The Faith of the Evolutionist

A friend of mine sent me this quote. It's from John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas' book, The Monkey Puzzle and it pretty much says it all.

"...it is an uncanny fact-amply documented-that fossil hunters have had a happy knack of finding exactly what they were looking for."

I spent much of last week in a couple of internet debates over the creation/evolution debate. The evolutionist kept talking about how that theory had been proven over and over again. He discounted the Biblical version of creation as not only unproveable, but wrong. My friend proved him wrong repeatedly, but the faith of the evolutionist in the truthfulness of evolution remained unshaken visibly.

Now if you've done any kind of study on some of these archeological "missing links" that have been found over the years, you come across serious problems. A couple were proven to be frauds. Others were proven to be mistakes. I came across this news story :msnbc.msn.com/id/6843721 about a new find claiming to be confirmation of hominids walking on 2 feet about 4.5 million years ago. Then when you read the whole article you realize that the anthropologists found "The teeth, jaw, and part of a toe and finger bones." That was all. Not complete skeletons, but a couple of bones. From those bones, they invented the rest of the story. Now that takes some imagination!

It's funny that my debate opponent didn't want to talk about the imagination of these scientists. Perhaps it's because he's put so much faith in scientists just like that. I told him that I don't have that much faith! As the quote says, fossil-hunters find exactly what they are looking for. It's easy to see red while wearing rose-colored glasses.

I think that's a real danger for everyone though. Christians often come at facts with our own set of biases. I ran across a web site yesterday where the author was claiming that the European Union coming together was the fulfillment of end-times prophecy. Now that is possible. It is also just as possible that the author was seeing what he wanted to see. Essentially he was finding exactly what he was looking for in the same way as the fossil-hunter. Just as it is important for the scientist to investigate with an open mind, so too Christians must do the same thing. I like to encourage people who grew up as Christians to investigate the claims of Christ for themselves. See how true they are. See how amazing the things that Jesus said actually are. We shouldn't be Christians just because that's all we've ever known. The evidence stands up on its own.

I don't want to put my faith in interpreting newspaper headline. I don't want to put my faith in people who tell me their own invented ideas about how things were or how they will be. I don't want to put my ultimate faith in anything on this earth. Faith is only as good as the object of your faith. I'm grateful that the One I put my faith in is worthy of that faith.