As a former biochemist (I’m in computers now), I totally identified with Geoff Down’s story of how he became a creationist (from the book In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation). Here’s my redux, with quotes from the article.
1. Evolution has big holes in it, but it is taught as fact.
This lecturer was teaching us that natural law cannot explain how the universe as a whole can increase in order. Therefore, science cannot explain how this order originated. However, he also (I assumed) believed in evolution. I had never been taught that there were aspects of evolution that scientists could not explain.
2. Both sides of the origin debate are missing data and are equally plausible – or implausible.
I thought that if I held to a belief in special creation, as explained in Genesis, then I was holding to a faith position, whereas scientists had evidence to support their view. This lecture helped me to realize that if scientists can’t explain all the evidence for evolution, perhaps I don’t need to have all the answers for a creationist position either.
That day I stepped outside of my evolutionary, long-age mind-set, started going to other lectures, and endeavored to evaluate the evidence from both viewpoints. What I found was that the overwhelming majority of the scientific evidence we were taught bore no direct relation to either creation or evolution. The evidence that was presented within an evolutionary framework could equally well be reinterpreted within a creationist framework.
3. Evolutionists don’t claim to have all the answers because science develops – and therefore, neither do creation scientists.
But I knew that, if these lecturers could be inconsistent in the sense that they were not able to make the evolutionary framework fit the evidence at every point, then I could also hold in “tension†those areas of science that I could not explain within a creationist framework. My understanding of the creationist perspective became steadily stronger in its ability to accommodate and explain the real scientific evidence.
4. A deistic world view is not “unscientific.”
Often I hear the argument that science cannot allow the presupposition or conclusion that a Creator exists. The moment you do, you supposedly step outside the realm of science. This is not so.
5. Naturalistic evolution fails philosophically, in that it can not be integrated with the foundations of logic.
I have come to realize that evolution is a religious view founded on the assumption that we can discern truth by using the abilities of our mind to reason and think logically through the evidence perceived by our five senses. However, if we pursue that reasoning, we ultimately arrive at the conclusion that we have no logical basis for believing that we can reason logically. We cannot prove that our thought processes are not just random chemical reactions occurring within our brains. We cannot prove ultimately that we exist. Descartes was wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” The decision to trust our ability to reason is a faith step. The theory of evolution is founded on this step of faith. However, even to be able to begin to have confidence in my ability to reason, I have to start with a revelation from the One who made me.
As C.S. Lewis stated, “I grew up believing in this (evolution) Myth and I have felt – I still feel – it’s almost perfect grandeur. Let no one say we are an unimaginative age: neither the Greeks nor the Norsemen ever invented a better story. But the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational, how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about evolution?”