March 2007

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I've always secretly identified with the apostle Thomas. Upon hearing eyewitness accounts of the Lord's resurrection, Thomas stubbornly said, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe." Doubting Thomas could have been a journalist.

When I became a Christian, I began looking for real-world evidence to bolster my faith in Christ—whether that evidence came in the form of threads snipped from the Shroud of Turin or splinters supposedly from Noah's Ark. I rebelled at the sneering claims of atheistic evolutionists such as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, who assert (with complete faith) that a proper understanding of physical law leaves no room for "the God hypothesis." Every science course I ever took assumed that we evolved from "primordial soup" in a random, purposeless process. No God required.

What I read in Genesis didn't seem to square with mainstream scientific theory, so I decided the theory was wrong. After all, "objective" scientists with naturalistic agendas had fallen for hoaxes before (just google "Piltdown Man"), and what little fossil evidence there was seemed skimpy. I wasn't alone in my skepticism. According to Gallup, approximately half of Americans express serious doubts about evolution.

Last year, however, came word of Tiktaalik roseae, which looks discomfitingly like those offensive "Darwin fishes" on the cars of smug college professors. Giddy evolutionists immediately hailed the 375-million-year-old fossil as a "missing link" between fish and land animals. "It's a really amazing, remarkable intermediate fossil," scientist Neil H. Shubin told The New York Times. "It's like, holy cow."

So what's a Doubting ...