Worst Case Scenario

by S. Daniel Smith

It’s in the very back of my mind almost every time I crack open a book on science or read a peer-reviewed journal article. Reading many biblical peer-reviewed journals compounds the issue as well. Some are traditional and evangelically minded, but many are not.

It’s the issue of whether or not Christianity is sustainable as a non-truth. If it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans came from a lower life form and not the direct hand of God, what happens next? Does it spell the end to Christianity? Of religion in general? Will it lead to the loss of faith altogether? Will it remove all barriers to immorality on the earth?

These are very important questions to those of faith, but many fundamentalists are afraid to ask those questions. Well, we can’t be afraid, so we ask the question.

First of all, most scientists already believe that they’ve proven humanity’s evolution beyond a shadow of a doubt. While everyone acknowledges that gaps in the record exist, no one thinks they won’t someday prove how it all happened…through evolution.

Second, AiG, ICR, and other groups continue to think that science does not prove evolution correct. At best, it is a flawed attempt by unbelievers to avoid giving God credit for creation. For some groups, such as the ones mentioned here, any thought other than the traditional six thousand year creation story is heresy, whether it’s OEC, gap theory, or evolution.

Third, it would be very difficult to prove beyond all doubt that evolution is a fact vice a series of hypotheses. What will they find? Another humanoid jawbone? Or a mammal that dragged its useless hind feet on land, but found its home in the water? These things, while possible, are not very probable, and again, it wouldn’t really matter if paleontologists found these items. It wouldn’t change the minds of most fundamentalists.

Maybe this post asks the wrong question. Maybe it has nothing to do with the church in general, and everything to do with the individual Christian that is contained in my skin and bones and the faith in my spirit.

To that end, I have to decide what the scientific evidence means to me. As I continue going through the data, a project that will take me a very, very long time, I continue to be shown evidence that the earth is really old, that dinosaurs lived a really long time ago, and that light from the stars had to start coming toward us an extremely long time ago. Yet the research also shows that science cannot explain how everything really came to be. We have, arguably, millions or billions of years to play with, but no idea where the basic building blocks came from. Oh, there is an answer to that, but it was a dying universe that passed away before the one we have now. That’s not a very good answer, in my unlearned opinion, because it gets circular at some point. It’s as untestable as Genesis One.

And I’ve already shown, in previous research, that genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis are un-provable as microevolutionary events because evolutionary biologists are unable to show exactly when the diseases came about. Unfortunately, this is also true of the Bible’s lack of evidence.

What it means right now is that the earth is older than most fundamentalists want to accept, but not that evolution is a proven fact.

Of course, this is a continuing topic and will be followed up upon in future posts. Click HERE to subscribe to updates.