One summer afternoon several years ago I noticed a loud buzzing sound from our front porch, like a bumblebee or cicada. The creature on the screen even looked like a cicada at first, wings spread as though it had come to light and would soon take off for other perches. Then, with a gasp, I realized it was a hummingbird, blurring its wings furiously between short rest pauses, its beak firmly wedged in the mesh.

For at least the fourth time in two decades, evolutionary researchers have found fossils they say represent a new species of human. But intelligent design experts and young-earth creationists agree that, once again, the find represents just one more ape.

Since many leading universities are steeped in scientism and evolutionary theory, some Christian students shy away from pursuing a science degree at a secular school. Nathaniel Jeanson was not one of those students.

Jeanson, homeschooled through the eighth grade, gained a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology at Harvard in 2009. A husband and father of four, he now serves as a research biologist with the creationist organization Answers in Genesis and has authored Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species.

The observable universe contains more than 100 billion galaxies. Our galaxy alone, popularly known as the Milky Way, has more than 100 billion stars. Does that make you yearn for those days of yesteryear when many followed the thought of Aristotle and Ptolemy: Five planets plus the sun and the moon circling Earth? Was it easier to evangelize before people thought of Earth as a little sphere circling a fifth-rate star on a minor galaxy’s periphery—so why should God care about us?

When Darwinist propaganda dominates academia and media, how can Christian students develop countercultural convictions and, like Günter Bechly, the courage to defend them?

Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson says 20th-century evangelicals “made a crucial error in picking evolution as a main point of contention with modernity.” Gerson quotes William Jennings Bryan from a century ago: “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. If evolution wins … Christianity goes.”

German paleontologist Günter Bechly, former curator of the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, is a world expert on fossilized dragonflies. He has discovered more than 170 new species, and eight species, two genera, and one family of organisms have been named after him. To prepare for an exhibit celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, Bechly read intelligent design books—and became an ID proponent. He is now a fellow at the Discovery Institute and a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. He now lives in Austria, but I interviewed him in Seattle, Wash.