Evolution and my ostrich mentality

• Did God take billions of years to create the universe?
• Mutations could have created many new species over time, couldn’t they?
• Were there human-like creatures before Adam and Eve?

Today I answer, “No, no, no,” to these questions with much clarity and confidence.

When I was growing up, in India, evolution was taught in schools. But it did not shake my faith even one teeny bit because none of my teachers believed in it. But the theory of evolution was sneakier than our teachers realised. Terms like adaptations and modifications soon became second nature to us all, teachers and taught alike. In reality, the monster was too crafty for ordinary people to handle. We did not know what to do with concepts like radioactive dating, Neanderthal man, Cambrian explosion, and the myriad others that we came across.

I believed that ordinary people need not worry themselves about these matters that were best left to Christian scientists to deal with. At the same time I believed resolutely, that the Bible will eventually be proved right. For all my zeal for the Lord, I was like the proverbial ostrich, imagining that if I did not think about the problem, it would go away.

Importance of becoming better informed

“Why are photocopies of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet not available free to the public?” Thus starts Don Srail’s Talkback piece in the Biblical Archaeology Review site, and he goes on to lament the suppression of valuable information from the public eye.

Once long ago, my dad was trying to move a bed from one room to another. And I was helping him. But being just four or so, he told me later, I was an additional weight that he was dragging with the bed. So it is in this struggle to get true science and true archaeology into the open, many of us are more of a nuisance than a help.

So you do not grieve as the rest who have no hope

Not far from where we live is a Christian college (’College’ in New Zealand is actually ‘high school’). On Monday, six students and a teacher from that school died in a flash flood during what was a week-long outdoor education course. The kids who died were 16 years old, the same age as our son Tim.

The students were at the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre in central North Island. As part of the course, 10 students with their teacher and instructor went canyoning on the Mangatepopo River. Now canyoning is an activity where you scramble, climb, jump, abseil and swim to travel through a canyon or gorge. When this little party entered the gorge, the water was at a very low level, and they were unaware that heavy rain was predicted.

The water level rose suddenly because of a flash flood. The group waited on a rocky ledge for the water level to go down, but it just kept increasing.