Christians Have Long Known the Origin of Species
Lee YanceyFossils have fascinated me since I can remember. My favorite book as a first grader was Danny and the Dinosaur. As I grew as a Christian I began to ask questions that yielded few results. Where do the dinosaurs fit into the Bible? Were they too big to get on the ark? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? What about Bigfoot? And what about the anthropological fossil evidence of half-apes and half-men? How is the Christian to work through the fossil evidence? Scientists have discovered ways of dating fossils through the use of Carbon-14 and Radiometric dating determining the half-lives of elements and their rates of deterioration. Are these methods foolproof? Is the earth literally six thousand some odd years old or is it millions of years old? Did life on earth as we know it begin with a one-celled amoeba and evolve into the many different varieties of animal kind we have today?
I don’t think so, and let me tell you why. Since Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, more questions have been raised than answers, yet the scientific community defends Darwin as if science itself is dependent on the propagation of the theory of evolution. In fact, last month World magazine reported that scientists at the Smithsonian Institute are punishing one of their own for simply publishing an article about Intelligent Design, a theory that suggests that all creation had to have had a Creator. According to World, “Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge and is a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, wrote an article entitled ‘The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.’ As Mr. Meyer explained it to World, his article deals with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, that point in the fossil record in which dozens of distinct animal body forms suddenly spring into existence. Mr. Meyer argued that the need for new proteins, new genetic codes, new cell structures, new organs, and new species requires specific ‘biological information.’ And ‘information invariably arises from conscious rational activity.’ That flies in the face of the Darwinist assumption that biological origins are random” (World, “Science’s New Heresy Trial”, February 19, 2005, p. 26). Mr. Meyer says that many other scientists secretly agree with elements of Intelligent Design but are afraid to go public. The attempts of the Smithsonian Institute to suppress Intelligent Design indicate how insecure they are in de-fending evolution. According to Meyer, “You don’t resort to authoritarianism if you can answer it.”
So, here we are again stuck in a quagmire of questions, searching for our origins. Every week it seems, I see a new headline in the newspaper, “Bones May Be Human’s Earl-iest Walking Ancestor” or “Researchers Say Hobbit-like Humans Had Complex Brain.” In these articles, these ape-like fossils have the characteristics of humans who walked upright (unlike apes) and had larger brains than apes. In some cases, stone tools were found with the bones. I don’t see anything in the Genesis account that correlates with these fossils. Yet I understand that not everything that has happened in history is recorded in the Scriptures. Ultimately, most of our questions will remain unanswered, at least until we are caught up in the air, in the twinkling of an eye. The same God who is able to save us, to raise His Son from the grave, who created the heavens and the earth, will answer all our questions, if they even matter to us then. The origin of species really comes down to faith. If you believe the Bible, you know that the One behind Intelligent Design is our Creator. Genesis 1:1 reveals the origin of species, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”