Of course, looking back to that time, I wish I would have had the knowledge and wisdom to have said to them: "God has already answered our questions about such things within his creation. God blessed us with enormous volumes of evidence which explain the history of the earth and the diversification of living things through evolutionary processes over millions of years. God established the laws of physics and those evolutionary processes so that the biosphere could develop according to his plan. God is not like a human engineer who must continually tweak and repair and maintain his inventions. Instead, God created a universe which would abound with life and continue to adapt to new environments and produce new varieties attuned to changing. [As the scientist summarized in the Jurassic Park movie, "Life finds a way."] And yes, such a "system" includes extinctions and even anatomical features which run their course and become "vestigial." We who are Christ-followers realize that God did these things because we "read" the evidence he gave us within his creation and within his Bible. Only those with a weak-and-limited-god insist on ignoring God's answers in Creation."
One of the many reasons why I'm no longer a young earth creationist is I learned enough about creation and about the Biblical text to out-grow the tiny and limited deity of the "creation science" entrepreneurs who have built the American young earth creationism industry. They refuse to believe the evidence which God has provided within Creation and follow the example of the first century Pharisees who opposed Jesus: they attribute the wonders of evolutionary processes to Satan and "atheists." And they did so while claiming that ONLY THEY spoke for God!
