Would You Believe …

 

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was “Get Smart”. The hilarious show, to my junior high school self, stared Don Adams as secret Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. Some of you may remember this show and how an enemy agent would jump out of a third story window, hoping to land on a preplaced cushion. As Maxwell looks out the window, he holds up his thumb and index finger about an inch apart and says, “Missed it by that much.”

I loved the dialog where Maxwell uses the phrase “would you believe…”

Agent 86: “At this very moment, this warehouse is being surrounded by one hundred cops with Doberman pinschers. Would you believe it? A hundred cops with Doberman pinschers.”

Enemy Agent: “I find that hard to believe.”

Agent 86: “Would you believe ten security guards and a bloodhound?”

Enemy Agent: “I don’t think so.”

Agent 86: “How about a Boy Scout with rabies?”

I howled with laughter as Agent 86 kept reducing his threats because the enemy agent didn’t believe him.

We all believe in something and have authorities we believe. Many people believe what scientists, teachers, and textbooks have told them about science and the origin of our world. After all, it’s their job to get this stuff right. Unfortunately, they do not have a time machine to take them back to the past to see what happened. All we have is the forensic evidence that exists in the present.

My authority is God’s Word. It is His creation, and he was an eyewitness to the creation of the world. We don’t have to rely just on forensic evidence. But doesn’t the Bible indicate that the world is only thousands of years old, and not millions or billions? Would you believe there is plenty of evidence for a young Earth? Unlike Maxwell’s statement this “would you believe” is true.

Let’s start with the geological column, the layers of rock you may have seen in textbooks with a chronology going back in time hundreds of millions of years as you descend to deeper layers. That dating was originally established based on the assumption of uniformitarianism. That long word just means that they assume the layers formed by the same slow forces we see acting most of the time such as erosion by wind and water. But there are also events where rapid change takes place, such as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Within days, not millions of years, a cavern one fortieth the size of the Grand Canyon was formed.

There was another cataclysmic event mentioned in the Bible, a global flood in the time of Noah. If the global flood was a true event, I would expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth, and that’s exactly what we find. The rock layers we can see lining the Grand Canyon contain billions of fossils. Also, these same rock layers are found all over the earth. This indicates they were not built up slowly from some local sediment formation, but a global cataclysmic event.

Let’s look at the fossil record buried in these layers. Many people point to the fossil record when asked why they believe in evolution. Scientists had expected the fossil record to be full of transitional fossils, showing how one kind of organism evolved into another. But there is an obvious lack of such transition fossils. Even Darwin in The Origin of Species … said, “The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?” More recently Stephen Gould in The Panda’s Thumb said, “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” It’s as if a great God created each kind of organism individually.

There are fossils dated to be hundreds of millions of years old that contain types of plants and animals that are alive today. These fossils look exactly like the organisms that are living today. This includes the Coelacanth a fish that looks exactly like a 66-million-year-old fossil, Gingko leaves that look exactly like a 170-million-year-old Gingko leaf fossil, and the Horseshoe Crab that looks exactly like his kin dated 450-million-years old. If evolution occurs as easily and rapidly as proponents believe, wouldn’t these creatures have evolved into something else? Surely, they would have at least changed size, evolved additional appendages, or added a few new capabilities. Yet what we find is exactly what I would have expected if the earth was only thousands of years old.

The most convincing evidence for a young earth is the soft tissue found in fossils. Researchers have discovered fragile biological molecules like proteins and DNA in rocks that are supposedly hundreds of millions of years old. They have found blood cells, collagen, and even DNA in these fossils. Laboratory studies on many of these materials indicate that they might survive, in the best of environments, thousands, not millions, of years.

Even our DNA points to a single male and female that existed about 6,000 years ago. Science and the Bible agree that there was a single major migration of humans that went through the middle east. It seems like science is finally catching up with God’s word.

There is so much evidence for a young earth, consistent with God’s literal word. But it seems as though many of our authorities keep saying (Maxwell Smart voice), “Would you believe …”