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Several pejoratives are popular these days. "Liberal," for instance, means by definition to be tolerant or generous. But in Christian theology, it usually depreciates a person's belief in biblical authority or lack thereof. "Secular" means to be connected with the world. Given that God called his creation "very good" (Genesis 1:31), this shouldn't be a bad thing. But it is. And "evolutionist," from a word meaning to develop, has itself evolved to the top (or bottom) of things not to be. Why is this? Why does the subject matter?
Evolutionary problems
Charles Darwin's evolutionary principles are really very simple: creatures procreate more offspring than can survive; this offspring possesses enormous variety; there is a struggle for existence due to overpopulation; because of their variety, some of the offspring are more fit for survival than others; these capacities for survival become naturally selected and inherited.
As an example, a hundred years ago there were small-winged moths and large-winged moths in England. The small-winged moths couldn't fly above the pollution generated by the factories of the day, so they died out. The large-winged moths could, and survived. Today there are only large-winged moths in England. Here we find "microevolution" at work—adaptation within a biological set, genus, or species. People are taller and less hairy than they used to be. Horses are larger; most dogs are smaller. Nothing in the Bible teaches that God didn't make the world so that it would adapt to its changing environment.
The difficulty arises when Darwin's principles are applied across biblical categories—from apes to people, fish to birds, and so on. This is called "macroevolution." And it leads to problems, both with the evidence and with Scripture.
The fossil record contains no so-called "missing links" from one biblical category to another. The old Neanderthal Man, Piltdown Man, and so on are no longer representative of the best theories. Darwin said the fossil record would demonstrate increasingly simple organisms as we move backward in time, but it does not. Paleontological evidence shows us adaptation within biblical categories, but not across them. Advocates for macroevolution now posit "spontaneous mutatory jumps" across the biblical categories, but without empirical evidence for their assumptions. Such a theory is of course contrary to the clear record of Genesis. The biblical accounts of creation are not written as myths or legends or symbols, but as straight-forward narrative.
It is clear that both macroevolution and biblical creationism are built on faith principles. I believe that both God's revelation and the best empirical evidence confirm the fact that God created life as Genesis says he did. He made birds, and fish, and us.
You didn't happen to be
So know this: you are here on purpose. You are not an accident, or the coincidence of random chaos. God made you, intentionally, for a reason.
You are the greatest miracle you know. Your body consists of 206 bones, wrapped with 650 muscles and seven miles of nerve fibers. Your eyes possess 100 million receptors, and your ears 24,000 fibers. Your heart beats 36,000,000 times every year and sends blood pumping through more than 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and tubing.
Your brain contains 13,000,000,000 nerve cells. Picture the possible number of interconnections in your brain this way: the number of atoms in the universe is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The number of different patterns possible in your brain is 1 followed by over 800 zeros. And your unconscious brain database, that which your unconscious brain knows and stores, outweighs your conscious brain on an order exceeding 10 million to one. You literally cannot imagine how remarkable you are.
Now glance at the matter and energy God has made. Imagine a wall with hundreds of dials. Each must be at exactly the right setting for carbon-based life to emerge in a suburb of the Milky Way. If the cosmic expansion of the universe had first been a fraction less, it would have imploded billions of years ago; a fraction more intense, and galaxies could not have formed. The odds of our universe's existence and design occurring by random chance would not be accepted by any gambler, anywhere on earth.
Picture a comet. Its vapor trail can be more than 10,000 miles long. But capture and bottle that "tail," and you discover that the amount of vapor actually present in your bottle is less than one cubic inch of space. Imagine traveling across the sky at the speed of light. You would fly for 4.5 billion years to reach the edges of the universe we can see through telescopes today. Yet the Bible says that God measures all of that with the palm of his hand (Isaiah 40:12). The creation reveals a remarkable Creator.
Conclusion
President Theodore Roosevelt and his good friend, the naturalist William Beebe, would on occasion stay at Roosevelt's family home. They would go out on its lawn at night. They would search the skies until they found the faint spot of light behind the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus. Then they would remember together the words:
That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It consists of one hundred billion suns,
Each larger than our sun.
Then President Roosevelt would grin at Mr. Beebe and say, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed." Are we small enough to go to God?
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