Mike, you are too smart and too devout to conflate [what appears to *you
to be compelling evidence based on] scientific theories with Divine Revelation. The so called ‘facts’ of evolution are ultimately an aticle of faith. Evolution can no more be proven (hence earning placement in the column of Truth) than the existence of aliens. Truth became flesh and dwelled among us.
Evolution takes limited samples, erects models based on an atheistic cosmological assumption and philsophical predisposition, extrapolates that model across extravagant amounts of time that no one can fathom under unobservable conditions, and then arrives at the position that God goofed in Genesis.
A fact is that water becomes ice at 32 degrees and steam at 212. Speculating that a man evolved from a monkey is neither a fact, science nor truth.
If scientific evidence were not at the level it is today, I’d probably agree with you, but I don’t think you’re aware of the level of scientific evidence favoring evolution that exists today.
First, there’s the matter of the age of the earth. Most young-earth-creationists (YECs for short) will refuse to accept an age of the earth that is more than 10,000 years. However, there are four independent lines of scientific evidence (tree ring data, varve analysis, C-14 dating, and ice core sampling) that confirm the earth has existed for at least 40,000 years. Now, sure, 40,000 years isn’t the 5 billion years that mainstream science agrees upon, but it’s still four times the maximum allowed by “creation scientists”. So “creation scientists” are dead in the water so far as their age of the earth constraints go, and if that’s the case, why
not, then, accept mainstream science’s 5 billion year reckoning for the age of the earth?
So, we’ve got an estimate of the age of the earth from mainstream science that accomodates evolution, but that’s just indirect evidence. Do we have direct evidence of evolution? Yes, actually, we do. First, we have the existence of transitional fossils. They
do exist. No, they aren’t perfect “halfway points” between prior known species, but we shouldn’t expect them to be. The “tree of evolution” is more like a bush, and many more species branch off and die out than branch off and develop into another species. (
Archaeopteryx, for example, is likely one of these “dead-end” branches, not a “pure” transitional species between dinosaurs and birds.) Second, we have the geographical distribution of species. Almost all marsupials exist
only in Australia and New Zealand. A “Noah’s Ark” style of migration cannot account for this. The distribution of bicolor and tricolor vision among primates (including humans) also follows an evolutionary pattern of geographical isolation followed by separate genetic development. Finally, there’s evidence of common ancestry among species located in DNA. By itself, the fact that humans and chimps share between 95 and 99% of their DNA is not evidence of common ancestry, but when you look at shared
mutations in human and chimp DNA (e.g., where the
same 13 non-functional copies of the same original gene are located in the
same places on 23 different chromosomes), there’s no question that the mutations had to have happened in a common ancestor species and were then passed down to both the human and chimp species that branched out from that common ancestor species.
Again, I recommend the following books to get you up to speed on the current state of evolutionary science:
Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll
The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll
Relics of Eden by Daniel J. Fairbanks
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald Prothero
–Mike
So according to the view of scripture you are defending here, the notion that God entered the world as Jesus is absurd.
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