In the Beginning
I grew up as the youngest son of a pastor. During my childhood, I was taught that the Bible is the infallible and divinely inspired Word of God. I learned all of the famous Bible stories, memorized scripture, and came to believe that Jesus Christ died in my place so that my sins could be forgiven.
As a child, I kept a collection of interesting rocks I found in my back yard, and I often wondered how they had formed. I also wondered about dinosaurs. What did they eat? How did they live? What happened to them? I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I had a Christian children's book that displayed evidence of man and dinosaurs coexisting. I specifically remember one picture of a sea monster that had been pulled out of the ocean near Japan in 1977. This was all the proof I needed that dinosaurs were still alive and Earth was young.
By the time I graduated from a Christian high school, I was under the impression that modern science and biblical Christianity were bitter enemies, and I was convinced that non-Christian scientists were mainly interested in propagating their atheistic worldviews. In support of these ideas, I learned alternatives to widely accepted teachings of popular science: Earth was approximately 6,000 years old, most fossil "missing links" were hoaxes, radiometric dating of rocks was unreliable at best, and Charles Darwin had recanted his evolutionary theory on his deathbed. To me, this was the truth that scientists did not want me to know about.
The Other Side
I always been good at math, so engineering seemed like the way for me to go out of high school. After two and a half years, I knew that I could not live out the rest of my life behind a desk, so I dropped all of my classes and picked the first major that popped into my head: Geology. I knew I liked being outside and figuring out how things worked, so it seemed like an ok choice. Plus, as a Christian, I figured it would be a good opportunity to learn about the "other side" and their point of view.
I began attending geology classes with a skeptical eye on all they were teaching me. I was convinced that scientists based all of their theories on the assumption that there was no God and I felt that my Bible contained a different view... the correct view on the formation of the world.
But the more geology classes I took, the more conflicted I became. I believed every word of the Bible and had a personal relationship with God, but I simply could not dismiss the fact that my Geology courses seemed to make a whole lot of sense. More importantly, it became increasingly clear to me that every rock did, in fact, seem to have a story to tell... a story different from the one I learned in Sunday School.
The Turning Point
I eventually graduated with my geology degree and began working for a living. For four years I kept trying to push the unresolved differences between my education and my beliefs further into the back of my mind. I finally decided that I needed more answers and applied to graduate school.
During my application process, I began to search for other scientists that shared my belief in the Bible, and I stumbled across a couple of amazing web sites (linked on the right side of this page). On a web site put together by a Christian with an interest in paleontology, I found an article about the sea monster (pictured) that had been pulled out of the ocean near Japan in 1977. This article described how a team of experts from differing scientific disciplines had studied the creature shortly after its discovery. It went on to list line after line of evidence indicating that this creature was most certainly a shark and not a dinosaur.I was shocked and didn't know what to think. I had believed in this "dinosaur" since I was a child, but my children's book had been wrong. Worse yet, I checked the date of my book and found that it was published 10 years after experts had proven the creature to be a shark.
I still believed in God, but if this "dinosaur" was not real then how many other scientific falsehoods had I come to believe?
Revelations
As I continued to search for truth, I found that historical figures such as St. Augustine had been pondering questions about science and faith for ages. I accepted that God was the creator of the universe, and I also believed that the Bible was the inspired Word of God. Gradually, I began to understand that God reveals Himself to us through both General and Specific Revelation (that is: Creation and the Bible). So, if God authored the Bible and also created the universe, then how could one book be describing a 6,000 year old Earth while the other "book" describes a 4.6 billion year old Earth? I concluded that I must be interpreting one of the two books incorrectly.
This conclusion opened up a previously unavailable third option for me. What if science and the Bible could compliment each other and did not have to be bitter enemies after all? What if God gave us the ability to observe His creation as a way to discover more about His character? What if the creation account in Genesis was not intended to be interpreted as literal science and I had been misunderstanding all of this time? Well.... what if? For me, the answer to each question was simply "peace". No more itching questions in the back of my mind. No more us-against-them mentality. No more conflict between the world I observe and God's Word.
It is this sense of peace that I want to share with you, the reader.
So if you made it all the way down this page, thanks for reading. Please understand that I'm not trying to force my beliefs on anybody. I just want to help both Christians and non-Christians understand that the God who created the universe wants you to know Him, and when He created this amazing universe we live in, He put His signature on it: the more we learn, the more we understand how little we truly know.
