A Creationist No Longer

Introductions are like first impressions and I acknowledge that I need to tread with care for a few minutes. I do not wish to scare off the very audience I am seeking, nor draw one only to shortly leave them feeling deceived. But I must also be truthful. This is my formal announcement that I am no longer a creationist. Understand, however, that by this, I do not mean that I no longer believe that the world was created by God. I have not embraced evolutionist science or secular principles. I have not even split the difference y becoming a theistic evolutionist. I remain a faithful adherent to the belief that the God of the bible created the world, not so long ago, and by miraculous means. It is, perhaps, a sad thing that in many places, an introduction must be used as a disclaimer, but there it is, and I hope that you’re still with me.

Many have already formulated the question in their minds, “Why is he not a creationist, if he believes in a world created directly (and quickly) by God?” The answer is in the definition of the term creationist. When someone today goes through the trouble of declaring themselves a creationist, the implication is that they have spent some time with some fossils and a notebook, excitedly writing down things that will, hopefully, give them a step up on the evolutionist camp. Two or three hundred years ago, there were no creationists, yet there were plenty who believed in what many call Young-Earth™ Creationism. Evolutionists, whatever the breed, are in the same boat. It seems you only bother to state that you’re an evolutionist if you are, in some way, attempting to make headway against Intelligent Design or Creationism. Richard Dawkins, this means you. A few hundred years ago, if you studied the nature of Nature, whether you believed in a literal interpretation of the bible, or in million-year old glaciers, you were a naturalist. And it seems that this was around the last time you could safely call yourself by that name, without being called to one side or the other. Naturalists, split as though they might have been, understood something that the men in lab coats did not. Their hours spent hiking on trails, with walking stick in hand, let them do something that no scientist could do while properly seated at a desk: enjoy nature.

Nature is immense. And glorious. You cannot prove that Night on Bald Mountain is great music for Halloween by examining it with a decibel meter and a calculator. Just as the Mona Lisa is comprised of more than paint, patterns, and canvas, nature is not just a complex arrangement of DNA and carbon atoms. Lest anyone misunderstand me, I am simply saying that it is not something you can reduce to figures. Nor should anyone try, not even when the evolutionist is shouting absurdly that our world is the result of a chemical accident. Hell has rebelled against Heaven, the bible says. In the world of science, it has done so by getting people to ignore everything about nature except the facts and figures. A creationist, by limiting himself to the same, does everyone a disservice (including his opponents). I’m not talking about emotional pleas or superstition, but the very real sense that when man collides with nature, he’s running into something that reaches deeper than his mind.

As a child on my grandparents’ farm, I would climb the rails of the fence and, when they would let me, run my hand down the perfectly flat forehead of their cows. There is something blessed about the patience and submission I felt under my hand. Even today, when I can get close to one, I cannot resist running my palm down the slope of its snout, feeling the tabletop flatness and carpeted feel of it. Once, my wife had to drag me from the elephant house in the Washington, D.C. Zoo, because I was enraptured by the sight of behemoth being fed, and would have stayed there for hours.

You’ve been properly introduced to the concept of my aversion to creationism as the lone protector of our beliefs. Let me now tell you a little bit about myself. At the time of this writing, I’m twenty-seven years old, married to a lovely and patient woman, who has given me one beautiful daughter. Two much-loved dogs—Pierce and Bubble—share the house with us. I said that my wife is patient, and for more than one reason, but one reason that applies here specifically is that she has allowed me to continue in one of my favorite hobbies: skull-collecting. Because someone always asks, I do not collect human skulls. Let me run you through an abridged inventory: Five birds, two coyotes, one cow, one horse, one muskrat, one rabbit, one prairie dog, a few deer, a pig, and a few others that I’ve neglected to mention. When my grandmother passed, I inherited her father’s rock collection, and have added to it significantly. I have a beautiful hummingbird that passed away atop a rafter in a hot and dry warehouse, preserving it perfectly. And once a year, I make a pilgrimage to Calvert Cliffs to hunt for fossils.

All of this is important because all of these things have taught me to see the beauty in the world around me. I mentioned that my wife had to drag me from the Washington Zoo’s elephant house, but I didn’t say that it helped our progress through the zoo. Outside, an attendant had ushered a hippopotamus skull to the entry way. I halted (again) to appreciate the size, the zygomatic processes, the teeth, the crest at the back of the skull, the animal it once was. Nothing, I must say, escorted my mind towards a sense of accidental production. I was, at once, reminded that it was a piece of sculpture, formed by a biological system that God created.

Two problems cause us to think wrongly about creation. The first is, as I’ve already said, that we feel the need to prove a biblical view of creation using the same method that evolutionists attempt to make their case. The second, I think, is that we have an undue sense of accomplishment over creation. We feel we have domesticated it and can understand its subtle nuances. We can breed, train, whip and clone just about anything we feel like breeding, training, whipping, or cloning.

I am certain of this one thing: if scientists ever manage to clone a dinosaur, many creationists (or at least people who agree with them) will be born as a result. Yes, there will be converts to evolution as well, but they will be magazine-readers and documentary-watchers, not visitors to the prehistoric zoo. In a laboratory, or in a classroom, a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Brachiosaur might make for impressive evidence of evolution. That evidence, however, will probably mean very little to someone standing at the foot of God’s flesh and blood creation, feeling the rough knobs of skin and hearing the orchestral bellow that rumbles from their enormous prehistoric lungs. Those knobs, that sound, is God’s signature on the beast and it will take more than numbers to convince someone who has seen or heard them, otherwise.

Just as I introduced this with a disclaimer, I will conclude it with one. It is not my intent to dissuade creationists or future creationists. We will still need them as school teachers and as authors of textbooks. They will be the ones who can explain how it is that cloned velociraptors are bright enough to be taught sign language (I can dream, right?) But, as a rule, their methods are limited to an explanation of reality. It is reality itself that must testify to God’s handiwork. An academic belief in creation is worthless if we cannot appreciate it for what it is, and that, we cannot do with a calculator.