I believed the Bible was absolute truth. As the word of God it should be perfect. What was i supposed to think when the evidence showed something contrary to the words i trusted implicitly?
The real turn in this story came from whales ability to smell, or lack there of.
Evolutionary biology shows the direct genetic link between animals. The theory of evolution predicts that the genes of ancestors will be present in some form in the DNA of creatures today.
The evolution of whales comes from land mammals which came from some aquatic critters further down the line (these aren't exactly the most technical terms but you get the idea.)
While I dint have time to discuss the entire lineage, and as far as fossils are concerned, there are some large gaps, but you can fill those gaps with whale DNA.
Because land animals evolved from a distant ancestor they have the genes for olfactory receptors which function under water only, but the genes are switched off in most terrestrial creatures. But what about whales? If they evolved from sea to land to sea again what do you think their genes would say?
Toothy whales have both genes for aquatic and airborne olfactory receptors, but they're all turned off.
I believed that God made everything. Why would he add junk genes to a creature? Genes it didn't need or use and indicated quite specifically the lineage of a creature's evolutionary process.
When I didn't know too much about genes, I assumed they all did something whether we knew it or not, but that's not the case. Organisms do not need every gene. Pseudogenes are abundant in organisms. This idea brought up an image of God sitting at a computer hitting "copy" and "paste" like a maniac as he created.
So if God presents the truth in a way that indicates a lie, is He lying?
Is it a lie for God to create every organism as if it had evolved even though it didn't?
Let me warn you now, from here I only find more lies that creationists shift their theories and stance on quite often to keep the position that their faith is grounded in truth. The reason this is such a hot topic to Christians is because the entire Bible must be true in order for the whole belief to not fall apart.
How can we inherit sin from Adam, if there was no Adam? If the creation story is false, why would Jesus, being God in flesh, mention it? I know that the domino effect is quite over used, but it applies overwhelmingly here.
Deep time is a term to describe the massive expanses of time, which are so mind-boggling large that they are difficult to truly comprehend, that make up the history of the universe.
I had never believed the universe to be older than 6,000 years, so how can we see stars billions of light years away?
Some of the creationist answers were as archaic as the Bible itself, such as the light-in-transit model which postulated that everything beyond 6,000 light years from us was played out like a movie on a galactic screen.
I immediately doubted the veracity of the claims of the distance of stars... until I studied how we find those distances through magnitude, parralax, and redshift. These methods give us an approximation which creationist argue with shifts in light travel fluctuations, but the theories are completely unfounded in reality, and it still leads to the same problem of "appearance of age."
Did God just make it appear old? Why would he form the cosmos in a way that alludes to an old universe? Maybe it wasn't in his plan for us to be able to measure those distances, but then why are we still here if it's not in his plan?
Over a period of months, which I am recounting in a single post, my faith was falling apart like a Jenga tower. I was pulling blocks to fill holes, but I was only creating new holes in my faith and my worldview.
The moment I realized that what I had been taught was untrue was the most profoundly lonely moment I have ever experienced.
Up until then I had imagined that we were all spiritually connected in a way that transcends belief or faith. That the souls of humanity existed on a plane indiscriminate of time or place.
What made it so profound for me was that for the first time ever I was alone in my mind. It was the first time I had ever conceived that God was not watching everything that went on in my mind like a continuous facebook feed filled with pictures, statuses and videos.
I was alone.
There were people nearby, but I was truly alone. It was frightening and liberating at the same time.
Even after all this I still felt the need to be sure. What if I was wrong? We're talking about ETERNAL consequences here. This goes well beyond the idea of deep time and was truly a concern. Had I been deceived? Was I lured away from my faith by the devil? What if the reason I felt so alone was actually separation from God? Am i just to dumb to see the message God has for me? Had i fallen into the same trap as my uncle and was i failing in my mission to win him back for Christ? Is the Bible absolute truth?
To answer these questions I had to turn back to the scriptures.
The real turn in this story came from whales ability to smell, or lack there of.
Evolutionary biology shows the direct genetic link between animals. The theory of evolution predicts that the genes of ancestors will be present in some form in the DNA of creatures today.
The evolution of whales comes from land mammals which came from some aquatic critters further down the line (these aren't exactly the most technical terms but you get the idea.)
While I dint have time to discuss the entire lineage, and as far as fossils are concerned, there are some large gaps, but you can fill those gaps with whale DNA.
Because land animals evolved from a distant ancestor they have the genes for olfactory receptors which function under water only, but the genes are switched off in most terrestrial creatures. But what about whales? If they evolved from sea to land to sea again what do you think their genes would say?
Toothy whales have both genes for aquatic and airborne olfactory receptors, but they're all turned off.
I believed that God made everything. Why would he add junk genes to a creature? Genes it didn't need or use and indicated quite specifically the lineage of a creature's evolutionary process.
When I didn't know too much about genes, I assumed they all did something whether we knew it or not, but that's not the case. Organisms do not need every gene. Pseudogenes are abundant in organisms. This idea brought up an image of God sitting at a computer hitting "copy" and "paste" like a maniac as he created.
So if God presents the truth in a way that indicates a lie, is He lying?
Is it a lie for God to create every organism as if it had evolved even though it didn't?
Let me warn you now, from here I only find more lies that creationists shift their theories and stance on quite often to keep the position that their faith is grounded in truth. The reason this is such a hot topic to Christians is because the entire Bible must be true in order for the whole belief to not fall apart.
How can we inherit sin from Adam, if there was no Adam? If the creation story is false, why would Jesus, being God in flesh, mention it? I know that the domino effect is quite over used, but it applies overwhelmingly here.
Deep time is a term to describe the massive expanses of time, which are so mind-boggling large that they are difficult to truly comprehend, that make up the history of the universe.
I had never believed the universe to be older than 6,000 years, so how can we see stars billions of light years away?
Some of the creationist answers were as archaic as the Bible itself, such as the light-in-transit model which postulated that everything beyond 6,000 light years from us was played out like a movie on a galactic screen.
I immediately doubted the veracity of the claims of the distance of stars... until I studied how we find those distances through magnitude, parralax, and redshift. These methods give us an approximation which creationist argue with shifts in light travel fluctuations, but the theories are completely unfounded in reality, and it still leads to the same problem of "appearance of age."
Did God just make it appear old? Why would he form the cosmos in a way that alludes to an old universe? Maybe it wasn't in his plan for us to be able to measure those distances, but then why are we still here if it's not in his plan?
Over a period of months, which I am recounting in a single post, my faith was falling apart like a Jenga tower. I was pulling blocks to fill holes, but I was only creating new holes in my faith and my worldview.
The moment I realized that what I had been taught was untrue was the most profoundly lonely moment I have ever experienced.
Up until then I had imagined that we were all spiritually connected in a way that transcends belief or faith. That the souls of humanity existed on a plane indiscriminate of time or place.
What made it so profound for me was that for the first time ever I was alone in my mind. It was the first time I had ever conceived that God was not watching everything that went on in my mind like a continuous facebook feed filled with pictures, statuses and videos.
I was alone.
There were people nearby, but I was truly alone. It was frightening and liberating at the same time.
Even after all this I still felt the need to be sure. What if I was wrong? We're talking about ETERNAL consequences here. This goes well beyond the idea of deep time and was truly a concern. Had I been deceived? Was I lured away from my faith by the devil? What if the reason I felt so alone was actually separation from God? Am i just to dumb to see the message God has for me? Had i fallen into the same trap as my uncle and was i failing in my mission to win him back for Christ? Is the Bible absolute truth?
To answer these questions I had to turn back to the scriptures.
