• I will believe you more if you have a prettier website. It has nothing at all to do with the quality of the information, but if you have a good web designer I trust your information more. 
• My favorite part of the Intelligent Design side of things are the people who contend that it could have been designed by Aliens rather than God. It is just fun to read their stuff. 
• Isn't it funny that two different groups of people can have radically different ideas and both claim to be taking the Bible literally?
• Smugness in an argument is an immediate turn off for me, even though I think I do it often. 
• One example of smugness is when Young Earth people make comics to make fun of all the assumptions you have to make to believe in evolution. Sure it may be true, but it is playing to your base, not helping change anyone's mind. 
• As a video editor I have no problem with the distance of stars and the speed of light even from a young universe perspective. God could have very easily created the universe and then fast forward it a bit to the place where it looked cool and then kept on creating, (sort of like with creating a grown up Adam). This isn't creating something false, it is making sure that we could see the vastness of his creation. (Without it there would be no starlight)
• I do think that holding to an exact 6,000 year timeline is being a little dogmatic.
• I also think that God didn't write a science book or a history book when he wrote the Bible. There is science and history in the Bible, but the Bible is ultimately the story of God and the way he interacts with us. It is supreme arrogance to worry so much about our origins and forget that the story is about the creator and not the creation. 

Late night television isn't very good, so I got into the habit of having something on the television for background noise and tuning it out while I worked. Now I want some sort of noise in the background so I like turning on Netflix, but the problem is that I am picking what I want to watch with Netflix. This means that it isn't just "something that is on" but "something I want to watch." And that distinction means that I stop what I am doing more often and watch the shows. Which also means that lately I haven't been watching anything. 

Tonight the show that caught my attention was an old Nova documentary on how Pluto lost planetary status. It is fun and informative. I have such a soft spot for documentaries. Now I just need to find some time to watch them that doesn't keep me from working. 

But apparently I was wrong. On their upcoming picket schedule you will see on July 22 that they plan to picket Comic Con because all of the people there have made comic book characters into idols. They are also planning to picket Al Gore in San Diego that day too, so I don't know which event came first and which one was "hey, while we are here." If you have a minute check out their picket schedule. It seems like it must be fake. It is what someone would write if they were trying to sound like the stereotype. 

My heart breaks for these people, and also for the people who feel that they represent Christians. At least now they are going so far off the deep end that most people understand that they are far from followers of Christ. 

I think today, like the true Creationism Agnostic that I am, that I am really feeling like a believer in a middle ground between the young earth and old earth people. Let me make some totally uniformed bullet points that I will never be able to defend later, but represent where I am at this moment as I continue to research, pray about, and generally ruminate on this subject. 

• I can fully believe that if God made Adam as a full grown man that he could have made the earth as already old. 
• I believe in a universal flood, and that catastrophe of all catastrophes had a profound effect on the earth. 
• In looking at the rest of the Hebrew scriptures I see many places where genealogies are problematic at best when it come to determining years. This doesn't mean that the Bible is wrong, just that it isn't real concerned with exact dates, but rather a retelling of major events. 
• I still have a problem with a millions of years life cycle of dinos and other things that happened before the fall. I see the fall as a world breaking event.
• As such the death of thousands of created creatures (such as dinosaurs) would not be possible before Adam and sin

So I am now espousing a totally non-informed, opinion that I am calling the Middle Earth Creationism theory. (Which probably more accurately should be called the Adult Earth Creationism Theory, but I like the Tolkien sound of my way) This theory says that God created the world and that he made it in 6 days, but that we have no way of knowing when that time line happened so the time from Adam could have been 50,000 years or more. So the earth is both old and young. 

See that at least makes my brain stop hurting for a while, but tune in tomorrow when I am sure to have a new theory partially cooked up from my own brain and partially misinformed by books and the internet. (Sometimes there is too much information in this information age).

Disclaimer: Just so no one yells at me about teaching this when I don't even know what I believe, from the beginning (last week) I have been teaching that there are 3 major theories (evolution, old-earth creation, and young-earth creation) and trying to present the arguments that the two creation camps make. So tonight I will be doing the same. 

And since it is so essential you can find people from all spectrum of science and religion with all manners of agendas and quite varied levels of craziness trying to defend their ideas of the origins of the world. I have been trying to wade through it all to find some real scholarship that at least acknowledges its bias even if it isn't without bias. 

In my readings I have discovered lots of new things (like a reason for your appendix) and have been trying to distill it all down into a few hour long lessons. The biggest struggle is to try to present information that some people are thirsty to hear, but others don't care about, in a manner that isn't intolerably boring. I don't think I have found the balance yet, but maybe before tomorrow night I will.  

I always have had sort of a half-way theory about how the flood messed up the fossil record and I how carbon dating must be wrong. From time to time I have espoused theories such as the "God days are longer" to explain way the age of the earth and even argued that since God created a full grown man why couldn't he have created an already old earth. 

But all of these were not really based on scholarship or study, just on my own assumptions and picking up bits and pieces of information here and there.

This week we are kicking off a youth study about just this topic, however, and it has me scrambling trying to find the best scholarship and at the same time figure out what I believe.

Because when it comes right down to it, everyone must make a choice about what they believe happened at the beginning of time. You must make a choice because you weren't there, and no one was there (with the exception of God of course). Then based on what you believe you will shape the data that you see to meet what you already believe, because the origins of life is where science and myth meet up.

I thought I was ready to go for my first lesson tomorrow night, but in trying to do some fact checking found out that some of the things I was going to teach was a little out of date and some of it just couldn't line up with the rest of what I teach about God, sin, and salvation. So this little study on evolution has exploded into a 6 hour marathon of reading, searching, and praying trying to figure out the best way to present the truth found in the Bible to a generation of students who have been told that everything that we will ready tomorrow is wrong.

I could continue, but now it is after 2 and even though I want to keep reading and writing I have to go to bed. More soon.  

If you are a regular reader you know that my sister and brother-in-law sold their house in the suburbs of Nashville to go live in a major city in Africa The community that they are working in is beyond poor. It is situated right beside the city landfill so most of the people survive by scavenging food and other things from the dump. 

They along with people in their church, have started Project 61 ministries (the name comes from Isaiah 61). One of the ways that they are making a difference is by getting sponsors to send children to boarding school. Our Vacation Bible School offering this year was enough to send a kid to school and also help with the summer food program. So we we given a boy named Takley as our sponsored child. 

Yesterday my sister posted something on her facebook account that just broke my heart. Takley says that he likes summer camp (a sort of pre-school program they are doing), but he is hungry. At the camp he only gets 1 meal a day, but, he says, "In the dump I can eat all day." 

Here is a guy who has no concept of clean and healthy food. He just knows that he is hungry and so he is willing to root through a trash dump to eat. I see so much of myself in this boy. Sure I have never missed a meal, but I have more times than I want to admit gone after the easy rather than the good. I have looked at the need in my heart for love, acceptance, purpose, etc and instead of going to God and getting something good I have turned back to the same old ways that always made the need feel like it was gone for a while. Like Takley I have turned down one good moment, one true thing, one thing to place my trust and faith in, for what I was used to, for a smörgåsbord of stuff that I know is wrong, stuff that will make me sick, but at least for the moment the deep need was gone. 

If you would like to learn more stories like this check out Project 61 on Facebook. If you would like to donate to help children like Takley go to http://p61.org and follow the donate link.