapid evolutionary change in order to survive. However, studies suggest that this mechanism moves the isolated population toward extinction rather than evolutionary change.

My Own Thoughts

           So after that long explanation here are my personal thoughts: evidence that disproves evolution does not exist. Proof is a messy word to throw around in both the scientific and the faith fields. Perhaps evolution sufficiently explains what we see in the world, but I think not. I think that the fossil record, and specifically events such as the Cambrian explosion and other rapid appearances of different life forms, the appearance of convergent evolution (where multiple species independently evolve--or perhaps were designed--with morphological features that are very similar or have the same function), and the small probability that mutations randomly propagate complexity point to the existence of a designer. There are good arguments that suggest otherwise and would point to naturalism. But I think it's reasonable and compelling to believe, based on the evidence we have, that an Intellect interfered in the natural order and created life "according to its kind".

          Studies have found that the probability of humans, or a similar species in regards to intellect and/or capability, evolving from single-celled organisms in ten billion years or less (our earth has supplied us only about 3.8 billion years) is anywhere between one in ten to the millionth power and one in ten to the twenty-four millionth power. These probabilities are so close to zero that even if I thought evolution adequately explained the complexity in the world I would still be believing in what could reasonably be called a miracle. Evolution of humanity in and of itself would be miraculous, regardless of whether that is what happened in history or not.

         As a Christian, I think that if someone is involved in a community where the question of Evolution or science is relevant, or if an individual finds him or herself doubting the existence of God because of Evolution, this is an issue that should be diligently sought out. As Christians, we have a responsibility to point out where we see the fingerprints of God's design in culturally relevant ways (and always with gentleness and respect!) but we must be well educated on these subjects. Belief in God requires faith, of course, but my faith is based on evidence and observation, not on shutting off my brain. I think that astronomy, the origin of the Universe, the origin of life, and the anthropic principle hold the best evidences for God's existence, so in conversation, that's where I would go first.

         I have to remind myself always that intellectual barriers to faith are very real and should be addressed when I'm communicating my faith, but the message that Jesus asked us to bring to the world is that we can turn from our sin and brokenness and accept his salvation through faith in order to become citizens of the kingdom of Heaven. Apart from what anyone thinks or understands about Evolution, that must be our utmost truth.

            So, there it is. Have at it, internet.