There has been so much said by so many authors on this subject, that the challenge of writing something that isn't redundant is daunting.  Yet, in my discussions with Christians, invariably the topic of evolution vs. Creation seems to come up.  So, I find myself compelled to explain why I personally do not find Creationism credible.  But, that was not always the case - in the 1980's, I was sympathetic to Creationism.  What I have decided to do here is explain my own personal journey from someone sympathetic to Creationism and how I came to my current conclusion that Creationism isn't credible.

In the 1980's, I spent a lot of time reading Christian materials.  I wanted to find out whether I believed Christianity or not.  One of the books I read was Reasons by Josh McDowell.  Among the subjects that book addresses is Creationism.  I knew that I wasn't qualified to adequately judge the scientific merits of his arguments, but at the time his arguments seemed to at least sounded reasonable.  So, I thought that maybe there might really be something to this Creationism thing.  I don't think I was 100% convinced, but McDowell's book had me open to the idea.

I have always been fond of animals.  I'm not a "dog" person, or a "cat" person, I enjoy both.  I believe that every dog and every cat has individual personalities and emotions, albeit less than humans.  Christians have always said that God is evident by His Creation.  And based on my fondness of animals, I thought it might well be true.  Emotions and personalities didn't seem to me like the kind of things that would evolve.  If evolution were true, it seemed like personalities wouldn't be much use.  If a certain level of aggressiveness was "optimal," would all dogs or all cats or all people have evolved a standard, optimal aggressiveness?  So, the fact that some dogs, some cats, some people are very aggressive, while others are very passive, just didn't seem to make sense in an evolutionary model.  And while I'm no biologist, there is no doubt that living things are extremely complex.  So, based on these feelings and observations, back in the 80's I was willing to say that I had reservations about whether evolution was true or not.

At the time, I had heard that some people still believed the Earth was only a few thousand years old.  But I thought that was merely a radical fringe idea.  I didn't have any idea that it was a significant school of thought in Christian circles.  I now know that Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) is indeed a view held by a large number of Christians.  But I didn't know it at the time, and didn't give the idea any consideration.  I'm sure that any YEC adherents reading this will say that was where I got led astray, but I'm simply explaining my thoughts at the time.  So the bottom line is, I didn't give any consideration to the possibility of a young-Earth, and evaluated evolution vs. Creationism from an old-Earth model. In other words, I considered Creationism from the Old-Earth Creationism (OEC) perspective.

So, in evaluating the OEC model, a lot of things just didn't seem to make sense.  The Bible seems to present that the primary purpose of the Earth, and even the entire universe, is primarily for man. But if so, why did God create dinosaurs?  What was their purpose?  Untold millions of forms of life existing prior to man didn't make much sense if the Earth was here primarily for man.  Of course maybe God had some reason for dinosaurs and the like that He just hasn't bothered to tell us about.  But just judging on what is supposedly God's Word, the Bible, which tells of the Earth being a place for man, dinosaurs and other prehistoric life forms just didn't make sense.

And the entirety of the universe, in size, age, and complexity, just didn't make sense for a just a little Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve.  Of course, I considered the possibility that maybe God has other purposes for the rest of the universe.  Maybe God put life on other planets.  Even so, there seemed to be a heck of a lot of wasted effort.  Out of the trillions of stars in the universe, how many have planets with life?  Most scientists doubt that so much as one in a million stars have planets with life.  If so, what purpose could all of the other stars have?  I know that Christians say that even the star-systems without life must have some purpose to God even if we don't know it.  But again, just looking at what I could see, it just didn't make any sense.  What possible use could trillions of lifeless star-systems have?

Another thing that didn't seem to make sense to me in the OEC model was the violence of the animal kingdom.  I am fond of dogs and cats, but of course there are far, far more animal species that aren't too friendly to man.  I'm not too likely to have an alligator for a pet.  And of course dogs and cats are themselves predators, happy to kill smaller animals for food.  This animal kingdom didn't seem to resemble anything like the Garden of Eden.  I had heard some Christians say that the world is a fallen world, and it is man's fault the world no longer resembles the Garden of Eden.  But that didn't make any sense if carnivorous animals existed for millions of years before man came on the scene.

So, on one hand, I found myself agreeing with Creationists in that life just seemed too complex to have evolved.  And emotions and personalities didn't make sense to me in an evolutionary sense.  But yet on the other hand, the observational evidence of the universe and pre-historic life forms didn't seem to match Creationism either.  So I found myself very confused.  I just didn't know what to think.  So, I decided to put the evolution vs. Creationism issue on the "back burner" so to speak.  The other questions I had about faith, which happen to be some of the other questions Strobel raises in The Case for Faith, were of higher importance from my perspective anyway.  So, for the period of the 1980's, I just considered myself "undecided" on the evolution/Creationism issue and left it at that.

I don't honestly know when the issue of whether evolution should be taught in schools became a big issue.  What I can say is that I didn't happen to notice it being a big issue until the late 90's.  I guess I just wasn't paying attention until then.  Since it was now becoming a household issue, I decided to take a more active interest in the issue.  Since I had read some works on the side of Creationism in the 80's, I decided to read some works on the side of evolution.  And so I read Robert Pennock's, Tower of Babel:  The Evidence Against the New Creationism.  I don't remember why I picked that book in particular to start out with.  But it was in reading Pennock's book that I learned that the young-Earth (YEC) viewpoint is still a significant viewpoint in the Creationist camp.  Until that point, I thought it was just a "radical fringe" idea.  Critics of Pennock often point to his condescending tone of voice to YEC adherents.  And I agree it is true, Pennock is indeed condescending towards such a view.  On the other hand, I felt Pennock was justified - the idea that the universe that spans billions of light-years across could have been created just a few thousand years ago seemed so preposterous that taking it seriously seemed out of the question.  So, by the time I finished reading Pennock's book, though I was surprised that YEC still flourished, I was all the more convinced it was a silly idea.

During this time period, I was still calling myself a Christian, but I was finding it harder and harder to have any faith at all.  So, I initiated conversations with some Christians I met over the Internet, to shore up my deteriorating faith.  I happened to come across some YEC adherents.  My first thoughts were, "I can't believe these people are serious."  But one thing that hit home to me was that the YEC proponents did indeed seem to present a model more consistent with my understanding of the Bible and what one might expect if God created the universe for man.  They agreed with me that untold life forms existing for millions or billions of years before man didn't make sense with the Bible.  They agreed with me that the violence of the animal kingdom didn't make sense with the Bible's Garden of Eden.  So, despite the fact that the idea of the Earth being only a few thousand years old seemed very farfetched, I decided that I needed to learn more about the issue.

So, I went looking around the web.  I found a few YEC websites, Answers in Genesis and True.Origins.  On one hand, I'm saying to myself, "I can't believe I'm even reading this stuff," but on the other hand, I have to admit that I don't know anything about radiometric dating or fossils or the geologic column or anything like that.  So, while I had reservations about the data on these sites being accurate, I had no honest way of knowing one way or the other.  So, I had to at least consider the possibility that the YEC's were actually right.  I had been reading pro-YEC materials on the net, so I figured I'd go ahead and pick up a book on the other side.  So I bought The Age of The Earth by G. Brent Dalrymple.  Well, what can I say?  I accept that reading one book doesn't make me an expert.  But I can say that Dalrymple impressed me as knowing what he was talking about.  He was able to lay out many different ways in which an old-Earth can be shown.  The book focused on why he believes radiometric dating is fundamentally sound.  But he also covered other ways the age of the Earth can be shown, such as via cosmological evidence.  I became fairly convinced that my original conclusion, that a young Earth is very unlikely, was the correct conclusion.  Though I'm no expert on radiometry, cosmology, archeology, geology, paleontology, etc., the possibility that all those fields could all be wrong is just too far-fetched.

Now, I have heard YEC's argue that cosmologists assume that archeologists are right, while archeologists assume cosmologists are right, etc.  And so, the argument goes, the evidence for an Old-Earth is merely a massive case of flawed circular reasoning.  I'm sorry, but I find that pretty hard to believe.  In fact, Dalrymple made a point of not using radiometric evidence when speaking of cosmological evidence, and vise-versa, specifically to avoid this potential problem.  So the idea of a massive case of flawed circular reasoning just seems pretty unlikely.

Then there are always the YEC Christians that argue that scientists hide or ignore evidence of a young Earth because the scientists just don't want to admit there is a Creator.  I've always found that idea hard to imagine.  From my own experience, I know that I am exactly the opposite - I would really like to believe there is a God.  Who could want to turn to dust when they die?  Who could possibly think that is a desirable outcome?  So, the idea of somebody actually wanting to not believe in God and wanting to hide evidence of God seems hard to imagine.  And, even if there are such people, I rather doubt there are enough of such people that they could have a lock on science and discovery, preventing the truth of a young Earth from coming out.  After all, a high percentage of scientists believe in God.  So, the idea of a great atheist conspiracy hiding the truth just doesn't seem believable. 

So, since I had returned to my belief that a young-Earth just isn't believable, I decided to once more consider an OEC view.  I came across some of Dr. Hugh Ross' books.  He's a "Progressive Creationist."  He believes the Earth and the universe is indeed billions of years old.  And he believes that God came along and created new life forms every few million years or so.  He seems to be quite intelligent.  And he seems to (like Dalrymple) provide a good case that the universe is old.  He believes that the creation "days" in Genesis are not literal 24-hour days.  So, he is a "day-age" proponent.  But I'm afraid that I just don't find his attempts to reconcile scripture with an old Earth plausible.  Ross has plenty of enemies in the OEC camps, and plenty of refutations of his theology exist around the net, so I won't elaborate them here.  The bottom line to me is that an old Earth seems inconsistent with Earth being here primarily for man and the Garden of Eden.

So, it seems to me that essentially, OEC and YEC effectively disprove each other.  I agree with the YEC's that a young Earth is what one would expect from reading Genesis.  And I agree with OEC's that the evidence for an old-Earth is just too strong.  So, as I said, they effectively disprove each other.

Very recently, I decided to read Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.  And while I know that I'm not really qualified to present an intellectual defense of Dawkins, I can say that his work did appear to me to be more credible than the Creationist works I have read.  His arguments seemed to me to fit the observational model much better.   Creationism now seems to me to be completely inconsistent with the the observational evidence.

Many Christians, when I explain that I find Creationism to not be credible, they seem to often assume that I've only read pro-evolution materials.  They say that if I read the pro-Creationism materials with an open mind, I will see that evolution is a theory with no evidence.  But I have read pro-Creation materials.  And these same people that claim that I must not have read pro-Creation materials usually have themselves not read any pro-evolution materials!  So, I say to them, take your own advise.  Read materials on both sides.  I think the evidence for evolution, at least after abiogenesis speaks for itself.