Should You Change Your Mind about Evolution?
I’ve changed my mind about evolution. Believing in evolution determines your worldview, which impacts your understanding and colors everything you think. My thoughts have changed about many things over the years as I learned and grew in understanding, but evolution was the most significant because it was so foundational to everything I believed.
Despite going to church and learning the Bible stories, I grew up believing in evolution because it was taught as fact in school. I remember seeing a picture of hairy cavemen around a fire in an article about evolution in a pictorial magazine when I was about 6 years old. I remember it talking about the survival of the fittest. That made a big impression on me.
I grew up believing in evolution because it was taught as fact in school.
I always loved science because I wanted to understand how everything works. So, I took as many math and science classes as I could and worked to understand what science was teaching about the world. This continued in college where I majored in Biochemistry because it included math, physics, chemistry, and biology. I added in courses in astronomy, geology, and quantum mechanics to round out my scientific understanding. These subjects all taught evolution as fact.
While I believed in evolution, I knew there were problems with the theory. It contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Things run down, wear out, and get worse; not better. Science cannot explain where mass and energy came from using known scientific principles. Despite this, “everyone” seemed to believe in evolution. Still, I had doubts.
I knew there were problems with the theory.
I had not forgotten about God and the Bible. I had read Genesis. I knew about creation, the fall, and the flood. But the liberal churches I attended didn’t teach Biblical creation or argue against evolution. I had not heard the gospel and didn’t know about being saved from sin through faith in Christ. So, I was an agnostic, unsure about the existence of God.
While in college, I also took a course called “the Philosophy of Biology.” Half the semester was spent teaching that evolution did not meet the requirements for being considered science. We studied the work of Karl Popper regarding the difference between science and pseudoscience. For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be capable of being tested in ways that could potentially demonstrate it as false. Evolution fails the falsifiability test and is therefore pseudoscience rather than genuine science.
I was an agnostic, unsure about the existence of God
But I justified believing in evolution by saying, “If God created the world, then where did God come from?” This showed my lack of understanding about God’s eternality and being the un-caused first-cause of everything else. A better question is “If there is no God, how could anything come from nothing?”
By my junior year in college, everything I had believed in had failed me. I searched for the meaning of life. I learned a lot about life and the circular nature of things. But the only meaning to life that evolution offers is to survive and reproduce, which gave me no comfort.
If there is no God, how could anything come from nothing?
One night, after trying to drown my thoughts, I fell to my knees and prayed to the God I had read about in the Bible and heard about in Church. I wasn’t sure He existed, but I said, “God, if you’re real, I want to serve you.”
I received no immediate revelation. My life didn’t change, but I knew I needed to get my act together and do the best I could. I finished college and joined the Navy to become a pilot. And about 2 years after that prayer, I walked away from a plane crash.
I knew the dangers of military flight training and had made my peace with death. I had assumed that physical death was the end of our existence, so the only thing to fear was the process of dying; not death itself. And I figured a plane crash would provide a quick, easy death.
But on the evening of April 8th, 1980, my agreement with death was annulled (Isaiah 28:15). Suddenly the plane rolled over and I saw trees spinning before me. I knew we were about to crash, which meant I was about to die. At that moment I didn’t feel ready to die; my only thought was, “Oh God!”
My agreement with death was annulled
God was merciful that night. He spared both my life and the life of my flight instructor. People told me how lucky I was, but I questioned that. If I was so lucky, why was I in a plane crash at all?
When I resumed flying, the thrill was gone. My military obligation was another 6-years if I continued flying, but only 3-years if I quit the flight program. When I dropped out of flight training, they transferred me to another base where my roommate just happened to be a new, born-again Christian who attended a fundamental, Bible-believing Baptist church.
God was merciful that night
This led to my hearing and understanding the gospel for the first time. I had never understood why God became a man or what Christ’s death did for me. I learned that Jesus was God in the flesh and lived a perfect life without sin. His death on the cross paid the death penalty I deserved for my sin. I trusted Christ as my savior, started attending my roommate’s church, and started reading the Bible every day.
As I read the book of Genesis, I had to deal with the conflict between evolution and the Biblical teaching of creation by God. I knew they couldn’t both be true, and since God’s Word is truth, then evolution must be false.
Since God’s Word is truth, then evolution must be false
I researched the topic and studied materials from creationist ministries that demonstrated that evolution is not science, and that creation and a global flood explain what we see in the geological record better than evolution.
So, I changed my mind about the origin of the universe, life, and time. I stopped believing evolution and instead believe that an eternal, almighty, self-existent God created everything just as the Bible says.
I changed my mind about evolution in 1981. Since then, real science has revealed much about fossils and the complexity of life that demonstrate the need for an all-powerful, all-knowing designer / creator. The more we know, the more preposterous the theory of evolution becomes. As the apostle Paul said:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” (Romans 1:18-23 / KJV)
Charles Darwin knew nothing about genetics. DNA was only discovered in the 1950s. In the 1980s, “scientists” still thought that our genome was filled with “junk DNA,” which could mutate into useful code leading to increased functionality. Today we know that there is no “junk,” and mutations destroy functionality in useful DNA. Not only is there no “junk,” but our DNA code is loaded with regulatory information that codes for how our cells function, and some sections of our DNA code for multiple functions depending on which direction they are read.
An eternal, almighty, self-existent God created everything just as the Bible says
Even the simplest life form would require a means to incorporate nutrients from its environment, a means to remain separate from that environment, the ability to use energy, the ability to reproduce, a genetic code to provide the instructions for all this, the ability to read that code and use it to make proteins and regulatory RNA, etc., and all the cellular machinery needed to do all that work. And it would all have to be complete, all working together at the same time. There is no way that could happen by chance.
Our cells are filled with fantastic nano-bots that perform microscopic tasks in our cells. Many features of life have multiple parts that must all work together or they do not work at all. This irreducible complexity could not evolve one part at a time. Truly we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
The list of arguments against evolution is getting longer and stronger the more genuine science discovers.
Atheists have no plausible explanation for the origin of life. They also have no plausible explanation for the origin of the universe from nothing. A “big-bang” explosion of everything from nothing, originating from a single point would create radial expansion outward, but would not generate any angular momentum, yet everything is spinning. Big-bang theorists invoke “inflation” (matter expanding faster than the speed of light) and “dark matter” (which has never been observed) to support their theory, but these add-ons are not supported by scientific observation.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the entropy (disorder) of the universe is always increasing. This means that the universe would have to have been in its most organized state immediately following the “big-bang” and has been running down ever since, but explosions create disorder, not order.
The only rational belief is faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who created everything
The list of arguments against evolution is getting longer and stronger the more genuine science discovers. The exquisite design of life and the universe requires an intelligent designer and all-powerful creator. When it comes to origins, the only rational belief is faith in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who created everything as described in the Bible.
I changed my mind about evolution. How about you? What do you believe? Do you believe in Biblical Creation, or are you still brainwashed by the lies of evolution?
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