The Repentance of a Young-Earth Creationist

“ ‘Neanderthal Man’ was simply a human who walked bent over because he had arthritis. …

There are few, if any, reliable clocks that give the age of the earth to be much older than 10,000 years. …

It is estimated that NASA spent almost $1 billion to figure out how to keep the lunar lander from sinking into the vast amounts of moon dust falsely predicted if the moon were a billion years old.”

I made these claims as a university sophomore in my very first opinion column in the Kansas State Collegian, published on Friday, August 27, 1999.

I was wrong.

I knew at least some of these claims to be false by the spring of 2000; others, I learned of only more recently. How I came to this realization – and, to a lesser extent, why it has taken me so long to speak out – is the subject of this post. The shortest possible summary is found in Proverbs 18:17, “The first to present his case seems right, until another comes forward and questions him.”

At the time that I wrote my column, I was familiar with 3 views of origins: naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution, and young-earth creationism. I easily rejected the first because it utterly excluded God from the creation process and because I could not see how Darwinian mechanims could produce life in all its diversity. Theistic evolution seemed to me like a half-baked idea, merely naturalistic evolution with a veneer of God painted over it, resulting in a poorly-formulated theory that failed to fit either Darwin or Genesis. Although I have since encountered much better formulations of it, the sense of my original objections remains. The young-earth creationist (YEC) viewpoint was trumpeted by every Christian organization I was familiar with, it was the only one I encountered in our local Christian bookstore, it seemed to be very faithful to the Bible, and the science sounded convincing enough.

But when I publicly jumped into the fray over the 1999 Kansas Science Standards – which eliminated Darwinism, the "Big Bang" Theory, and the age of the earth from the curriculum – I quickly became aware of some glaring deficiencies in my view. Though I still had much to learn, I could generally hold my own when it came to biology – if nothing else, I could pick apart most arguments and show that there was, at best, reasonable doubt for claims that natural selection plus random mutation could generate completely new types of organisms. But I knew virtually nothing of astronomy, geology, or anthropology. In exchanges with professors at both Kansas State University and the University of Kansas over these subjects, I quickly proved myself to be an irritating ignoramus. And this began to torment me.

I had taken a public stand on something I could not fully defend. I was way out of my depth. And try as I might, I could not get around the fact that we could see stars that were hundreds of millions of light years away – meaning the universe had to be at least that old for their light to reach us. Psalm 19:1 exuberantly proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God!” When I looked up at the night sky in Kansas, dotted with hundreds of stars, I couldn’t rejoice – I just felt bewildered.

The following semester, two things happened which would define my view of origins for the rest of my life. The first was that I completed BIOL 198, Principles of Biology and was utterly unimpressed with the arguments used to sell Darwinism to us. Most proved nothing more than micro-evolution (variations within a species, possibly producing a new but highly-related species with no new features); others were illustrations completely unrelated to actual processes in nature, in which the deck was stacked artificially to make it appear as if Darwinism “worked.” The creation-evolution debate had nearly erupted into an all-out war, and these were the best evidences they had? From that point on, I never took Darwinism seriously as a theory of origins.

The second was that I picked up a book at the local Christian bookstore, which in less than 200 pages refuted everything I had ever read about the age of the Earth and the correct interpretation of Genesis 1. That book was Creation and Time, by Dr. Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist, a Christian, and the founder of Reasons To Believe. It was the first time I had ever heard a fair presentation of the old-earth creationist viewpoint. I had never even considered it before. I didn’t want Hugh Ross to be right, not for any noble reason but simply because I didn’t want to wrong. But as I went back and forth between all the YEC resources I could find, and Dr. Ross’ little book, I found myself unable to resist his clear arguments and evidence from both nature and Scripture. The YECs all boasted about their fidelity to Scripture, but Dr. Ross was the first person I had ever encountered who actually took Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 literally. His entire exposition of the text made more sense than anything I had ever read in YEC material, and it fit better with the rest of the Bible as well. And his scientific explanations not only showed the bankruptcy of the YEC arguments – some of which bordered on dishonesty – they also allowed me to rejoice in the discoveries which were being made about God’s world, instead of constantly fearing them. Nevertheless, I initially embraced the the old-earth view as “the most dejected convert” (as C.S. Lewis describes his conversion from atheism to theism).

But I said nothing publicly. Having been wrong once, I was afraid of speaking too soon. I was at least 99% sure I had been wrong, but what if I really hadn’t been? And although I had twice apologized for erroneous statements in opinion columns, writing an entire column repudiating my former view seemed like too bitter a pill to swallow, not to mention that I didn’t know how to fill my allotted space with it. So I said nothing, gave up my platform at the end of the school year, and returned to normal life as a student and aspiring engineer.

The summer between my undergraduate and graduate educations, Answers In Genesis conducted a Vacation Bible School at my home church. I’m not sure how much the children learned about Jesus, but for an entire week they heard young-earth theories about dinosaurs and were taught that science couldn’t be trusted. The final night, the leader spoke to all the adults for a few hours, trying to convince us of the worthlessness of science and our obligation to believe in a young earth; at one point, he actually told us that if we rejected his views, we were denying that Jesus died for our sins! It was a proposterous twisting of God’s Word. I was offended and disgusted, but I lacked the courage to challenge him to his face.

Over the years, I kept studying and learning. I took the few opportunities I had to educate others, sent an email of apology to two Christian professors at K-State towards whom I had been disrespectful, and in graduate school co-founded a group to study the interface of science and Christianity. But I always regretted not publicly repenting for my error. Although I had “acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17), my confidence was actually arrogance, and in so doing I had brought disrepute to the name of Jesus.

Today, I know that:

• the “Big Bang” Theory is in fact a compelling confirmation of the Bible that has brought many physicists to faith
• both the Earth and the Universe can be accurately measured as billions of years old
• NASA was never very concerned about moon dust (as the YEC group Answers In Genesis now admits)
• the speed of light has not changed but is in fact one of the key fundamental constants which must be finely-tuned in order for life to exist,
• Neanderthals are competely unrelated to human beings
• the Flood was quite likely a local (i.e. Middle-Eastern) event
• the death of animals has nothing to do with human sin
• the seventh day – the day of God’s rest – is still on-going today.

I now know that Christians have nothing to fear from scientific discoveries or inquisitive Biblical study. I praise God for His grace in gently leading me to the truth, and it is my prayer that others would follow in this pursuit. At the very least, all Christians ought to keep an open mind and a humble posture until they have listened to both sides of the debate, before rejecting out-of-hand the view held by nearly all Christians who actually do science for a living. As Proverbs 18:13 states, “He who answers before listening – that is his folly and shame.”