Evolution vs. Creationism

I have always loved science. I think when I was a child I covered nearly ALL branches of science in what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was in high school my science teacher was called in to the school board superintendents office and told NOT to teach us about evolution because it contradicted his religious faith and his daughter was in my biology class. My teacher was so annoyed by this that he asked us to open our biology books to the chapter on evolution and completely rip it out of our books. Had I been the Briar creature then that I am now I'd have gone to a school board meeting to protest the complete stupidity of this rule because this girl's daddy would have no control on what she learned beyond high school and it also took away MY right to learn about evolution.

One day as a child my parents and I were out riding around on a dusty old dirt road. It was obvious that it was rarely traveled. Someone had decided to dump their junk out there rather than the town landfill. The stuff was pretty old but some of it was of interest to my dad and for me we'd just struck gold. There was a set of science encyclopedias. My parents said no because they were old and weathered and likely had cooties, but I promised to keep them out in my playhouse. I loved them. I would read for hours in them but as it got colder that was harder to do. My dad had an old truck we rarely used and it had a camper shell on it. He moved it so that the sun would warm it most of the day. I moved my encyclopedias in there as well as my microscope and chemistry set (which had to be a relief to my mother because I'd nearly blown up the toilet with one of my "potions"). I hung up my star charts and my poster of Mars I took from a National Geographic. Now I had a lab and I continued to read in the encyclopedias. I came across a chart showing one celled animals, so I ran down into the field below my house to the pasture that had a pond with the BEST frogs ever! I had to take a stick and break away ice, but I managed over time to identify each and every one celled animal on the chart in that book. So not teaching me evolution was more of an injustice than an outrage because I probably could have taught the class myself.
The part that really bugged me is that it's true. Evolution is a fact of nature. NO ONE can deny it. In your younger years you learn about the Arctic fox and hare vs. the Desert fox and hare. Clearly they have evolved to their environment. Many things have changed and we know it well. Maybe people are uncomfortable putting the name to it because Evolution sounds like a dirty word to the ignorant Christian. I learned all the theories of Evolution. I came away feeling skeptical every time. I mean, most things that evolve have to change completely to exist in their everchanging environment. So why are there still monkeys?? This could be a bit of stubbornness on my part but I really don't think that MY DNA was ever part monkey. But I read them all and think about them and I can almost believe it. Like a Stephen King book, it falls apart at the end. I just don't believe that some unknown spark hit primordial soup or primitive fairy dust. THAT would require a miracle that sounds a LOT like God to me and we are right NOW at the point where we try to explain where WE came from....That is as far as I ever got with the science of where I came from.
This explanation has always worked for me:

26 ¶ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 ¶ And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

(Genesis 1:27-31)

THAT makes more sense to me and twice as much so when I was handed on of my children for the very first time after having watched my stomach grow from flat to round and felt the life inside of me. Feeling my baby having a nasty case of hiccups in MY tummy. There is a lot that science explains for me, most things, in fact. But God did give that spark of life, I've never ever doubted it since I became a mother.

This is what prompted today's blog:
In The Beginning