What Could Persuade You that
evolution were not true?
If archaeologists found a rabbit in the Cambrian layers of soil then evolution would be disproven…right?
Well, as it turns out, proverbial
rabbits are found all of the time in layers much “too old” for them. The problem is that people do not change their view based on conflicting evidence…they evolve their interpretation of the evidence to fit their view.
In an article entitled
Radiometric Backflip, Volume 37, Issue 1,
Creation Magazine describes just such an example. Here’s an example where the “science” (based on
absolute radio metric dating)
proved suggested that the rock layers of the Santo Domingo rock formation were 200 million years old (Nature 417 (6892):936-938, 27 June 2002). But when footprints of sandpipers were found in layers of soil underneath the 200 million year old layers, scientists were able to
scrub away 175 million years to
make the data fit with the idea that sandpipers evolved about 37 million years ago. It must have taken quite a bit of soap to scrub away 175 million years that fast.
And this is not an isolated case. A hominid fossil,
KNM-ER 1470 was found beneath soil that had originally been
absolutely dated at over 200 million years old. Once the fossil was found, Richard Leakey requested a re-test. Not surprisingly, the
NEW absolute dates of between 2-5 million years fit perfectly in the range that was needed to perpetuate the evolutionary myth. What happened to the original 200 million years? They were donated to a local charity for all we know.
So no amount of evidence will change someone’s mind regarding origins. This is why it is so important for Christians to be familiar with
presuppositional apologetics. Everyone has presuppositions that define how we interpret evidence. So, the argument is not over evidence; the argument is over which presuppositions can correctly account for the preconditions of intelligibility.
Only Christianity can account for intelligibility
Christians presuppose that there is a Creator God and that he revealed himself through the Bible, through creation, and in Jesus. Those who presuppose that there is no God are reliant on billions of years and a creative mechanism (evolution by natural selection and random mutation) to explain the origin and development of life.
We can trust God’s Word about history, and since it is a reliable history book (and the revealed Word of God), we know that we can trust God at his word regarding salvation and our future hope (Romans 8.)