Foolish Things
Living with the Darwin Fish
I've always secretly identified with the apostle Thomas. Upon hearing eyewitness accounts of the Lord's resurrection, Thomas stubbornly said, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe." Doubting Thomas could have been a journalist.
When I became a Christian, I began looking for real-world evidence to bolster my faith in Christ—whether that evidence came in the form of threads snipped from the Shroud of Turin or splinters supposedly from Noah's Ark. I rebelled at the sneering claims of atheistic evolutionists such as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, who assert (with complete faith) that a proper understanding of physical law leaves no room for "the God hypothesis." Every science course I ever took assumed that we evolved from "primordial soup" in a random, purposeless process. No God required.
What I read in Genesis didn't seem to square with mainstream scientific theory, so I decided the theory was wrong. After all, "objective" scientists with naturalistic agendas had fallen for hoaxes before (just google "Piltdown Man"), and what little fossil evidence there was seemed skimpy. I wasn't alone in my skepticism. According to Gallup, approximately half of Americans express serious doubts about evolution.
Last year, however, came word of Tiktaalik roseae, which looks discomfitingly like those offensive "Darwin fishes" on the cars of smug college professors. Giddy evolutionists immediately hailed the 375-million-year-old fossil as a "missing link" between fish and land animals. "It's a really amazing, remarkable intermediate fossil," scientist Neil H. Shubin told The New York Times. "It's like, holy cow."
So what's a Doubting ...
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Foolish Things
Stan Guthrie
Stan Guthrie is an editor at large for Christianity Today and author of Missions in the Third Millennium and All That Jesus Asks. His column, "Foolish Things," ran from 2006 to 2007.
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A Fractured and Beautiful Faith
Streaming This Weekend, May 24, 2013
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Bryan
It's sad that most of the posts on here seem to be completely reactionary, even though the article is so thoughtful. We put up our defensive sheilds the moment we detect that someone doesn't agree with us. Why do we feel so threatened? My suggestion would be to investigate this for yourself. If you only read authors you know ahead of time you're going to agree with, this investigation will be useless. Read those who believe humans were created in a day and read Christians who believe God used evolution (e.g., Kenneth Miller). And just remember how often the disciples got it wrong, even though they sat at the feet of Jesus every day. Remember how everyone misinterpreted the scriptures about the Messiah and thought he would be a political ruler. It is possible to follow God and sometimes misunderstand how he works in this world. And it is possible that the person doing this is you.
Darren King
"...Does not everyone believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God and is completely and utterly inerrant? If there is only truth then animals were not all made from one creature, they were created separately." My friend you are turning the Bible into a historical/scientific textbook rather than a legacy of a people in relationship with their God. In doing so you do injustice to the true intention of Scripture. Please do us a favor and abandon your modernistic, one-size fits all view of the Bible. If you were actually to study historic Christianity- and the role the Bible has played throughout- you would find that your understanding of scripture, which is very close to verbal plenary inspiration, is closer to a historic Muslim understanding of the Koran, than it is to a Christian understanding of the Bible.
Ken Osborn
My father did was not a church person, mostly because he couldn't find a minister who didn't believe that earth was created in six days. The God that I believe in certainly could have done this but why would this God have gone to some much trouble to make it seem otherwise.