Monday, February 16, 2009

Change my mind for me

My biology professor is the most abundantly friendly teacher I have had in all my life. She's tough, pulls no punches, and never, never quits smiling. She just expects you to know your stuff.

Last semester, in my naivety I spoke out about the problems that the theory of evolution suffers. I was met with some resistance, but it was short lived, and we went on. A few weeks ago, when Mrs. Rock and I were arranging the details of a school visit that I would be handling, she approached me and said, rather cautiously,

"Can I ask you a personal question?"
"Sure" I said.
"You do realize..." she paused, "you do understand..." another pause, "You do realize that the world really is billions of years old.

I smiled politely, not really sure how to answer such a fallacious question coming from a superior. So I sidestepped it.

"I understand, Mrs. Rock, that there are fundamental problems with the idea of molecules-to-man evolution."

I hadn't answered her question, and she wasn't satisfied.

"But you understand, it really has been proven, I mean look at all the dating methods!"

I wasn't going to dignify a geological question coming from a biologist, and thereby expose my ignorance.

"I'm not a geologist, Mrs. Rock, and frankly, neither are you. All I know about radioactive dating is that they're all based on boatloads of assumptions about the history of the world; a history that was shaped by the ideals of biologists."

I shared an anecdote about rocks of a known 2-digit age that were dated using some modern dating method, and "shown" to be thousands of years old.

"But the biggest problem I have with Darwinism is the idea of the complexity of life originating from a conglomerate of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor."

And do you know what she said?

"I KNOW! Its incredible! It was a h*** of a roll of the dice!"