Dear Earth, You're Only as Old as You Feel

The latest archeological testing has determined that humans did not evolve from apes after all. The 1994 find of a four-foot tall female skeleton in Ethiopia and the just released intensive testing have laid to rest the long held belief that humans evolved from a prehistoric ape. Archaeologists searching for the “Missing Link” now have to regroup and begin looking for this common ancestor of both humans and apes. Those aren’t the only scientists thrown for a loop as a result of this earth shaking discovery. Scientists who date the Earth’s age are also scrambling to find their calculators as our planet is now believed to be even older than previous research had indicated.

Theology will not be immune to this discovery as both protests and affirmations will flow from the two sides of the creation versus evolution debate. Creationists see the world as being only 6,000 years old and reject all tenets of evolution. On the other end of the spectrum are those who view the earth as being millions of years old and who readily accept many of the teachings of evolution as long as it is stated that God was intimately involved. In the middle are those who have no clue and are happy to admit it. Truth be told, that’s the best location to be in the midst of all the rancorous debate. Many of today’s best scientists are swimming upstream against the current after these findings were published. World class scientists held to the ape-to-human evolution track for most of the twentieth-century, only to be proven wrong by one find. Now they know how meteorologists feel on a regular basis. Creationists will continue to say that all of this is hooey and that carbon dating is a hoax. And the fight goes on.

So let’s find a middle ground and settle this silly fight over something so mysterious, so ethereal, and so abstract that we couldn’t possibly understand the actual truth anyway. Here’s the simple answer: GOD DID IT! If God created this rock we live on six billion years ago or six million years ago or six thousand years ago, the real story is that God did the heavy lifting. If God created dinosaurs (which most certainly existed as I saw the skeletons at Fernbank) and they died out, what’s the big deal? If humans and animals looked differently millions of years ago so be it. We’d look different today if we had to forage for food and run from saber tooth tigers and flying lizards with big teeth. No one can empirically prove God or God’s path from day one of creation to today, so why fight about it? These fights are not good for God’s Kingdom.

So go with God. God created all things and God did it in and through God’s dimension. The details are not important enough to fight over. God did it and that’s all that matters to me.

MM