They say they are wise, but they are fools; 23 instead of worshiping the immortal God, they worship images made to look like mortals or birds or animals or reptiles.
(Romans 1:22-23) Good News Translation
Evolution, naturally, goes back to Sir Charles Darwin and his infamous book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
We (that’s me and the Holy spirit) actually took the time to read it when we were in high school (sixth form). We didn’t know much about anything at the time but it seemed to be a rambling diatribe of anecdotal evidence with very little scientific merit.
We all have the same evidence. Our choice of paradigm determines what we think it’s evidence of.
– Matty’s Razor
We’re not sure when we first heard about the theory of evolution, we may have been maybe 12 or 13 years old, but we knew that this was potentially the answer to the God problem nagging in the back of our mind. Still, we were thrilled by evolution and it helped us to fool ourselves into thinking that there was no God so that we could sin as much as we wanted and it would be OK. It was our attempt at a logical antidote to guilt.
We were shocked to hear that there was such a thing as a theory of evolution, at first, and we thought that it was brazen that someone would be so bold as to suggest that the origin of humankind didn’t need God, but we were delighted by it and we pursued it.
We gravitated towards the biological sciences in school and then in college. We knew that we’d be going out on a limb, by throwing in our lot with evolution, so we wanted to be sure. We wanted to prove to ourselves beyond any doubt that the mainstream science narrative of godless existence (SciPop) was iron-clad. In 1990 we entered graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill and shortly found ourselves studying Paleobotany. It was a way to escape the mindless tedium of molecular biology which was all the rage back then. A lot of folk were doing cladistic phylogenetic analysis with DNA.
Faith is believing in something that you can’t see, because of evidence.
– Faith, definition
“A speed of light flight
– Matty, going to class at Duke in 1991
into boredom”
We had the opportunity to take a class in phylogenetic systematics at Duke University in the spring of 1991. We have to admit that we dreaded having to go over to Duke a couple of times a week for what seemed like a “speed of light flight into boredom.” However, we mastered the philosophy behind the scientific method, and the rationale behind the geological timescale. We specialized in the Devonian period supposedly about 350 million years ago.
By the spring of 1993, when the Tarheels won the Men’s Basketball NCAA National Championship and President Bill Clinton visited UNC, we left the Ph.D. program with a masters degree. It was a relief.
Matty's Paradigm 
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