I am now a board member and webmaster for Twin Cities Creation Science Association and a thoroughly convinced young earth creationist. I was a theistic evolutionist going through my medical training. I was told that science had proved evolution and although for quite a while it shook my faith because it seemed to make God unnecessary, I finally decided that God must have set up the universe so it spontaneously organized itself. This view is sometimes called the "fully competent creation" and is considered by its backers to be a magnificent demonstration of God's power. It seemed to me that if that were the case, God must have done something special in the case of man to give him "the image of God" but that otherwise it had to be all automatic and imbedded in the basic constituents of the universe.
I continued to hold this position, mostly because I had never really looked at the data in detail, even as a missionary in Hong Kong with the Evangelical Free Church. While there, my brother, who is a science teacher, sent me two books by Biochemist A.E.Wilder-Smith who showed that order does not arise spontaneously. Dr. Wilder-Smith also included pictures of polystrate fossils, tree trunks 50 feet tall, fossilized standing up, that obviously could not have been buried at the rate hypothesized by uniformitarian geology because they would have rotted before they were covered. It took me a year to even open them because I was emotionally revolted by what seemed to be so far out of the scientific mainstream. Dr. Wilder-Smith showed that the whole idea of a code requires intelligence and the information carried by a code does not arise spontaneously. Long periods of time do not help because time degrades information. Random changes in a complex system do not improve it but deteriorate or completely destroy it
I was astounded and wondered why this point of view had never come up in my science classes. When I returned to Minnesota for a year of further training, I looked up some of my professors. The Christian advisor to the Christian Medical Society Student Chapter was a theistic evolutionist. I showed him this data and asked what he thought of it. He said it did not impress him. But I asked again how he answered it and he repeated the same answer. I got a mental picture of a person standing on the freeway with a Mack truck bearing down on him saying, "It doesn't impress me." He then gave me an application form for American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of theistic evolutionists, essentially using the junior high tactic of saying, "everybody is doing it."
Then another professor made passing reference to evolution in a lecture on hypertension, saying that the kidney evolved in an environment of low salt and when the sodium levels rise, it cannot compensate and by hormonal means raises the blood pressure. After the lecture I asked him if the kidney evolved into this amazing machine that keeps so many things in balance, knowing what to keep and what to toss, why could it not make a minor adjustment? He said that it was the time frame. I said that there was other evidence against evolution and asked if he would like to look at it. Without a moments hesitation he said, "No!" in a tone that implied that it was a stupid question. Either naively because I did not see the storm brewing or with characteristic courage, I continued by saying that I could leave him some books and papers. He stopped me in mid sentence with, "I know where you are headed with this. You are going to talk about God and Jesus and I have no place for them in my life!" Then turning, he shot back over his shoulder, "And I don't think you can talk about this on a public university campus."
I was flabbergasted. Here was a faculty member of a major medical school who was unwilling to even talk about what may be the most important scientific question possible, namely "Where did we come from." He was not responding intellectually but emotionally. On the question of evolution, I had not been educated but indoctrinated. And I also saw clearly that the Christian in academic science, making his living in a hostile intellectual environment had apparently taken on "protective coloration" saying essentially, "I believe just like all you other guys do, but I say God did it." (This is no threat to the secular scientific community because they can say, "That's fine for you if you need a crutch, but we don't.") Then having made that decision without supporting data, the compromising Christian would be forced to defend it emotionally and without evidence or else admit to either dishonesty or cowardice.
I was radicalized, realizing that there were very smart, highly educated people who were completely out to lunch on this issue. There were even warm hearted spiritually alive Christians who were sincerely wrong, and even thought they were protecting the gospel from potential rejection by non-Christians on scientific grounds. Yet in the process they were eroding the authority of Scripture -- if God did it that way, why didn't He just tell us? To say that early man was primitive begs the question by assuming evolution. Adam and Eve were created perfect with powerful intelligence according to the Scripture. Early man invented all sorts of technology and art very quickly.
Also, if God used a wasteful, destructive, cruel method of creating -- struggle for existence, competition for resources, predation, and death -- then at the moment He said, "It is very good," Adam and Eve were standing on top of thousands of feet of fossilized remains of that sordid history. And if it were true, physical death did not result from humans in but is God's method of creation. Is that the picture of the God who is personally and intimately involved in the lives of His people? Does a God who takes billions of years to create consistent with the God who will wrap up history in the twinkling of an eye? Is ruthless competition and survival of the fittest consistent with Jesus teaching and example of self-sacrifice and exhortation to care for "the least of these"? If death before sin is true, why did Jesus die physically on the cross and rise again to conquer death and take the penalty for our sins at the some time?
I became first an intelligent design advocate and slowly also saw that there was also a powerful case for a young earth. In fact, the fossil record is much more consistent with rapid burial in a worldwide flood than in slow sedimentation over millions of years of a land mass that slowly rises and falls. For one thing, fossils don't form unless the creature is covered before it rots. Clams all over the world are fossilized closed. There are 50 foot tree trunks that surely would not wait to be covered up at 1 millimeter a year. There are many "out of place" fossils and in the grand canyon such as pollen in the pre-Cambrian layer where no such plants should have existed. Also, there are 200 million "missing" years and the layers are blended at their interface, as if for those 200 million years absolutely nothing happened, neither deposition nor erosion, and the bottom lay stayed soft waiting for the next. See http://tccsa.tc/articles/index.html#pollen
A summary of the physical evidence against evolution, the philosophical assumptions used to support it and the psychological reasons why academia marches in lockstep against any challenge to its ruling paradigm can be seen at http://tccsa.tc/articles/evaluating_evolution.html . The way the courts have entangled themselves and confused the issue is discussed in http://tccsa.tc/articles/id_in_schools.pdf .
Ross S. Olson MD