Testimony of Norwegian geology student:

I am currently living in Norway and study geology. That would, perhaps, not be the most natural choice a few years back, being quite uncomfortable with the whole evolution thing.

I grew up in a Christian home, and the science vs. faith debate never became a big deal, though some skepticism towards man evolving from apes was expressed at times. During high school, there was much more focus on evolution, and I was really uncomfortable with it, fearing it was in conflict with Christianity. This all came to a peak around Darwin’s 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), when my science teacher decided to show a documentary of Richard Dawkins showing students all the ways evolution had disproved religion, and saying it’s all myths and fairy tales.

To our teacher’s great surprise, this didn’t hit home in our class. Even one of my atheist friends loudly proclaimed that the film was a bad idea and should not have been shown.

Obviously, I thought Dawkins had missed something, but still had a difficult time reconciling evolution with faith. Later, I heard someone say they thought microevolution to be true, but not macroevolution. It had never been observed, they said, therefore, it was not true. I thought, “Wow, that sounds reasonable and scientific,” so that was my viewpoint for a couple of years.

After high school, I attendeded a rather conservative Bible school. There was actually no teaching on science and faith, which was a bit disappointing to me. A couple of the students were young-earth creationists though, and though they did not fully convince me, our conversations did increase my skepticism towards science. My viewpoint after Bible school was something like: “God probably could have created the world in six days 6,000 years ago, science isn’t as reliable as it’s portrayed, but stil, what we observe can’t be in conflict with Christianity if it is to be true.”

Entering geology studies with a great deal of skepticism toward science was an interesting experience, to say the least. Soon, I wanted to hear from Christians studying science, and came across a video of Gordon J. Glover explaining some flaws of creationism and teaching some geology. This made me instantly order his book about the matter, “Beyond the Firmament.”

After some thorough explanation of scientific principles, Occam’s razor and such, it strengthened my trust in science. I came to see that evolution and Christianity can be reconciled. And I discovered, to my amazement, how Genesis 1 was simply giving the Hebrews a tale of creation of their own, using language and images they could understand, explaining why the earth was created, not how.

Now I find evolution strengthening my faith rather than weakening it, and God seems more awesome to me than ever. After all, using one shot to get all the pool balls in the pockets is more impressive than shooting one after one.

Source: God of Evolution