For the first 14 years of my life, the stories of the Bible were the only foundation for my beliefs. I refused to believe anything else because I was never taught anything else.
When I was young, I took the stories of Moses and Noah as pure fact and memorized the Book of Psalms and Proverbs word for word. Not the “Song of Solomon,” though. It’s too “inappropriate” for youngsters.
As I aged through Christian school, I began to question the stories. How could Noah have possibly fit two of every species of animal on one boat? Did he bring sea creatures too, or just leave them to fend in the floodwaters? How did he feed them all for 40 days and 40 nights?
Since entering public school for high school and continuing my science education in college, I still question those stories, but I have a better grasp of how the world works and where we came from.
The debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham last week reinforced my views. While Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, cited mainly the Bible as a source of historical evidence, Nye, the Science Guy, presented facts and statistics almost impossible to discount.
Ham claimed evolution and natural laws are “man’s ideas” of the origins of the Earth and claimed the Bible as a literal source of history. But wait, wasn’t the Bible written by men thousands of years ago? The words of God, possibly yes, but still recorded by men.
What angered me more than Ham’s claims of the Bible as literal history was his discussion of students being taught immoral ways of thinking in school. I could listen and almost understand his reasoning behind a belief in creationism, but when he started talking about marriage as being “designed for a man and a woman” and the immorality of abortion, I wanted to turn off the TV.
Thank goodness Nye stepped in with his adorable bow-tie reassuring all of us that plenty of religious people still believe in science and even evolution, and kangaroos explain everything. Nye claims if kangaroos were on the ark, we would have found their bones between the Middle East (the supposed landing area of the ark) and Australia.
Some scientific data gathered and interpreted by those who are evolutionists may be flawed and could possibly be skewed to reflect the views of the gatherer. But “because the Bible said so” is not an educated answer to my questions about the origins of the world.
Chelsea Tatham is a senior majoring in mass communications and managing editor. She can be reached at chelsea11@mail.usf.edu.
