About a week ago, news reports surfaced from Turkey that a team of evangelical researchers had claimed to find the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.  The team confirmed that they were "99.9 percent" sure that the wooden structure they found was part of the Biblical vessel that preserved life during the cataclysmic flood approximately 5,000 years ago.

Within moments of their announcement, evolutionary scientists began to cast doubt on the find.  The headline at MSNBC read, "Noah's Ark Found? Not so Fast."  Stories appeared, quoting archaeologists like Peter Kuniholm from Cornell who called the reported find a "crock."  Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist and historian at Stony Brook University who specializes in that region of the world, dismissed the reports as well, stating, "Press releases are not the way archaeology advances."

Though I certainly agree with that sentiment, I have to wonder where Zimansky and these other critics were less than a year ago when another earth-shattering discovery was touted by media reports.  Then, rather than being a potential find that would go a long way to validate the Biblical record of history (and by extension the creationist model), it was the reported discovery of the so-called Darwinian "missing link."

Nicknamed "Ida," this perfectly preserved lemur-like fossil was said to provide the, "final piece of Darwin's jigsaw."  But unlike the supposed Ark discovery, the frenzy that ensued from this press release was far from skeptical.

Sky News called it, "the eighth wonder of the world."  National Geographic trumpeted that Ida was a "branching point on the evolutionary tree."  British naturalist David Attenborough proclaimed, "The link, they would have said until now, is missing.  Well, it is no longer missing."  ABC's Good Morning America showcased the fossil.  Both the History Channel and BBC One aired documentaries on Ida called, "The Link."  A book by the same title was published almost instantaneously.  Even the online search engine Google fell prey to the trap and modified its search page banner to show Ida.  Within a week, over 630 online news sites had covered the groundbreaking story.

A year later, the scientific community is recognizing that there's nothing very special about Ida after all.  Well, perhaps that's not fair.  The remarkable preservation of this lemur-like creature is stunning (something best explained by its rapid burial in sediment...sort of like what would happen in a catastrophic worldwide flood).  But all those references to Ida as a "missing link" were summarily removed from the final scientific paper by the conscientious peer-review process.

So why the two different standards?  Why does the potential find of Noah's Ark generate scorn and immediate skepticism if the potential find of the "missing link" does not?  By the way, though I certainly believe in Noah's flood, I should acknowledge that I think the skepticism over the Ark find is completely appropriate.  Every couple years, it seems, a new group claims to have found it - and usually the evidence is less than compelling.  But how is that any different from the missing link - something that Darwin's modern prophets angrily say has already been found...until a news story like Ida reveals the truth that they are desperately still searching for it?

The truth is that science is supposed to be skeptical of everything.  And yet, so often we see the reality that Darwinists hijack the name of science in an effort to proselytize their own faith, and thereby commit the same offense they condemn creationists for committing.  Think about it:

Kuniholm mocks Ark hunters by saying, "These guys have already gotten the answer worked out ahead of time, and then they go out to prove it."  In other words, if there does end up being a large wooden structure on the mountain, that doesn't necessarily prove Noah's story.it only proves there is something wooden on the mountain.  Creationists then work that structure into a narrative they've already accepted of a worldwide flood.

Fair enough...but what was Ida?  Nothing about her suggested anything other than an extinct, lemur-like creature.  Yet Darwinists took a dead organism and worked it into a narrative they've already accepted of macro-evolution.  They presuppose Darwin's model is correct and then interpret the fossil in a way that helps tell the story.

So how about some intellectual honesty?  Science can prove there's a wooden structure on a mountain, and a dead lemur in the rocks.  But how we choose to interpret those scientific facts is much more about our presuppositions and faith than it is science.  And that's true on both sides.