Sudden Evolution and Petrified Trees (Stange Facts and Earth's Age Part 2)

Since I was in grade school, I have been instructed in a picture of life on this planet that started with simple life and moved on to the amazing diversity of life today. I remember watching a school film some years ago that followed this pattern. We were told, "Life started with only a few molecules, shocked into life in a fertile soup of millions of years ago (don't mind the rhetoric), which painstakingly preserved untold positive additions to the DNA blueprint over aeons that ultimately resulted in everything from jellyfish to man. Wow! What a story. Not only that, but some of each step in the "tree of life" have been buried and preserved in rocks corresponding to their age.

Not only this, but many people have seen something like the following geological scheme:



Tables like these list ages of the earth, based on organisms found in each layer of the earth, and draw conclusions about the age of rock layers based on them, as well as using radiometric dating to determine rock ages (the last being the subject of a future post). These have been powerful arguments to my mind, in favor of an old earth.

However, I later found out these tables are far from the whole picture. Often, older life is found on top of younger life (though scientists reject these as exceptions as the result of upheaval of old rocks).

So illustrated (with higher numbers equal to younger life the traditional picture of rock layers and life looks like this:

10
9
8
etc.

....while the newer pictures look like this

10
9
8
etc.

or

10
6
8

or

7
10
6


Not only the disorder, but sometimes, layers are missing completely, and in hardly any place does anything resembling what should be a sequence from 10 down to 1 occur neatly.These days, the old story of orderly deposition of old life to new is not what science is finding.

Also, and against the steady re-telling of the old story, there has emerged a large scientific consensus that life has been an explosive affair--not only involving those first Frankenstein bacteria. The following link leads to an article detailing at least one of these explosions:

http://www.thedesignoflife.net/blog/The-Avalon-explosion-The-dawn-of-life-reveals-another-intricate-puzzle/View/Default.aspx

So Darwin, though worshiped by Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins as the fountain of all knowledge on biological life has undergone some revision. The new scheme shows multiple bursts of complex life appearing in earth's history, and amazingly, disappearing in many cases just as suddenly.

So the timetable of life is fraught with conflict in the scientific community. Now we ask, what does all this have to do with the age of the earth?

Well, a great mystery, in addition to that just mentioned, is the phenomenon of petrified trees. These trees were buried and replaced by minerals over time, but here's the kicker--they where buried standing up! They go through multiple rock layers and multiple ages of rock.



Scientists say they might have been completely buried, the surrounding rock worn away, and then reburied, layer by layer, but this seems to beg the question a bit. Why should that be the case? Could it be, that layers don't equal times in earth's history? And if so...how do we know how old everything is with certainty?

T-Rex flesh? (Strange facts and Earth's Age part 1)

I have long loved dinosaurs (I wanted to be a palientologist growing up), and also have had many questions about how the dinos related to my inherited Christian beliefs derived from the Bible (a possibly young earth, the Flood, etc). As a child, I often heard my father say: "A thousand years is like a day to the LORD" (a la 2 Peter 3:8) and "I don't believe we came from monkeys." All I knew for the longest time (from 5 or so to 21) was that I could come to no conclusion on this matter, having no desire to read the literature related to earth-age debate from theologians and apologists, or the scientific community.

After coming to know Christ...my desire to answer some of those old questions returned. Since then, I have read scientists like Stephen J. Gould, young-earth creationists like Henry Morris, IE theorists like William Dembski, and others in search of more information on what the Bible says about the age of the earth and what science says about its age. I have surveyed the strengths of both sets of arguments (the secular and the biblical) and also their weaknesses. What is strange is that both sides can be convincing enough to make you declare at times: "I can see truth here." However, this post is not about my conclusions on the earth's age, it is simply a demonstration of this conflict of ideas as I have encountered them.



First, there was the trip to Ripley's Aquarium at Myrtle Beach in 2003 (I realize the picture is the one in Gatlinburg, which I went to this year). That year on my honeymoon in June, walking through that fascinating display of fish, I encountered the following info on the Nurse Shark:

"Nurse Sharks carry their young and bare them live. While in the womb, the faster developing of the two babies will eventually devour the other en utero."

Horrifying? Yeah, a tad. What immediately shot through my mind was: "Life is a struggle...evolution is a struggle of selection (fittest surviving)...these sharks are already struggling in the womb...the fittest is surviving! Yikes! That's strong evidence for evolution."

I left the aquarium pondering whether evolution might be true after all from that little sign by the shark tank.

Second, there was the day I read on a science website (National Geographic no less) that palientologists had recovered (get this) intact dino flesh...and not just any dino--T REX! They found soft-tissue remains. You can read the article here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html

The day I read this, the pendulum took a hard swing toward the no-evolution, younger earth perspective. Soft tissue from an animal not thousands, but many millions of years old? Seems a little suspect. In fact, in that article, the scientist states:

"Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation]," Schweitzer said."

I am no scientist, but it don't take a genius to say it is utterly strange that meat didn't decay after 40 million years...hmmm...what could this mean? Possibly that dinos aren't as old as we thought?

Do you see the power of the examples? Course there are other examples of this play of ideas in my mind, but I won't go there, seeing this blog is getting too long already. My point would be that there is still so much we don't know scientifically, and that what side in this debate we are inclined to can be overturned quickly by a T-Rex burger or a ravenous baby shark...unless we just believe that "day" equals one solar day in Genesis.

Review of "The Myth of a Christian Nation" by Greg Boyd

Recently on vacation, I picked up Greg Boyd's "The Myth of a Christian Nation." This title sparked my interest, because I, as a evangelical Christian, have often struggled with the relationship between church and state in America.

I have become firmly convinced from historical records that the founding fathers approved of the Christian faith in many ways, though many of them where more deistic than theistic. America also started as a Christian nation in the sense that most of her people have claimed some form of Christianity. Additionally, two major Christian revivals deeply influenced national thought for the more than hundred years as America grew from colony to one of the most powerful nations on earth.

The question Boyd asks of all this is "What is the difference between the nationally recognized form of Christianity throughout American history and Jesus' kingdom--the kingdom of God?" Here Boyd drives a stake between widespread national faith and the faith of Christ. He basically says there is no relationship...zero...and bases his claim on the fact that the kingdoms of this world, whether America or any other have advanced by coercive, self-interested power, whereas the kingdom of God in Christ advances by other-interested, sacrificial love. He says:

"Following the example of Christ, and in stark contrast to the modus operandi of the world, we are to do "nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than ourselves." (pp. 31)

This is his key point, and it is forceful. He uses various evidence from American history to make this point stick, from the Indian Wars to slavery, in order to show that America is much different than the kingdom of God and is really just another kingdom of the world.

I nodded along as I read much of his argument on these points, probably for a couple of reasons. First, during college, it is just these negative points of American history that many of my professors used as arguments against evangelicalism. For some reason, they couldn't help but lump Christ together with the national history of people who have not followed all of His teachings (of course their arguments included the Crusades and Europe's bloody, post-Reformation religious wars, as well, among others). The second reason, I nodded along was because of his many quotations of Christ's teachings on how His followers are to regard others. Jesus did tell us to do good to our enemies rather than forcing them to our position or attacking them. Boyd's practical application of these ideas is that we are not called to force America to abide by Judeo-Christian morality, and consequently, certain moral issues should not be so important to evangelicals as they are (gay marriage, war, or patriotism for instance). As all these arguments stirred my mind, I couldn't help but remember watching Gary Cooper in "Sgt. York," a film where "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" includes military service and killing other human beings (which is antithetical to the statement "do good to them that hate you").

However, I did find some difficulty with Boyd's argument.

First, my biggest question was "Are Christians not to work for a society more in accord with God's moral law, particularly in regard to God's commands for human behavior, if it is within our power?" If we where to go to hell, we would see there many people from Sodom and Gomorrah. Is it not possible that some of these would regret that their society's wickedness was not controlled somehow, allowing them a greater chance to repent back then, instead of the sudden destruction that overtook them? Certain persons might say, those folks would not have repented, so they don't care and they hate God even now, but I think the picture of the rich man in hell in the story Jesus told of he and Lazarus speaks otherwise. I believe that being salt is being a witness to God's Law, His justice, and His wrath, as well as showing Calvary-quality love. To Boyd, what society does does not matter to Christians, so pacificism and love are the only witnesses available to Christians. This is a difficult point to take at face value and needs more complexity from Boyd to be convincing.

Second, beyond the control of the standard of society's laws, there is the doctrine of repentance within the Gospel appeal. This is a deeper issue than influencing legislation, and goes to the heart of what the Gospel is. Predictably, Boyd denies any preaching of judgment to unbelievers. Boyd says, "...when we assume the role of moral guardians of the culture, we invariably position ourselves as judges over others. Not only is there no precedent for this in the life of Jesus, but Scripture explicitly and repeatedly forbids us to judge others....Jesus contrasts love and judgment as antithetical activities...Our fundamental job is to love like God loves, not to pretend we know what only God knows." (pp. 132-133). Boyd goes on to say that we are to preach none of this "judgment" to unbelievers and this is why evangelicals are hated. Excuse me? When is calling something God calls sin wrong? When is preaching against such sin wrong? When is seeking to limit such sin in the lives of others wrong? When is it wrong to call on the consciences of people to do what God commands--no matter how close they are to Christianity? None of these things is wrong, yet Boyd denounces them all. He urges that we build relationships and present the love of Christ only. And it is that "only" that completely overlooks Jesus', the New Testament writers, and the Old Testament writers position on the sin of man and the necessity of repentance. Jonah even preached repentance to Ninevah in the Old Testament for crying out loud. Boyd may want to love people as God loves, but God is in the business of calling all people to repentance (Acts 17).

These two problems were the most prominent to me in this book. I have not provided exhaustive answers to them, but only enough to show that the issues are far more complicated than Boyd would have them. A book may arise that will give Christians a correct sense of their social role in regard to America's civil Christian mores--what to do, and what not...but this book is not it. Though there is something to be said for reading this book, for I wrestled with its implications.