How the Gospel of Evolution Steals Our Faith

Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey

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By day four, the last day of their once-in-a-lifetime trip together, Dave Mulholland and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Katy, had memorized the turnoffs along Disney World Drive: Pleasure Island, River Country, Discovery Island, Disney MGM Studios, and the Magic Kingdom itself.  Today they were pressing on to Epcot Center to have “a look at the future,” as the brochure advertised.[1]

Disney World Drive itself was as broad as Interstate 4, Dave marveled, with its own castle-marked, fireworks-bursting signs.  It was like entering a foreign but familiar country.  The idea behind the trip had been for Dave to draw closer to his daughter, to get behind the emotional walls she had thrown up over the past year.  And in their wanderings through this Luxembourg of the fantastic, he had felt he was reconnecting with her. Until today.  It was Sunday and Dave had irritated Katy by insisting that they attend church.  Now his daughter’s stiff silence made him hyperaware of the rental car’s four-cylinder, sewing-machine whine. 

Suddenly Katy broke her silence.  “You think we really saw as much of Disney World as we wanted?” she asked, with just a hint of petulance.  “The lines might not be as long today for the Haunted House.”

“I want to see Epcot Center,” Dave said.  “I’ve heard you have to spend most of the day there to do it justice.”

“Dad, I told you that this morning.” She sighed extravagantly, crossed her arms, and wedged herself back against the door.  David knew she was making a show of pouting.  And he knew why.

“Look, Katy, the worship service took only an hour.  We’re still going to be there when the gates open.”

She looked pointedly out the window.  “Most people just skip church on vacation, Dad.  I wanted to sleep in.”

Their resort had offered an ecumenical service and listening to the sentimental, candy-cane sermon, Dave had grimaced inwardly, even feeling a bit guilty for having dragged his daughter out of bed for this.  But he had reminded himself that at least he was making a testimony about putting first things first.  They had gone to church!  Now he realized that his great idea had only re-injected much of the tension they had come here to smooth away. 

He turned into the exit for Epcot Center and headed for the parking lot.

“Okay,” Katy said, picking up her line of argument, “but if this stinks, can we bail? We can just take the monorail over and –“ 

“If it stinks, we’ll be sure to stay until nightfall,” Dave teased.  “Because personally, you know, I’m down here to have as bad a time as possible.  I’m really hoping this Epcot thing is excruciating.”

“Oh, Dad,” she groaned.  But he sensed some of her anger dissipating.  He paid for their parking ticket and turned back to her.  “You know, hon, this is probably the last spring break you’ll have time for your male parental unit.  I’m glad you wanted to come.  Let’s have a good day, okay?” 

Before he had finished parking, he heard her seat belt unlatch.  She leaned across the console and kissed his cheek.  “It’s been the best,” she said.

Kids’ moods turn on a dime, Dave thought.  Thank you, Lord.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

The great globe of AT&T’s “Spaceship Earth,” Epcot’s symbol, loomed ahead, but the waiting lines were already filled with people.  Dave and Katy had learned to hit second-choice rides or exhibits first; at the start of the day, most visitors were determined to check the big ones off their lists.  So the two of them made their way to “The Living Seas.”

The exhibit was housed in a building whose curvilinear design evoked waves upon a shore.  Inside a blue-green room with low lighting were exhibits of antiquated diving gear and photos of early submarines and diving pools.  Dave and Katy hurried through the display, urged forward by an omnipresent recorded voice inviting them to enter a theater where they would witness the birth of the seas.

In the semicircular theater they took their seats, and as they waited for the program to begin, Dave glanced proudly at his daughter.  Her pretty, girlish face was acquiring new touches of a more dramatic, womanly beauty, but underneath, he knew, was still a confused mixture of fear and bravado.

Dave and his wife, Claudia, had sensed that Katy was in trouble.  It wasn’t only the marijuana they had found in her purse, though that in itself had sent them reeling.  Worse, they felt they were losing her to a secular world smugly satisfied with itself and deeply hostile to their own.  And what stabbed most deeply was that Katy herself was becoming more and more antagonistic to their religious beliefs, to the point where she resisted any involvement in the church’s high school group and the Sunday worship services.  This from a girl who at age nine had responded to an altar call and given her life to Jesus with free-flowing tears of joy.

The theater darkened, and Dave’s attention was drawn to a man with a handheld mike.  “Ocean exploration has come a long way,” the man intoned.  “But how did the ocean form? The answers to those and many other questions are about to surface in a dramatic film simply titled, ‘The Sea.’”

With a wave of sound, screens lit up all around, and the audience was surrounded by vivid images.  First, the dark eeriness of outer space, suddenly punctuated by countless white spots of brilliance, while a voice invited the audience to imagine a place “somewhere in the endless reaches of the universe, on the other edge of the galaxy of a hundred-thousand-million suns.”  In this tiny corner of the universe, the mesmerizing voice went on, “deep within the cluster of slowly forming planets,” is “a small sphere of just the right size”, a sphere “just the right distance from its mother star.”

The right size and the right distance for what? Dave was caught up by the spectacular sights unfolding before his eyes, but something pricked his attention in those words.  Just right for life, I suppose, he thought.  Though of course Earth didn’t just happen to have the right conditions for life; God made it that way, as his faith had taught him.  He wondered whether Disney would give even a token nod to the Creator behind it all.

But Dave had little time for reflection.  Action was erupting on the huge screen again, where the molten Earth was being shown as a young planet, slowly cooling.  It spawned thousands of volcanoes, spewing out gases and steam until the planet was swathed in clouds.  The roar of the great eruptions shook the entire room.

Finally, the recorded voice broke in again: “And then the clouds of gas and steam condense and rain upon the planet.” Dave heard a sudden, loud rush of rain, so realistic he thought it was pelting the roof of the theater.  “Rain and rain and rain,” the voice continued, more intensely now. “A deluge!” Torrents of water washed down bare slopes of the lifeless planet.  Finally, the seas themselves were born, green waters foaming and churning; and here, the voice said, began the greatest mystery of the universe: life itself.  From the play of chemicals in the primeval ocean arose “tiny single-celled plants that captured the energy of the sun,” producing the oxygen required for the more advanced organisms to evolve.

Once again Dave was strangely uneasy.  Like the science programs he had watched on television, this one made it sound as if God had nothing to do with any of this, that nature by itself had the power to create the universe and the wonders of life on Earth.

Dave hazarded a sidelong glance at Katy to see if she was at all troubled.  But her eyes were fastened to the screen, her uplifted face entranced.  And suddenly it struck him that she had no reason to be troubled because she had been hearing the message of evolution all her life from textbooks, teacher, and TV science programs.

When the film ended, they were ushered into “hydrolators,” escalator-type contraptions that plunged down to another set of exhibits.  There, Katy was delighted with the gigantic aquarium, where divers were training dolphins to communicate with humans.  But Dave remained haunted by the image of blue-green seas generating primeval forms of life.  Maybe this was one reason for the barrier that had grown up between him and Katy.  Was she so inundated with images of a universe without any need for God that she was questioning her faith?  Was her rebellion against him and her mother coming from deeper doubts about whether the Bible was true?

When they emerged from “The Living Seas” exhibit, Dave resorted to humor to break through his obsessive thoughts.  He looped Katy’s arm through his and strutted like Rex Harrison playing Doctor Dolittle as he sang “If I Could Talk to the Animals.”

“Doctor Dolittle wasn’t a Disney film, Dad,” Katy said.

“I don’t care. Sing with me.”

She was game, and they staged their own little parade, zigzagging down the asphalt, singing under their breath at first and then louder as several passersby offered mock applause.

As they broke apart and stood for a moment laughing, Dave thought of Katy’s childhood, when he had called her Miss Disney.  During grammar school she had sported Goofy sweatshirts and carried her Minnie Mouse lunch box, even when her friends had moved on to the Ninja Turtles.  All of which had led to this moment, for Katy had always longed to come to Disney World, and that almost-forgotten wish had resurfaced in Dave’s and Claudia’s minds as they groped for a way to make her feel special.

Shaking off these memories, Dave steered her toward “The Universe of Energy,” with its towering topiary in the shape of a dinosaur.  They settled quickly into seats in a large movie theater, where Bill-Nye-the Science-Guy was soon taking them on and imaginary tour of the history of energy.  He started at the ultimate beginning – pointing to a spot where the universe was about to come into existence through the big bang.  A spot of light expanded into a thunderous crashing flood as stars exploded and galaxies formed.

Once again, niggling questions began whispering in Dave’s mind: What was there before the big bang? And how were all the millions of people who trooped through Epcot every year affected when they saw the history of the universe retold in completely natural terms, as if God were irrelevant and unnecessary? More important, what impact was it having on his own daughter?

Just then Katy gasped as the theater seats began to move under them, transforming sections of seating into a thrill-ride mini-train.  Bill Nye had transported them to the age of the dinosaurs, explaining that fossil fuels had come from this era millions of years ago in Earth’s history.  Then a giant comet crashed into the earth, raising a global dust cloud, and the age of the dinosaurs was over.

The moveable seats carried them along to another era, featuring a mock celestial media station with reporters describing a “major upset,” the victory of mammals over the dinosaurs in the survival of the fittest.  Suddenly another reporter broke in with a news update about the Ice Age, explaining the need for creatures to evolve thick skins and heavy wool coats.  That was followed in quick succession by another reporter, who had scooped a story about the glaciers of the Ice Age retreating to the polar circles, making conditions favorable for the emergence of a “whole new kind of creature.”

What kind of creature? “Our early ancestors,” Bill Nye announced – a creature that screamed like and ape as it kindled a fire.

Dave winced.  There it was again – the notion that human beings emerged from a long line of evolutionary forebears through survival of the fittest.  No place for the God of the Bible.  Just creatures emerging from the slime by chance, as if natural selection were our creator.

The rest of the exhibit covered the various types of energy resources – solar, wind, nuclear, coal, and petroleum – until finally, the train-like auditorium seats reassembled themselves into a theater.

Relieved that it was over, Dave said, “Let’s get lunch.”

As he and Katy sat at an outdoor table and munched on their sandwiches, Dave resorted to commenting on the weather.  “Sure seems hotter today.” But that wasn’t what he really wanted to say.  Time was running out for the heart-to-heart talk he had planned to have with Katy on this trip, yet he didn’t know how to launch it.  The heat seemed to sizzle into his emotions.  He knew the only way was to force himself simply to plunge in.

“I told you I wanted to have at least one serious talk before we go back.  Remember?” He paused briefly.  “How about now?”

Katy looked wary.  “Are you and Mom still worried about the purse thing?”

“That wasn’t good.”

“Come on, Dad. You didn’t have to bring me down here to convince me not to do marijuana.  I only tried it once.”

Dave fiddled with his diet Coke.  “I worry about why you did it,” he said finally.

“You and Mom don’t trust me.  You act as if I’m ten years old.  You have no idea. . . You should see how some of my friends act.”

“Oh, I have some idea.  I won’t bore you with tales of my years in high school, but I do remember what it was like.”

“Could we just get back to being on vacation here? It’s almost over.” Katy tilted her head back and pursed her lips.

“I don’t know how to explain exactly why I’m worried, Katy.  You are a good kid.  But I am worried.”

“That’s you job as a parent, isn’t it? And I mean, you are very, very good at it.  But it’s okay, Dad.” She grinned at him.  She could win him in an instant.

Suddenly, Dave lost all sense of where he wanted this conversation to go.  He had to admit that he had seen none of the typical symptoms of drug use in Katy.  No, it wasn’t that marijuana episode he was really concerned about.  It was something else that had been worrying him, and it had been brought into focus at Epcot.  He was concerned most of all about the stat of Katy’s spiritual life.

After they left the restaurant, they circled around a lagoon and came to the Norway exhibit, which included a tall, medieval-looking wooden structure shingled in elaborate layers and appearing strangely out of place in this Land of the Future.  Dave grabbed Katy’s hand and headed inside.  There they were greeted by recorded music, not the usual blare but gentle strains of hymns.  The interior was tiny and dark, the light drifting in from openings high up in the steeply sloped ceiling.  A placard indicated that the building was a stave kirke, a reproduction of Norway’s famous twelfth-century wooden churches.  Photos of genuine stave churches lined the walls.  In one glass case lay an elaborately-worked gold crucifix with Christ robed in blue.

The exhibit was intended as a historical artifact, a museum piece of ancient history.  But Dave lingered, suddenly aware of an ethereal quality permeating the dim light, a subtle memory of the days when Christian faith was robust, even heroic.

Katy began fidgeting. “Come on, let’s go,” she whispered.  “There’s nothing here.”

“Nothing?” Dave asked, without turning around.

“No rides or anything.  Let’s go”

“In a minute.”

Katy snorted and stalked outside.  Dave murmured a quick prayer and followed her.  But his serious mood was hard to break.  As he stopped at a vendor and bought some ice cream and then headed for a nearby bench, he could tell that Katy sensed the change in his mood and knew she could not longer put off the “big talk.”

“So why don’t you want to go to church with us anymore?” he said, deciding to jump in with both feet.  “What have you got against Christianity?”

Katy turned her head aside.  “I don’t have anything against it.”

“You act as if you’re going to die every time we get near anything that has to do with it.  You did it there just now.”

“Dad, do we have to talk about this? I thought we were just supposed to be here –“

“No,” he interrupted, “we aren’t just supposed to be here on vacation.  Your mom and I planned this so that you and I could have some time to talk.  That’s the hidden agenda.  So let’s have that talk before we get off this park bench.”

Katy attacked her ice cream, her eyes fixed on the dish.

“Look, Katy, your whole attitude toward spiritual things has changed.  I want to know what you’re thinking.”

She took a long breath, then said, “It’s just that I don’t want to be so different.  And I don’t have to be,” she added in a rush.  “I can be a good person without believing the things you believe.”

“Different from what?”

“Different from everybody.” She waved her hands as if to take in everyone at Disney World.  “Hardly anybody believes what you and Mom believe.  I have lots of friends who are good people, and they aren’t religious.”

Katy’s words were like barbs piercing his heart, but at least she was talking, at least she was finally opening up to him.

“I don’t think it’s a question of what anyone believes,” Dave said after a painful pause.  “Not even what Mom and I believe.  It’s a question of what’s true.”

“How does anyone know what’s really true?”

“A lot of people think they know what’s true. We just spent the day going to exhibits where a whole bunch of ideas were presented as true.”

“That’s science, Dad,” Katy said patiently, as if teaching a child.  “Science is things that are proved.”

“Most of it was more like philosophy, Katy.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was. Most of the exhibits here share one version of the truth, even when they’re talking about different things.  It’s a story more than anything, and it goes like this: By chance the universe came into existence, by chance the Earth was just right for life to exist, by chance life developed into birds and bees and butterflies, by chance human beings came along, and by chance human beings turned out to be so smart that all the world’s problems will someday succumb to our technological prowess.  End of story.  Hallelujah, amen.”

“But scientists can prove all that, Dad.  No one can know for sure about God.”

“Come on, how can anyone ‘prove’ that the universe came about by chance?  Everything I know about the universe, including my incredibly beautiful daughter, indicates to me that Somebody designed it.  Created it.”  All the questions that had been eating at Dave’s mind from the time the entered “The Living Seas” were finally taking shape.

“My biology teacher says…he says that’s our ego talking.  People want to believe they’re important, so they invent religion.  They invented the idea of a God who created them so they’ll feel better.”

“You really think life came about by chance?”

“It’s chemicals.  It’s all chemicals.  We saw how it happened in ‘The Living Seas’ exhibit.  Volcanoes erupting, then the ocean, then chemicals coming together.  Scientists have done it in a test tube.  I read about it in my Science book.  I even saw a photo of this thing with glass tubes and electrical sparks and then, you know, molecules came out.”

Katy flopped back against the bench, and Dave put his head in his hands.  So that was it.  She had been so indoctrinated with a secular view of the world, a view backed by prestige of “science,” that Christianity no longer made sense to her.  He saw it now.  But what could he say to make her change her mind?

“I just can’t believe this beautiful world came about by chance.” He said it again, more out of desperation than out of any hope that it would make a difference.

“If what you believe is true, Dad, then how come no one else believes it? Listen, last semester in English class we saw a movie called Inherit the Wind, and you could see that all the scientists are on the side of Darwin.  Christians just close their minds to the facts of science.”

Dave sucked in his breath.  He felt as if he had been hit in the chest.  It made him angry.  “Come on, Katy.  You know we didn’t come from the monkeys.” It was a pretty weak response, but it was the best he could muster on the spur of the moment.

Katy looked away without answering.

In despair, Dave realized that he didn’t even know how to begin tackling this subject with his daughter.  He knew very little about Darwin or evolution.  All he really knew – what he felt instinctively – was that if you dismissed God as the Creator, then the whole foundation of faith dissolved.  He decided to take a different tack.

“When you went forward in church and became a Christian, Katy . . . doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?” he asked.

Katy bit he knuckle. “I’ve thought about that—a lot.  But how can you trust how you feel in those situations? I mean, I get emotional when I’m watching a movie, and that’s not real.”

“Katy, the two are hardly the same.  Giving your life to Christ and . . . and watching a movie.”

“All I know is, you and Mom expect me to believe what you believe.  If I go to church and pretend to be happy about it, we’ll get along.  If I don’t, you get all serious and make everyone miserable.  Just like this trip.   It’s as if you’re blackmailing.”

“Katy, I…"

“Do you really love me, Dad? The Katy you’re talking to right now? Because this is the real me.  I’m not the little girl you have in your head.”

“Wait a minute.  Don’t I have a right to disagree with your ideas without you accusing me of not loving you?  Who’s doing the blackmailing here?”

“They’re not just my ideas, Dad.  They’re what I learned in school.  They’re what everyone believes – even what we saw in the exhibits today.  And you can’t argue with that.”

On that point, she was right, Dave thought grimly.  He couldn’t argue with that, because he didn’t know how to begin to counter what she was saying.  His daughter seemed to be throwing away her faith, and he had no idea how to stop her.  But what he said next came out of a place much deeper than his own frustration and helplessness.

“I’ll find out.”

“What?”

“I’ll find out how to argue with it.  I’ll find out why the story we heard here today is wrong.”

She rolled her eyes scornfully.  “Oh come—"

“Or I’ll give up my faith, too,” he concluded.

She stared, as if he had slapped her.  Then suddenly she dropped her mock sophistication. “Oh Dad, I don’t want. . . you know, everything to change.”

“But everything is at stake here, Katy.  That’s what you’ve got to realize.  Everything is at stake.  Look, if Christianity is true, then it’s not my belief or you mother’s belief.  It’s the truth about reality, about what is ultimately real.  And somehow I am going to find the facts that will show you it’s true.”

 

One of Many Answers Dave Could Give Katy

The late Christian evangelist Francis Schaeffer used to offer an argument against evolution that was simple, easy to grasp, and devastating: Suppose a fish evolves lungs.  What happens then?  Does it move up to the next evolutionary stage?

Of course not.  It drowns.

Living things cannot simply change piecemeal – a new organ here, a new limb there.  An organism is an integrated system, and any isolated change in the system is more likely to be harmful than helpful.  If a fish’s gills were to begin mutating into a set of lungs, it would be a disaster, not an advantage.  The only way to turn a fish into a land-dwelling animal is to transform it all at once, with a host of interrelated changes happening at the same time – not only lungs but also co-adapted changes in the skeleton, the circulatory  system, and so on.

The term to describe this kind of interdependent system is irreducible complexity.  And the fact that organisms are irreducibly complex is an argument that they could not have evolved piecemeal, one step at a time, as Darwin proposed.  Darwinian theory states that all living structures evolved in small, gradual steps from simpler structures – feathers from scales, wings from forelegs, blossoms from leaves, and so on.  But anything that is irreducibly complex cannot evolve in gradual steps, and thus its very existence refutes Darwin’s theory. 

The concept of irreducible complexity was developed by Michael Behe, a Lehigh University professor of biochemistry, in his 1993 book Darwin’s Black Box.  Behe’s homey example of irreducible complexity is the mousetrap.  A mousetrap cannot be assembled gradually, he points out.  You cannot start with a wooden platform and catch a few mice, add a spring and catch a few more mice, add a hammer, and so on, each addition making the mousetrap function better.  No, to even start catching mice, all the parts must be assembled from the outset.  The mousetrap doesn’t work until all its parts are present and working together.[2] 

Many living structures are like the mousetrap.  They involve and entire system of interacting parts all working together.  If one part were to evolve in isolation, the entire system of interacting parts would stop functioning; and since, according to Darwinism, natural selection preserves the forms that function better than their rivals, the nonfunctioning system would be eliminated by natural selection—like the fish with lungs.  Therefore, there is no possible Darwinian explanation of how irreducibly complex structures and systems came into existence.

Interestingly, Darwin himself grasped the problem and even admitted that it could falsify his theory. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” he wrote, “my theory would absolutely break down.”[3] Today we can confidently say that his theory has broken down, for we now know that nature is full of examples of complex organs that could not possibly have been formed by numerous, slight modifications – that is, organs that are irreducibly complex. 

Take the example of the bat.  Evolutionists propose that the bat evolved from a small, mouse-like creature whose forelimbs (the “front toes”) developed into wings by gradual steps.  But picture the steps: As the “front toes” grow longer and skin begins to grow between them, the animal can no longer run without stumbling over them; and yet the forelimbs are not long enough to function as wings.  And so, during most of its hypothetical transitional stages, the poor creature would have limbs too long for running and too short for flying.  It would flop along helplessly and soon become extinct.

There is no conceivable pathway for bat wings to be formed in gradual stages.  And this conclusion is confirmed by the fossil record, where we find no transitional fossils leading up to bats.  The first time bats appear in the fossil record, they are already fully formed and virtually identical to modern bats.

A classic example of irreducible complexity is the human eye.  An eye is no use at all unless all its parts are fully formed and working together.  Even a slight alteration from its current form destroys its function.  How, then, could the eye evolve by slight alterations? Even in Darwin’s day the complexity of the eye was offered as evidence against his theory, and Darwin said the mere thought of trying to explain the eye gave him “a cold shudder.”

Darwin would have shuddered even harder had he know the structure of cells inside the eye.  Contemporary Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins have tried to solve the problem by tracing a pathway to the evolution of the eye, starting with a light-sensitive spot,  moving to a group of cells cupped to focus light better, and so on through a graded series of small improvements to produce a true lens.  But as Behe points out, even the first step – the light-sensitive spot – is irreducibly complex, requiring a chain reaction of chemical reactions, starting when a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which changes to transretinal, which forces a change in the shape of a protein called rhodopsin, which sticks to another protein called transducin, which binds to another molecule. . . and so on.  And where do those cupped cells that Dawkins talks about come from?  There are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control groups of cells.  Each of Dawkins' steps is itself a complex system, and adding them together doesn’t answer where these complex systems came from in the first place.  It’s as if we asked how a stereo system is made, and someone answered, “By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player and a tape deck.” Right.  The real question is how to make those speakers and amplifiers in the first place.[4]

The most advanced, automated modern factory, with its computers and robots all coordinated on a precisely timed schedule, is less complex than the inner workings of a single cell.  No such system could arise in a blind, step-by-step Darwinian process.  The most rational explanation of irreducibly complex structures in nature is that they are products of the creative mind of and intelligent being.

On all fronts, scientists are being forced to face up to the evidence for an intelligent cause.  Ever since big bang theory was proposed, cosmologists have had to wrestle with the implications that the universe had an absolute beginning – and therefore a transcendent creator.  The discovery of the information content in DNA is forcing biologists to recognize an intelligent cause for the origin of life.  So, too, the fact of irreducible complexity is raising the question of design in living things.

Science cannot tell us everything we might wish to know about this intelligent cause, of course.  It cannot reveal the details of God’s character, and it cannot explain his plan of salvation.  These are tasks for theology.  But a study of the design and purpose in nature does clearly support the existence of a transcendent creator – so clearly that, as the apostle Paul writes in the New Testament, we stand before him without excuse (see Rom. 1:20).

Since the scientific evidence is so persuasive, why does the scientific establishment cling so tenaciously to Darwinian evolution? Why is Darwinism still the official creed in our public schools? Because the real issue is not what we see through the microscope or the telescope; it’s what we adhere to in our hearts and minds.  Darwinism functions as the cornerstone propping up a naturalistic worldview, and therefore the scientist who is committed to naturalism before he or she even walks into the laboratory is primed to accept even the flimsiest evidence supporting the theory.  The most trivial change in living things is accepted as confirmation of the most far-flung claims of evolution, so that minor variation in finch beaks or insecticide resistance is touted as evidence that finches and flies both evolved ultimately from the slime by blind, unguided natural processes.

The core of the controversy is not science; it is a titanic struggle between opposing worldviews – between naturalism and theism.  Is the universe governed by blind material forces or by a loving personal being? Only when Christians understand this – only when we clear away the smoke screens and get to the core issue – will we stop losing debates.  Only then will we be able to help our kids, like Katy, face the continual challenges to their faith.