Creation, Conflict, and Controversy

I haven't blogged for a while, mostly because my thoughts recently haven't been fully compatible with this kind of blog. For example, I did homework for my Historical Geology class yesterday. I spent hours identifying events of the Pre-Cambrian Earth and putting them in chronological order. Then I wondered "If the Great Oxygenation Event marked the end of the Archean Eon and the beginning of the Proterozoic Eon 2.5 billion years ago, what great event caused the end of the Proterozoic Eon 0.542 billion years ago?" I hope our teacher will tell us soon. It's really going to bug me if I never find out.

Whenever I talk to people about my Historical Geology class (bear in mind that most of the people I know are LDS), they ask me how what I'm learning in class compares with "how it really happened." I put that phrase in quotation marks because it implies that what I'm learning in class isn't true, and I would like to ask in response "How do we know they're not both true?" I agree that God knows much more than we do, and if we disagree with what He says, then He's still right and we still have a lot to learn. But I suggest that if our theories seem to contradict with His revealed truths, then either our theories are wrong, or we're interpreting the revelations incorrectly. I suggest that it's possible that we don't perfectly know exactly HOW God created the Earth.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we humans are smart enough to figure out exactly how the earth was formed, even if God doesn't tell us. I'm saying that we humans are stupid enough to think we know everything. Example, one biologist looks at a couple of canaries in the Galopagos, and suddenly we have a huge theory on how every living creature on Earth evolved from some original organism that existed billions of years ago. Meanwhile, one Christian reads in the Bible that God created every living creature, and he jumps to the conclusion that God personally created every living creature by hand.

One theory says that Evolution did everything and who knows if there even is a god? The other theory says that God did everything and evolution doesn't exist. My theory is that God exists, and He did create the Earth. But you've heard of the "Economy of Heaven" haven't you? In October 1976, Elder Neal L. Maxwell of the Presidency of the Seventy said, "In the economy of heaven, God does not send thunder if a still, small voice is enough, or a prophet if a priest can do the job." My reasoning, in my own imperfect human fallacy, is that God probably wouldn't put the whole Earth together step by step if He could have simply set things in motion and let the laws of physics and, yes, even evolution, do the rest. Of course, there were a few places where God would have to step in and provide miracles in situations where the laws of physics would fall short. I'm pretty sure that God created the first few living organisms Himself, at the very least. And the scriptures are very clear that God created the first human beings personally (thus explaining the gap between apes and humans known as the "missing link"). But other than that, when the scriptures talk about "the waters gathering together" and other such steps in the creation process, remember: water does that even without God's help. All water flows the the lowest point it can reach, which, in most cases, is the ocean. It's not a miracle - it's physics. Of course, it helps to remember that God knows everything. He understands the laws of physics perfectly, and I believe He uses them to His advantage. God is the greatest scientist in all the universe. I believe that He used that knowledge to help Him create the earth. Though, of course, that's just a theory.