I have been raised as a Christian, I wouldn't call it overly
fundamentalist, cause my parents did listen to rock music and such. I
showed an interest in animals from a very young age partially because
our first house had a big back yard that had lots of lizards, snails
with big shells, toads, frogs, earthworms, birds, squirrels, even
snakes sometimes.

I liked to explore the yard and find these animals and sometimes I'd
catch and hold some legless lizards (or maybe they were baby snakes)
that would sit in my hands and flick their tongues out, and little
anoles that would change color right before my eyes.

I always liked to watch "animal shows" on Discovery Channel and PBS
and National Geographic, where I could see even more animals and learn
about them.

When I got to be a little older I found out the people who studied
them were called biologists, and I wanted to be a biologist too. Since
around first grade, when someone asked me what I was going to be when
I grew up, I would always say "A scientist" or "a biologist studying
animals".

My parents never really had a problem with phrases like "dogs are
related to foxes". Maybe because this didn't seem so far fetched. They
also didn't have a problem with there being an old earth, though this
was never really crystallized, it just wasn't considered important.

I listened to a lot of creationists on tv when I was growing up,
mostly because they talked about "science" and I was always drinking
up everything I could that mentioned science. In seventh grade (second
grade of Jr. High) I was fascinated when I saw Carl Baugh on tv with a
human footprint that supposedly had a trilobite embedded into it. I
kind of shake my head at this now but I didn't think a Christian
leader would deliberately lie back then. I thought the fossil was real
and he had evidence that humans were around a long long time ago. I
didn't fully understand at that time that he was using it as evidence
of a young earth.

He was also kind of appealing in some ways cause he talked about how
he had evidence that dinosaurs might have been around as recent as
4000 years ago and he even claimed there were eye witnesses of
dinosaurs more recent than that. Lies, dirty lies, but that's how it
was. I thought it'd be really cool if dinosaurs were still alive
somewhere.

I didn't really fully understand the scientfic method nor did I
understand that eye witness testimony is not considered to be a good
source of information.

It was also in seventh grade that I was taking a life science course.
It was here that I got my first exposure to the nested hierarchy. We
were told about the Kingdoms: Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae,
Animalia, and lots of phyla. It was the phyla that gave me a good
first understanding of what would help me to accept evolution later.
In animals they started out with sponges, went up to jellyfish, etc.
This was also my first exposure to Euglena, which seems to show both
protozoan and algae traits. It all seemed like it fit together, but at
the time I was a creationist and I just thought God created them
separately. Evolution was barely touched on, never explained. Rare
mentions of "this evolved" but no support for that, and no explanation
of how evolution worked.

We watched a laser disc one day that casually mentioned evolution, I
challenged my teacher on that saying that I thought things were
created, not evolved. She just told me that the video said that was
how it might have happened. When I told her that humans weren't
animals, she got me to concede that scientifically, we do belong in
Animalia. She didn't help me quite as much as I needed it but I have
to thank her because she did help me to grow in the right direction.
She was very sweet and always answered questions I had.

I was having severe problems at school with the other kids at this
time, cussed at spit on, having every single book stolen from my
locker, having assignments stolen, being threatened with death, being
beaten up. Rumors were flying that I had been involved in all kinds of
things that weren't true and people hated me for things I'd never
done. So I went into home school to recover my sanity. I'm glad that I
did, it helped a lot, the only thing that was really lacking was in
the science area, but to be honest I don't think I was getting much
better education in evolution in public schools other than the casual
mention they gave it now and then.

When I chose to take biology in home school, I did learn a lot of good
information that was true, but I also had to write a paper on why
evolution was wrong. The section I had to study from contained a lot
of worn our arguments like the "second law" thing, and "goats don't
give birth to lizards". It was basically hovind-level crap.

I didn't agree with everything they said but I wrote the paper. I
asked my mom if it was right for A Beka to make us write it with that
position rather than deciding for ourself one way or another, and she
just asked me if I would rather have gone to public school and be
forced to write that God didn't create anything. Of course I said no
to that.

One thing I had a serious problem with was that they firmly declared
that there were two kindgoms, plants and animals. I knew from my
earlier class that this was wrong. I knew that bacteria and protists
and fungi were in different kingdoms. This was my first dose of
skepticism regarding creationists.

I began to gravitate toward Hugh Ross, I listened to him a lot, and I
actually did learn some stuff I didn't know before about the Big Bang
and such through listening to him. I had never really been a YEC
before, but Ross helped me realize that I was an old earther. One time
the nosy yuppie neighbor who didn't approve of home school started
trying to ask me what I was studying in school, I stunned him silent
parroting things about dimensions and time. He never asked about it
again. That's one of my fondest memories.

Hugh Ross was appealing because he made it seem like it was ok to
accept science, that science and the Bible really could come together.
His version of science was warped, but it was a step in the right
direction. It took me a long time to completely get over what I'd been
taught watching his program.

The next time evolution really came up was when I was 19 and just
starting college and in a Christian chat room at coolchat.com. I
debated atheists a lot and often they'd try to use evolution as a
proof of atheism. I would use some of the tired old arguments we
defeat every day here, and often I would win because they weren't
equipped to answer them. They confused abiogenesis with evolution, and
I did too, and I was able to defeat them when I showed them that it
wasn't proven. One day one of the atheists (nicknamed Drexl) from
Scotland came in that was a little better informed, we liked to spar
with each other, we were pretty much evenly matched. He too linked
evolution to atheism but he is the one that eventually led me out of
the dark of creationism.

He gave me a page that debunked Carl Baugh, and other creationists,
and the page also made the case for evolution of theropods into birds.
Drexl casually mentioned to me that people at the newsgroup
talk.origins would be able to answer any questions I might have.

I studied the page, it made me realize that Baugh wasn't quite honest,
I didn't believe him anymore, and I learned to be a lot more
questioning and skeptical regarding my sources, and I knew for a fact
then that I was an old earther and not a young earther after reading
the site's debunking of flood geology (which I'd never heard of before
in that term). I began to refer to myself as an old earth creationist.

I wasn't ready for talk.origins and wasn't sure how to get there
either, so I forgot about it for then, I wrote a question to the
person who authored the page and got a nasty response back in the
harshest filthiest language, which reinforced the idea that
evolutionists and atheists were evil. That killed that.

I didn't get close to accepting evolution again until I took my second
biology course in college. Again, I was presented with the nested
hierarchy that I'd learned back in seventh grade. It felt familiar and
I was excited to study it in more detail.

This was also the first class in which I was told how evolution works,
that it works on populations, not individuals, how natural selection
works, how genetic drift works, how sexual selection works. How
alleles change frequency in populations, how sympatric and allopatric
speciation work, how polyploidy works etc. More than anything though
it was the nested hierarchy I'd learned back in seventh grade, when it
was expanded into such detail in this college course, it was very hard
to deny that the organisms were related through common descent.

I didn't know how to deal with it, it was all making sense, all the
puzzle pieces were fitting together! I tried not to think about it, I
couldn't handle it so I blocked it out for a while.

I went on summer vacation, I was watching animal planet on tv, and
Gorillas in the Mist came on. I watched the movie, watched the
gorillas. Suddenly that biology class came back to haunt me. I had to
know! I couldn't deny it anymore, I couldn't compartmentalize anymore,
I had to know if there was any truth to creationism at all.

I reminded myself that a true scientist has to follow the evidence
wherever it leads.

Drexl's words from years ago came back to me "The people at
talk.origins will answer any questions you might have." I was scared..
things were falling apart, I wrote to creationist organizations, Hugh
Ross' site no longer had an e-mail address for questions, so I wrote
to AIG and other places like it. I wrote some serious questions, I got
answers back that were full of lies and I knew they were lies because
of what I'd learned in school. So I finally got up the courage to to
to talk.origins, I wrote "This is my last resort" in the subject line,
and they helped me.

I got some helpful and polite letters from the regulars (completely
unlike the caustic person who answered my inquiries to the site that
had been given me long ago), I found ways to debate and ask questions
of both sides, soon I came around to believing that God guided
evolution and then chose the first hominid that was fully human to be
Adam and then the story went from there. My interpretation of the days
of Genesis was still day-age (a carry over from Ross). I had no
problem with abiogenesis, because if God could guide biological
evolution then God could just as easily guide the formation of life
from chemical precursors. I was still awfully literalist, but I was
making progress. I was debating with creationists of both the young
and old earth persuasions, I began to refer to myself as a theistic
evolutionist.

Things were going great, though I fought with some feelings of guilt
and such sometimes, overall there was a tremendous release, I could
finally watch my favorite tv shows on Discovery without saying "no
that's not true".

The next step was I actually read Genesis again. I saw that the
serpent looked like it was cursed to go down on its belly and eat
dust. "But wait," I thought, "When did snakes appear in the fossil
record?" I studied it, I asked questions about it, and found out they
appeared in the Cretaceous, long before humans. This certainly threw a
wrench into my literalist machinery. I then took the entire account of
Genesis as symbolic. When I did, I began to discover meaning in it
that was lost to me before. I think the phrase of not having seen the
forest for the trees applies very well here.

I was probably around 23 1/2 by the time this happened. I'm 24 now.