OXFORD, Miss. (U-WIRE) — It seems like ages since I was in high school. In truth, it’s been only a few years. A lot can change in a few years, though. I certainly have.
In my early youth I was a follower, and wherever the crowd went, there I was. As I grew, so did the importance of my individuality. By high school, I was thinking clearly, making my own decisions, going my own way. I was the master of my fate! Then we opened our textbooks and read, and I believed every word without question.
The printed word is a powerful thing, always written by that silent someone who is wiser than we are. But what if that someone was not as wise as we thought? It’s a possibility that never really crossed my mind until about a year ago when I began my Christian walk. At the same time I was scrounging for Biblical contradictions, I began to question other things as well — things I’d taken for granted for most of my life; things like the validity of contemporary evolutionary theory.
As a Christian, I knew that evolution would present a major roadblock to belief if it were proven reliable. At first, I tried to harmonize evolution with creationism. It simply can’t be done. Evolution is based on the progression of a species through the propagation of advantageous changes from one generation to the next. Those without the improved genes have less chance of survival and thus die sooner than those with the genes, ultimately resulting in the weeding out of weaker traits.
However, the Bible teaches that before sin, there was no death. Since death is an integral part of evolution, any harmonization of evolution and creationism becomes impossible.
At that point, I had to make a choice. Would I believe in evolution, which is certainly much more reasonable than creationism, or would I trust the fairy tales out of the Bible? The answer was obvious at first — that is until I took a closer look at evolution. That’s when the problems started to arise.
Why should I trust dating methods used to support evolution? Dating methods such as carbon 14, uranium and potassium-argon are based on assumptions of the initial makeup of the material being dated. What right do we have to make those assumptions?
What are the chances that atoms would randomly combine to form a simple living being and that being would survive in its early stages to mature? What are the chances that those organisms would evolve in exactly the manner needed to survive for even one unexpected situation, not to mention the many more that could easily occur in a lifetime? What are the chances that an organism would evolve a functioning and internally codependent system all at once? Doesn’t all of this contradict the second law of thermodynamics?
Do species even function in a “survival of the fittest” manner?
Most importantly of all, at what point did we progress from a simple chemical reaction to a living organism? Was it when we began to move, reproduce and react to our environment? The soap suds in my dishwasher do those very things, but they’re hardly alive. Maybe the only difference between us and a few bubbles is the complexity of the chemical reaction.
Even more disturbing than the notion of our being random-chance chemical reactions, are the implications of such an idea. If we are nothing more than the random product of physical forces, what becomes of the soul? Could the big bang have created a soul? Did human souls once inhabit bacteria? Where did the soul go before there was physical life? If it were created by a random physical event involving nonliving matter, would the soul even be alive?
The point here is that we don’t know what life is, and no evolutionists can tell you when during the evolutionary process we became alive. However, they will tell you tales of a little pool of primordial ooze that somewhere along the line was struck by lightning, and poof! The Frankenstein amoeba was mystically whisked into the realm of the living. After hearing this from one of my friends, I couldn’t help but smile. What incredible faith he had in evolution.

Bryant Glisson’s column originally appeared in Tuesday’s University of Mississippi paper the Daily Mississippian.