Bones, Fossilized and Otherwise

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding, who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest?" (Job 38:5).

One day some friends and I were sitting around chatting and eventually the conversation took a serious turn. We each shared what we thought was the most harmful idea in the world. When I made my contribution, my friends voiced a bit of concern for my sanity. I made no bones, fossilized or not, about my views on evolution. Many years ago I read a book on evolution, and one of the chapters was devoted to the cell and its myriad complexities and organization. It was amazing!

Of course they wanted to know why I felt that evolution has had such a deleterious effect on humankind. I told them this particular chapter on the cell had absolutely convinced me that we have a Creator Who is the Author of our being. The very complexity of all cells tells me that an intelligent Designer had to pull together everything at the same time to give us the basic unit of life.

As for the effects of not believing that there is a Supreme Being, if we believe that we evolved from slime, then why bother living a decent life? After all, if this is all its about, we can do whatever we want! Consider the following: "If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing...." Jeffrey Dahmer said that! Hitler and Stalin both bought into the theory of survival of the fittest. That’s why they had no qualms about murder and mayhem – and they certainly had no remorse for the horror they inflicted on the entire world.

Following is a confession by Darwin:

"I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a single line of poetry: I have tried recently to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also lost my taste for pictures or music...My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding out general laws of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that (aesthetic) part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive...The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature" (Charles Darwin).

Every time I hear a pronouncement of a bone that is 50 million years old, my first thought is: Where were you when God laid the foundations of the earth!