A hard time believing in Young Earth creationism, to be specific. YEC is a deluded fantasy with absolutely no evidence.
Actually what finally impressed me about the simple accounts in scripture about origins is that although they are simple they are sufficiently close to a practical solution as to suggest that they are true. Let me explain.
1) How did the universe originate and how come we can see distant starlight when the stars are so far away and the universe is so large that any light being emitted
at this exact moment would take billions of years to reach us?
Scripture claims that God not only created the universe but also stretched out the heavens, both events occurring sometime during the 6 days of creation. Interestingly if God stretched out the heavens to their present size in less than a week we would be able to see distant stars because their light would have been stretched out along with everything else in the early universe. How come nomadic sheepherders realized this when it has only been recently that modern astronomers have hypothesized in the Big Bang scenario (inflationary period) that this is what would have happened if the universe had been expanded rapidly? In other words we do not see in our telescopes the light that has been recently emitted, but instead we see the light that was emitted during the initial ultra rapid expansion of the heavens.
2) How could random mutations, even conceding that Natural Selection culls all failures, generate countless thousands of proteins necessary for even the simplist life to exist? In other words how could the first fully functioning lifeforms even get started?
Scripture teaches that the first lifeforms were not simple and that they were created in multiple types. Therefore, the diversity we see today in the natural world could build up very rapidly from the original types by the process of sexual recombination and minor changes to
already existing regulatory genes. How could nomatic sheepherders realize that this was not only possible, but a more feasible scenario than that offered by the "random mutations plus natural selection" scenario?
3) The latest hot idea in evolutionary science is called "evo-devo" and imagines that small changes to regulatory genes can cause large effects in the final living forms.
Evo-devo focuses on regulatory genes and tends to ignores the fact that just turning on a switch is not the entire story. We turn on a switch to start our car, but the question is not so much where the switch came from and how it functions but instead where all the things activated by the switch came from in the first place. This is why it is disingeneous (misleading) to say that evolution does not include abiogenesis. If by abiogenesis one means
the first fully functioning lifeform this is really where most of the details of life are at, not merely the switch which activates the car when the ignition switch is turned on.
So the bottom line is that God created the first fully functioning lifeforms in multiple types of land, sea and air creatures and sexual reproduction and a few minor changes to regulatory genes was able to take it from there in a relatively short period of time. (Do you realize how rapidly people can breed variations of animals to exhibit at a County Fair compared to how many generations would be involved and how long it would take given only "random mutations plus Natural Selection" ?) Yes, mutations can also lead to variation, but the time scale is typically millions of times longer in length. Not a very efficient way for adaptation to react to changes in the environment.
