Creation Station
Education and Current Events
Why It Matters! - Losing Our Young People to Evolutionism
A Barna Research poll of a few years ago revealed a frightening reality in America today. The poll found that of those children in church today, 70% will be unchurched by age 20. Another poll on young people found that of those High School seniors entering college who state that they are Christian, upon graduation 91% state that they are no longer Christian. The number one reason cited for this falling away is that the church seemed irrelevant to them.
One of the ways that evolutionists, especially those in public schools, have encouraged this opinion is by framing the issue as a choice between science, by which they mean evolutionism, and the Bible. They then go on to show all of their so-called “scientific” evidence for evolutionism. If evolutionists succeed in convincing their students that there really is a conflict between the Bible and science, they know that some of those students are going to choose what they have been persuaded is science. Unfortunately most parents and churches do little to teach their children how the true science and history actually supports the Genesis account of Creation.
How this failure can bring about tragedy is seen in the case of Ronald Numbers. Ronald Numbers is an author who tells a little bit of his life story in one of his books. It is the story of a person who was born into a Christian family and who went thru Christian schools from Kindergarten thru University. During these years, he was told about Creation in both school and church, but was never taught the facts about Creation. A short time after leaving the University, he went to hear an evolutionist talk about the fossil forests at Yellowstone National Park. The evolutionist told a story of the 27 layers of fossil forest at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone. He claimed that each layer would have taken hundreds of years to develop before it was buried in a volcanic eruption and that it would have taken at least hundreds of thousands of years for the 27 layers to
have formed. After having listened to the evolutionist, Numbers realized that he had to decide what he was going to believe, the Bible which tells of an earth a few thousand years old or the evolutionist story of an earth millions or billions of years old. In Ronald Numbers’ own words, “I quickly, though not painlessly, lost all faith in the Bible.” As a result of all this, Ronald Numbers became an atheist and now writes books attacking the Bible and Christianity. The lesson of Ronald Numbers is that telling is not teaching. Children who are taught the facts of Creation and how to think logically and scientifically would have very quickly realized the logical and scientific fallacies of the evolutionist speaker. Ironically, if Ronald Numbers had only waited a few years until the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, he would have seen the same type of tree layering that happened at Yellowstone taking place at Spirit Lake. In Spirit Lake the whole process of tree layering, of the type that happened at Yellowstone, is already half way finished and will be completely finished in about 100 years.
What the polls and stories like Ronald Numbers’ tell us is that telling our children about Creation is not the same as teaching them about it. It is essential that we prepare our children if we are going to protect them not just for now, but for eternity.
