Biology: Response Paper

Origin of the Earth, Life, and How All of this Came About

By: Rebecca Reinhard

2/2/2016
 Before we began the unit of evolution, I thought I didnt really believe in any of it. After

reviewing what I learned in this unit, I came to realize that I believe in some aspects of evolution

and also in the biblical aspects. I have also come to the conclusion that since I believe in both

and some of the things that I believe in contradicts each other, there must be a reasonable

explanation for the contradictions. I cannot really say I believe in only evolution or only in God

in this paper. I know I believe in God and also some aspects evolution. Therefore, I can only

conclude that I am undecided at this moment.

Evolution is the process of things changing over some amount of time. In class we

learned about evolution using tortoises as an example. On a little island off the mainland there

lives a single tortoises that is unique from the mainland tortoises. Both tortoises have almost the

same DNA, minus a few changes. Those minor changes in DNA cause the tortoises to be unable

to breed with each other. Therefore, the unique DNA of the island tortoise could not be

reproduced and it became extinct.

I understand that God created the earth and everything on the earth. That it only took six

days for everything to be made and on the seventh day God rested. I believe that creation and

how everything formed should be taken literally. The fall shows us how man messed up, and

how God separated us from Him because we became unholy. I believe you can go deeper into

the message and try to understand how God was able to create the whole universe. I believe that

we can learn from sciences what the Bible did not tell us. Since the Bible does not tell us how

physics works or all the elements on the periodic table, etc., we need science to fill in the details.

Science is a way for us to understand how different things work that were not explained by the
Bible. Science is man's way of explaining the unknown and I feel it is also true, until it can be

proven wrong.

I would say that based on the biblical genealogy, the earth is somewhere around 6,000

years old. I also think it is possible that the Bible might be missing some recorded details and the

earth might be a little over 6,000 years old but no where close to a million and especially not 4.5

billion years old as carbon dating would have us believe . The reason why I do not believe the

earth to be older can be proven based on math and science. It has been proven that the sun

shrinks about 5 feet per hour every day of every year, yet it has not been proven that the earths

orbit around the sun has changed. We learned in science that the larger an object is, the greater

the gravitational pull on the smaller object. Using some quick math, the sun shrinks about 43,800

ft every normal year and 43,932 ft every leap year. The sun would have shrunk about

197,248,500,000,000 ft or 37,357,670,454.55 miles since the earth was supposedly created, if the

earth is 4.5 billion years old. The sun right now is 432,376 miles wide. The earth is 92.96 million

miles away from the sun, at this moment. If the sun was 37,358,102,830.55 miles wide and the

earths orbit around the sun has not changed, then the earth would have been orbiting inside the

sun & life as we know it could not have existed. Looking at Neptune, it is 2.8 billion miles away

from the sun and it also would have been orbiting inside of the sun. To me, this proves that there

would have been no possibility of having any planets in our solar system. Since carbon dating is

the only way we currently have to prove how old the earth is, I can not accept it as true because

math and science contradict it.

I accept the fact that we came out of Africa. We all are suppose to come from one man

and one woman and that evidence can be traced through some males y chromosome. What I said
in the prior paragraph is that I dont believe in carbon dating. Based on my previous explanation,

I would have to say that carbon dating is false evidence since nothing could exist on earth at that

time period. Even if the earth is around 6,000 years old, you can still have animals adapt and

change enough to be called a type of evolution. It just happened in a shorter amount of time than

originally expected.

I do believe that animals can change and adapt to their climate. I also believe that if you

separate a group of animals long enough, to different areas, then bring those two groups back

together, they may not be able to breed with each other any longer. I would not say they create a

completely different species, I would just say they evolved to their own climates and that can

change the genetic makeup. I do not believe that humans evolved from monkeys or any other

animals, humans were always humans. There are different types of humans which we call races

but that doesnt mean that someone is a new species because we are a different ethnicities. It is

the same with monkeys, dogs, cats, ect. We just call them different names to be more descriptive

of what the animal is. I do believe things can change and evolve, but I do not believe that one

animal can change into a completely new animal.

I believe in both science and the bible. In time, science may be able to prove the bible to

be correct. At that point, we might be able to put the two ideas together and make a more logical

conclusions. This is how I view the topic of evolution, I can agree with some aspects but also

disagree with others. This is a complicated subject and I remain undecided.