The Parade insert in the Sunday newspaper [September, 1992] featured a smiling Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan on the cover and an excerpt from their newest book inside. Not to neglect Druyan, but Sagan, of course, was (deceased) one of the best known scientific "personalities" of our day. Although he was an astronomer by profession and training, Sagan had become something of an authority on everything else, including the environment, politics and even religion. His articles are published in Parade because he was the most vocal and, I think, most eloquent spokesman and explainer of science on a popular level.

     This latest work in entitled Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search For Who We Are. A panoramic view of the history of the universe, and a fervent argument for the theory of evolution (both inorganic and organic), the gook holds as its premise that "our species is hundreds of thousands of years old, the genus Homo millions of years old, primates tens of millions of years old, mammals over 200 million years old, and life about 4 billion years old."

     Those of us who believe the Bible are well aware that we live in a skeptical, unbelieving world. Scientists, educators, and learned men speak of the absolute certainty of evolution and dismiss God as an anachronism, a holdover from a primitive, superstitious, ignorant past. If things continue as they are, belief in the God of Genesis 1 will not be met with argument or debate, but with amused silence, contempt or pity.

     The believer is sometimes intimidated by the scholarship and sophisticated arguments of atheists and infidels. Latin terms and names of species are bandied about, geologic ages are discussed in a matter-of-fact way, extinct creatures are reconstructed from a few fossils and footprints, and the full-blown system is found in virtually every science text in our schools and nature program on television. Really, is the case for evolution so certain and overwhelming as all that?

     We need not know a Tribobite from a termite, or the Paleozoic from a Pontiac, to see the fallacy of evolution. The crux of the matter is not so much whether man could have evolved from apelike ancestors, where are the "missing links" in the fossil record, or that there is no place on the planet where geologic strata are laid out in textbook illustration. Dinosaurs, comets, Neanderthals, Gondwana, and natural selection are all good issues to study and discuss, but why not attack evolution at its very weakest link?

     How did life begin? Mind you, now how did life adapt, change and evolve, but what about the origin of all living things? Sagan and Druyan posit that while the earth was taking shape, billions of years ago, "small organic particles trickled down from space like a fine sooty snow." And then...WHAT? Lightning crackling through the atmosphere, or heat from a volcanic vent in the ocean floor, or something stirred the organic soup and cooked up life from something that was not alive!

     I have little time and no patience for someone to lecture me on how a feather could evolve over the aeons and become fur on a bear or a quill on a porcupine. Let's begin at the beginning! Let the evolutionist put aside his eye popping charts and full color illustrations of man's long climb from slug to sea guppy to ape. Instead, tell me how -- without God -- life began. Evolution cannot begin to answer the question of origin!