Thanks for Healthy Skepticism

Every now and then, amidst all the sad things I inform you about concerning the state of the church and culture, I like to encourage you as others encourage us. Here is a letter we received from a family in Illinois:

My family and I recently took a road trip from central Illinois to Utah and southern Colorado. One of the trip highlights was our stop in Vernal, UT where we visited the modestly sized but high quality “Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum”

Prominent in their display content were some beautiful fossilized leaves that were found by manually pulling apart layers of sandstone slabs commonly found in that region.  Every vein and delicate texture of the leaves were preserved as dark imprints against the light colored sandstone.

A teachable moment presented itself when viewing the short video and inscription of how these fossils came to be. Their conclusion went something like this: Millions of years ago, the area was once a lake surrounded by trees. Every year, the trees would shed their leaves which then settled on the lake bottom along with tiny amounts of other sediment. Through countless ages the bottommost leaves and sediment compressed and eventually became fossilized when the conditions were right.

As an outdoorsman, I have had the messy occasion to walk some present day lake beds while fishing, swimming, etc. Having slogged through the thick, submerged layers of decomposing leaves and watching the gas bubbles rise to the surface in response, I can tell you that when the leaves pile up and age they eventually decompose into common mud. I am confident that no matter how deeply I wanted to dig into that mush, there would be no pristinely preserved leaves to be found.

Rather, the only rational answer of how such leaves could be preserved would be by very rapid burial with heavy sediment turning quickly to rock, and not a gradual burial over millions of years. Clearly, such an extreme sedimentary situation is consistent with the major deluge and upheaval described in Genesis of the Old Testament.

We took an opportunity to share this though with our children, and it served to open their eyes to the fact that not all material prepared by “grown-ups” is automatically reliable and to be treated as fact … particularly if it presents a departure from history as recorded in the Bible.

Thank you AiG for helping to equip us as parents, and for encouraging a healthy level of skepticism toward the claims of modern science and of those who have chosen a worldview which doesn’t acknowledge our Creator. Please keep up the good work.

Many families have been impacted by AiG as this one has. How we praise the Lord for the way He has used AiG to help families in raising a godly generation. It reminds me once again of our theme for this year: “Standing Our Ground, Rescuing Our Kids” (Galatians 1:4).

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken