Our Family’s Creation Science Journey, by Mary Elizabeth Hall (originally published in Home Educating Family Magazine)
MY DAUGHTER hit me with one of those impossible-to-answer-in-thirty-seconds questions while I was dashing, arms laden with once-highly-revered artwork now surreptitiously removed to make room for more, to the garage recycling bin before racing back into the house to slap supper on the table before our evening event (whatever it was) beckoned us into the car and off to infinity and beyond. “Mommy, how would males and females evolve randomly?” she asked. Thankfully I had a non-stuttering response for this question. “I haven’t a clue, Sweetheart.”
As our family discussed the topic over dinner, we wondered how a random evolutionary mutation developing either male or female parts could possibly spur the necessary corresponding reaction in another of the same species. Consider for a moment what would be required. Both organisms would have to be fertile. The offspring produced would have to include both males and females, and be fertile as well. This would have had to occur during a point in the evolutionary chain before any higher organisms evolved (since all such organisms today reproduce sexually). It would also have had to be more successful than the asexual reproduction practiced by the other organisms around them. This means they would have had to produce more offspring, since every higher organism alive today had to descend from this original pair (unless you suggest this process randomly and successfully occurred multiple times). It simply didn’t make any sense to our family that such an event would have happened by chance, and I gave thanks in my heart for our Lord’s clear and simple explanation that He created us male and female.
I grew up steeped in modern scientific thought and never questioned the notion that we evolved from lower life forms over thousands of millennia until I became a believer in Christ during college. During a scripture discussion a friend said he would have a problem with the suggestion that Adam had a parent. I mulled that over and began to read arguments on both sides of the issue. I was amazed to find a wealth of evidence supporting the notion of young-earth creation, and I gradually became convinced of its truth. I learned that bombardier beetles carry chemicals in their bodies that ignite when combined, and that giraffes have spongy material in their heads that keeps them conscious when bending down to drink. I can’t explain these remarkable facts with random mutations and natural selection.
Years later my husband and I felt led by the Lord to educate our children at home. We were blessed by the abundance of creation science resources available to help us. Our family finds science fascinating, so we’ve used books and materials from a variety of sources. In fact, we’ve used public school texts side by side with creation study materials to discuss their differences in philosophy. We want our children to be familiar with the world’s thinking and armed with the tools they’ll need in the future to think logically and critically through the arguments they’ll encounter wherever the Lord leads them. We participate in programs at our zoo and local public school district’s science center. We watch nature programs on public television. But we talk together about what we see and hear, and evaluate the world’s teachings by what we know to be true in God’s Word.
Our family has found that the more we study God’s creation, the more deeply we are awed by Him. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” It saddens me that home educating families sometimes shy away from studying the sciences any more extensively than their home states require because they fear the world’s influence on their children. The world in all its beauty was created by our Lord for us. Scripture tells us the stars were made to give light upon the earth! That alone is an astounding and humbling fact, and makes me want to learn about the wonders God created.
Psalm 8 (English Standard Version) says, “When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” I certainly don’t deserve such dominion. I don’t even deserve to look upon the beauty of God’s creation. That He allows me these things makes my heart want to cry out the next verse with the psalmist, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!”
Last year our family took a trip out west to see the great national and state parks in Utah and Arizona. We were captivated by the astounding beauty our Lord created. As we walked the slopes of Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake we were struck by the subtle colors in the uniquely brackish water at sunset. Zion National Park surrounded us with rocky formations that seemed to touch the sky. Climbers looked like tiny beetles as they made their way up the vertical walls. The colors in Bryce Canyon took our breath away. At dawn the hoodoos seem to glow, as if warmed by the sun’s first bright rays. And the Grand Canyon made me want to sit still and look out over the landscape for a year or more just to study all the different ways the sunlight and cloud shadows played over the rocky surfaces.
But what struck me most powerfully as we traveled from park to park were the swirling layers of rock that proclaimed evidence for the Genesis flood. Dust doesn’t land in curving layers over millennia of settlement. It gets deposited that way when carried and dropped by water plunging over the land. In such a cataclysmic event water rips tops off mountains and scatters the soil through the valleys. Eddies and whirlpools carve tunnels and crevices. If I had any lingering notions of slow deposition creating the layers on the surface of the earth’s crust, they were obliterated by what I saw during this amazing trip.
“The earth is the Lord’s,” Psalm 24 says, “and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein, for He has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.” Let’s make sure we don’t neglect to teach our children about it.
Author Mary E. Hall 