Please turn away from cherry-picked, forced evidence to view the world as it actually is. The “Missoula Flood” (findable on the web) is the result of easily understood natural processes. It has no correlation to a flood thousands of times larger, i.e. a global flood.
I was born Christian, and remain a devout servant of Jesus Christ. But I realized, somewhere along the way to age 75, that for reasons I’m not privy to GOD chose to adopt the Abrahamic tribes. HE adopted them along with their origin story – which was as unique to them as the origin stories of all other ancient cultures.
No ancient culture’s origin story correlates to today’s perception of geological or genealogical cause-and-effect. They differ greatly from each other, as well. What does a faithful Christian do with this information?
I suppose there are some who persist in believing that science is in the hands of Satan, or at least deluded into Error, for having the temerity to dispute the Holiness and Purity of the Genesis account. To them (in my eyes) Genesis compares well to a seminar held by GOD to teach us how HE formed the universe.
This introduces a temptation to either-or Scripture – either Genesis is literal and full science, or all of Scripture is equally untrue. This is a debate technique called the False Alternative. Either A is true or NOT—A; take your pick. But first you have to formulate an exact A, which is where the idea breaks. A is always, in matters this complex, tailorable, modifiable, removable from A / NOT—A.
GOD did say “Let there be light” and the heavens say HE did that 13.78 billion years ago. Our Sun formed 5 billion years ago and planet earth coalesced 4.6 billion years ago. All of these numbers are considered beyond dispute due to the accumulation of decades of research, experiment, and plain hard work. Not liking what science says is hardly grounds for belittling it.
We look into the heavens to see HIS handiworks; HE asks us to. Does HE also add a caveat, a “Don’t look too close, lest you become confused?” No, there is no such warning.
We look into the heavens and find two hundred sextillion stars – that takes twenty-three zeroes to write – and realize that GOD didn’t just make our planet. HE didn’t just set lights in the sky to make a day and light the night.
HE did arrange the orbits of the planets and the positions of the stars near earth, to a degree of precision we can’t even calculate. Those signs in the starry skies of Babylon shortly before Jesus’ birth were enough to alert a set of scholars, probably Jewish descendants and keepers of Jewish prophecy.
Their ancestors had remained behind half a millennium earlier when Cyrus sent the Jews back from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem. These holdouts, the magi, saw the constellations do something that had never been seen before; it fulfilled Old Testament prophesies; the “fullness of time” had arrived.
This was when the angel came to Mary. When she delivered Jesus, other signs appeared to announce that as well. That same night “shepherds in the fields watching their flocks” witnessed angels from heaven singing their joy that Jesus had been born.
This put the scholars / magi astride their camels. Roughly half a year later they entered Jerusalem and saw a third sign, which Scripture today records as “the star stood over the place where Jesus was born.” Bethlehem sat five miles south of Jerusalem, and what had happened was that ‘star’ Jupiter had gone retrograde in the southern skies. Retrograde means that the star’s changing location in the skies, night by night, halts, reverses, halts again, then reverses again and resumes its path. We know this via a “star gazing” personal computer app.
One of those two halts happened on 25 December. Does GOD have a sense of humor?
EVOLUTION: let me recall the example of Job, who questioned GOD. You recall that GOD wasn’t offended, and Job’s ultimate faithfulness led to considerable earthly reward. We also look for great reward, in the form of spending eternity in GOD’s presence.
So, who are we to quibble with GOD over time? A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day? 13.78 billion is roughly six thousand years times 2.3 million. Is that too great a challenge for GOD? Is that too much of a burden on HIS patience? Especially considering he advertised it in the heavens?
Who are we to quibble with GOD over methods? HE invented particle physics, which reveals numerous arbitrary arithmetic constants – the ratio between matter and energy which results in the exact speed of light, or the relative strengths of the four different elemental forces, or the ratio of mass between proton and neutron?
Changing any one of these by a tiny amount would mean that, yes, there was light, but no, when it cooled enough for matter to precipitate out, the matter wouldn’t make stars in a way that would create more elements than the hydrogen and helium that started out. When those stars managed to go supernova, they wouldn’t have generated any higher kinds of atoms to form GOD’s fabulous table of elements.
Or if the elements did form, they wouldn’t work together the way we see them working. Biochemists are realizing that the chemistry of DNA is primed to do what we see it do – once there is a single cell, life is unstoppable. And all because GOD created the universe so that it would be so.
GOD numbers the hairs on our heads and has known, from the instant of creation, who would live and every word that would come out of their hearts, from the first humans to you and me and to all of our descendants, forever until the Second Coming.
Given that, what possible justification is there to suggest that the process we know as evolution is in any way not under GOD’s total control? Do we want to chop logic with GOD and debate with HIM, “Why did you do it THAT way?” – hardly.
Oh, and Another Thing 