Creationism and Evolution

I am inspired by a post over at the Neanderpundit to expound a little on the Creation vs. Evolution debate. I tried to post a comment there, but something in my comments triggered a ban. I will therefore take this opportunity to pontificate on my own site!

I spent a great deal of my teen and young adulthood as an agnostic at best, an atheist in many ways. I was raised a Methodist, I had the benefits of Church and Sunday school just about every week until I was 11 or 12. Some of the lessons remain in my mind, most have not. I studied the Bible in college through a couple of religion courses. Here the Bible was broken down,the history of the passages, the inter-relationships of the Books were examined. I found it interesting, and entertaining, but I did not believe. I was never ready to completely renounce God, but I came pretty close, certainly I was a blasphemer. I will be presented with the consequences in the hereafter. The funny thing, it is through the "educated study" of the Bible that I became a believer again. I still am not a Bible thumping, go to Church twice a week, Born Again Apostolic. I do not go to Church. I do pray to God several times a day. HE always answers my prayers, sometimes I just do not hear or like the answer.

If you have read much here you will know I view myself as an amateur historian. I cannot in good conscious intellectually or emotionally accept the earth is a few thousand years old. I accept the fossil record, Homer and Herodotus may have stretched the truth, but man's life on this planet is detailed in many ways.

I believe the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I accept the ice ages. Continental drift and volcanoes and sedimentary rock and fossils all present me with incontrovertible truth to evolution.

Do I think we understand it fully? Not a chance. Most people cannot even get Darwin straight. He never claimed man descended from apes. Read his very boring work.

You see, for me the fact that there IS evolution is all the evidence I need to prove there is a God. Only an omnific God could have created the amazing mechanisms that are life. The incredible sequences involved in cell replication and the codes found in DNA and RNA and the amino acids that make up life are so complicated and amazing, I cannot accept that it is all random chance! I cannot accept that the entire interlocking aspect of all life on this planet is random gene splicing. God put the entire process into motion. Some animals had roles to fill, some did not survive, some evolved faster and adapted better. This is a genius plan. Only a GOD could have done it. Look at the human circulatory system, I cannot believe this is just random cells forming over time.

Do I believe man has evolved? Yes. We continue the process even today. Indiana kept very precise records of the men who enlisted in the Civil War. We know that the average height was 5'4". The average height of a human is now around 5'9". We are bigger, stronger, and faster as a species than ever before (steroids not withstanding). Sports records are doomed to fail. Look at the intellectual accomplishments of the last 100 years. Tell me man is not smarter than ever before. He spent eons trying to fly, and now he is exploring the space of the universe.

By coincidence I watched part of a program on PBS last night that discussed these very issues -- life how it formed, is there life on other planets, etc. We do not know the answers. Even the brightest scientists, those who worship knowledge, not God, cannot answer how a collection of carbon atoms and molecular structures went from inanimate elements to LIFE.

In the beginning there was just the unformed clay and the wind and the water. And God said "let there be light". Life was formed and the evolutionary rollercoaster that is Earth started down the track. Why can't both sides be right?