Belief

We’ve been having a lot of conversations here at my office this week. One of my coworkers is in the development stage of a new project he wants to launch where people (hopefully non-Christians) can submit questions (video or email) and get reasonable responses from Christians (pastors or not). By reasonable, we mean in a way that is not belittling to anyone and in some cases, not even answer the question because we don’t have all the answers. The point of the website would be to have sensible discussions on theological questions.

We had a meeting this week to discuss one possible topic as a pilot. Evolution. In doing research for this, my coworker found some interesting things. First, there are the very vocal atheists out there who rant against religion. Just do a search on YouTube and there are hundreds of videos. The unfortunate thing is that the responses by Christians are rarely intelligent or lacking. Second, videos that Christians do put out can often make things worse. Over at GodTube, one of the popular cartoons is this one which ends by saying: Evolution is Impossible. Look at some of the other related videos there, and you can see how Christians haven’t been very good at using the Bible to refute evolution and science.

Now I’m not trying to be an apologist for either side of the debate. I merely want to present what I believe.

Luke 1:37 – For nothing is impossible with God.

Here is my fundamental belief on creation and evolution: God created the earth and until I die and go to heaven, I will not know how He did it.

I am neither a literal creationist (God created the earth in exactly 6 days) nor an abstract creationist (like the day-age theory – that “days” could refer to eras), but simply a creationist. Now, I’m not smart enough to get into a debate with scientists or creationist over this topic. To me, there is no debate. The answer to evolution is “I don’t know.” God is way more powerful than anyone, so anything is possible.

Could God have created the earth along the lines of the big-bang theory and then used evolution to have life develop? Is the earth really 6 billion years old? With God, that’s possible.

Or was the earth created in 6 days and is only 6000 years old? Scientists will then state their findings of million year old fossils or that light coming from galaxies away had to take billions of years to reach us. I’d respond that with God being the intelligent designer that He is, it is possible that He created a mature earth with fossils embedded in our crusts and other “proofs” for scientists to discover?

I do not believe that my salvation relies on me picking an interpretation of this. This obviously is going to cause problems. I’m sure people are going to point out that I must not believe the Bible to be true if I don’t believe one thing or another about Genesis 1. This is false. I do believe the Bible is true but I also know that I am not done studying it nor will I ever completely understand it. I do know that while on the earth, I will never fully understand God, but I have faith in His master plan.