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.
No comments:
Post a Comment