Evolution is an issue because many people haven’t taken the Bible seriously since evolution became a doctrine of biology. The beginning of the Bible presents a story about the universe and life on earth which is different from the one given by modern cosmology and biology. That story looks untrue and silly for many people in the twenty-first century.
     It’s true that the doctrine of evolution was developed because of the facts of fossil records on earth. Those fossil records have been discovered by serious and honest scholars, and most of the literary accounts of them are both accurate and faithful. If I spent my time as those scholars, I would see what they have seen, say what they have said, and write what they have written.
     Fossils are imprints within rocks. Those rocks containing fossils normally are sedimentary, i.e., formed at the bottom of water after years of pressure. A scientifically acceptable explanation of those imprints is that the corpses of living things caused them. For example, a horse died and somehow its body was buried in the dirt in the bottom of the sea. After many years, the dirt would be covered by other dirt of several hundred meters’ thickness, causing it to become a hard sedimentary rock containing an imprint of the skeleton of a horse. This is how scientists answer why there are imprints within rocks at many places. Some imprints look like the remains of some species we know. But there are also many imprints that could be the remains of some species we have never seen. When scientists systematically analyzed fossil records around the earth, they concluded that the past time can be divided into several periods. Those periods could last millions of years. They suggested that each period had its own kinds of plants and animals different from other periods. For example, Jurassic is supposed to be a period when many different kinds of dinosaurs were on earth.
     According to our knowledge, all living things are generated from previous ones. Those mysterious ancient animals and plants in a given period should be the descendants of those of the previous period. They looked different from period to period, so there must be some reasons for them to change from one generation to another. Some biologists suggested that the reasons should be hereditary variation and natural selection. If an organism randomly produces many different descendants and only some of them survive the harshness of nature, the survivors will be a little different than their predecessors. After a long time, a species will become another one or many different ones. But where did the first living form come from? The earliest stratum only has the remains of simple life forms such as unicellular organisms. The first living cell should be generated naturally under the conditions of the early earth, which should be quite different from what it is now. It should be automatically produced by some random reactions of chemicals in the early ocean. In conclusion, scientists proposed a theory to explain all fossil records and how all living things, including human beings, came into existence by our physical, chemical, and biological principles. This explanation does not involve any supernatural interference.
     Scientific knowledge from many other areas basically supports this theory. Radioactive dating in physics is helpful to suggest the ages of fossils and strata. Knowledge of plate tectonics in earth science is used to explain the distribution of the fossil records of extinct species. For example, there are maps of continents and oceans showing how major orders of dinosaurs were distributed during the Jurassic Period. Although these maps have no practical use, some scientists with genuine scientific curiosity made them. Molecular biology provides an opportunity to verify the closeness between species by analyzing the DNA and protein structures of animals, plants, and microorganisms. Many of these discoveries often lead to common results. As a fan of science, I know that it is one of the most exciting features of science and a reason why science is beautiful that now and then we reach the same conclusions from two or more different areas of science.
     Archeology of the migration of prehistoric human beings is another example of this kind. Archeologists have found early human skeletons, stone tools, and frescoes in caves at many sites around the world. They proposed a model that, originally, all modern people came from Africa. Our common ancestors began to migrate to other continents about 100,000 years ago. Some of them arrived in Europe and Eastern Asia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. Some of them arrived in Australia about 30,000 years ago. Some of them crossed Bering Strait and arrived in North America about 14,000 years ago. After thousands of years, the diversity of races appeared and resulted in the ethnic differences among people all over the world. On the other hand, when anthropologists analyzed DNA examples of many tribes of all continents and islands, they said that the DNA difference of those modern races corresponds to the model. Research of the twentieth century established a story of early people not mentioned in the Bible.
     Evolution is an important discipline of biology now. If we remove this idea from biology, the rest of the knowledge in this area of science lacks organizational simplicity and systematic beauty. Evolution is useful for classifying species, which is an important mission of biology. It also gives insight into the life forms on earth, which can be applied to solve some problems about which many biologists are curious. It is helpful to medicine, too. Combining evolution and other knowledge of biology provides significant help in developing new drugs for attacking bacteria or viruses and in understanding the anatomy of our own or other animals’ bodies for practicing surgery.
     Actually, evolution is something we should expect to have when our scientific knowledge grows. Science is powerful in all aspects of nature. If we have the ability to discover stars and galaxies billions of light years away, to observe things less than a trillionth of a centimeter in size, to construct a computer chip containing millions of transistors, and to build an Internet that connects millions of computers, it’s natural that a theory about the history of the past billions of years can be similarly developed. When we collect remains on earth and try to guess what happened in the past, that the earth has existed for billions of years and that living organisms on earth have evolved are scientifically reasonable theories. Our world opens many doors for us to discover and manipulate its rules in all directions including the one toward the distant past.
     However, we made an assertion that science can’t prove or disprove the existence of God or the miraculous events recorded in the Bible. We also said that science doesn’t know how to explain our experiences of self-consciousness. Evolution is only a theory of biology, which is only one of many subjects in science. It can’t reach domains beyond the capabilities of science. We may still believe in God and the reality of our souls, even though evolution seems able to provide a scientific explanation of fossil records and how various species on earth came into existence.
     I guess it’s okay to believe Christianity and evolution at the same time. The Bible says whoever believes in Jesus Christ shall not perish but have eternal life — instead of whoever believes in creationism shall not perish but have eternal life. The main theme of Christianity is the teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, not the details of how the living things on earth came into existence. All these details, as other discoveries about nature, are left for people to find out when science achieves the corresponding maturity.
     Can there be a God who created the world through the process of evolution? If this is the case, God should know this, so why doesn’t he explain it well in the Bible? Maybe God thinks the detailed history of life on earth is unimportant. I believe that no more than 10 percent of people have enough interests or chances to study the theory of evolution in detail. (A fact to illustrate this point is that only 1 percent of people in the early twenty-first century have college degrees.) An even smaller percentage of people make their livings in the field of biology. In addition, evolution is mainly a story of the very distant past when nobody was around, and it does not directly relate to most people today. Not everyone has to or wants to care about that. If the Bible had used as many pages as a modern biology textbook to explain the origin of life in detail, it would not look like a general guide of life for all human beings.
     For people belonging to the minority who understand evolution clearly and correctly, and reject Christianity as a whole because of that, please check out the next chapter. We want to discuss this topic further.

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