Tonight, I watched a fascinating show on the Discovery Channel: T-Rex: New Science, New Beast. As a dinosaur junkie, I really enjoyed this show, showing how new technology allows us to determine more about these amazing animals, like how fast they could run based on their required leg muscle mass, etc.

But it was the last section that got my cranium gears grinding. They discussed other species of Tyrannosaurs, some of which apparently had feathers, based on fossil imprints. They then went into a long discussion of how theropods evolved into modern birds. As a young earth-creationist, these discussions always interest me, because they challenge my worldview and force me to examine the evidence again to determine the true origins of the earth and its inhabitants.

So once I’ve heard one side of the debate, I always like to check out the other side, and the best young-earth creationist site on the web is Answers in Genesis, where I found an excellent article on bird evolution. Upon reading the article, I was disappointed to see that the supposed feathers were not feathers at all, that this had been disproven years ago, and that embryonic evidence shows that birds couldn’t possibly have evolved from theropods. In fact, on examination of bird lungs, bird evolution from any kind of reptile would be, given the current evidence, completely impossible, a leap of faith requiring better flying structures than any bird to survive. (And feathers couldn’t evolve from scales. If anything, they would have to evolve from mammal hair, which doesn’t fit with the Darwinian timeline.)

While I should be ecstatic that my worldview remains intact, I find myself exceedingly disappointed in the scientific community and the state of science television. The “dinosaur feathers” theory was disproven almost a decade ago, yet it’s still being touted as fact on brand new shows. I want to examine the evidence and current theories, but the media keeps giving me Piltdown Rex. Is evolutionary theory so shaky that they can’t admit that they’re reevaluating their theories and don’t have all the answers? Or does it simply come down to the dollar, that investors want results and new information, and researchers who have to say, “We were wrong and have to start from scratch,” will lose their funding?

The Bible is not a science book, but the God who made the universe is the same God who gave us His Word in the Bible. So far, I’m still looking for evidence to the contrary and haven’t found it. I’m not talking about Intelligent Design. I’m talking about young earth theory. If it’s so backward, why does the evidence not contradict it? Someone give me some actual evidence I can struggle with!