I will state once more that I spent over forty years believing the typical Christian perspective, that the Earth is six thousand years old, humans were created from scratch, and physical death came into the world by original sin. Even after leaving evangelicalism and beginning to seek factual truth, I first turned to Young Earth Creationist (YEC) organizations, becoming a supporting member of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) to make sense of things. I wanted, with all my heart, to believe the traditional Christian viewpoint. However, the things I heard from the YEC were preposterous. I knew they were lying, such as using the eruption of Mount Saint Helens to prove that the Grand Canyon was created in days, not millions of years. Telling the truth is one of the fundamental commandments of Christianity.

I then began reading books and listening to at least 100 lectures by YECs, evolutionary biologists, and paleoanthropologists, as well as many debates between them. In my pursuit of truth, it became clear that the old-Earth evolutionary scientists were the ones telling the truth. That’s what the evidence supports, overwhelmingly.

The day that our beloved football coach-church elder announced that I was not an real Christian because I resisted the idea of requiring the teens to believe in a six-thousand-year-old Earth, the only “support” I received, walking out of church that morning was a fellow-member who came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Mike, you’ve been brainwashed. All that carbon dating stuff is made up.”

I will remind you that brainwashing occurs when you are not allowed to think outside the box or the authority of the group to which you belong. That’s why some Christian groups want to destroy science, tear down institutions of higher learning, enact national censorship, and ban books. That is the behavior of brainwashing. Brainwashing never happens when you open your mind to a variety of perspectives.

Answer Number One: Young Earth Creationists’ Perspective

From this viewpoint, the creation story in the Bible and the genealogies in Luke 3:23-38 must be taken literally, accurately, and comprehensively. Additionally, the presupposition that the scientists are all working for the devil, making up stuff to deceive and destroy Christianity.

Specifically, regarding Homo Naledi, the YEC have made little comment except that rain had washed both monkey and human bones into the cave and the “atheist scientists” choose to mix the bones up to pretend to find another human missing link because they hate God.

I suggest you watch the Netflix documentary Unkown: Cave of Bones, which shows how the bones were found and the care taken to examine them. First, geologists have studied the dolomite cave in which the bones were found, and there is no evidence that groundwater has entered the cave over millions of years. The bones found were burials of eighteen articulated skeletons, an ape-like head on a human-like body. It would genuinely be absurd to think that a flash flood washed eighteen chimp heads and eighteen headless human bodies into a deep cave and each of them lined up anatomically. Lastly, no other bones, but Homo Naledi bones were found in the cave, indicating that the rainwater was highly selective. Magic.

Most Christians believe this first answer. Again, on the surface, it does not matter what you think about the age of the Earth. Our command is to simply love others. But it does matter when you start to falsely assume that a big swath of our society has an agenda to deceive you and hurt your religion. That level of paranoia is not healthy for a society. It also compromises one’s epistemology, your ability to find truth and to resist baseless conspiracy theories.

Going forward, I will move faster, covering more possible answers to this dilemma in each article installment.

Respectfully, Mike