Blood Cells, Dinosaurs, and Creationism

Scientific American has an article up about how researchers have been able to find soft tissue in the fossils of long-dead dinosaurs (the article can be found here). This should be exciting for you Young-Earth Creationists (YEC), because it lends some small scientific respectability to the argument that the theory of evolution is fundamentally wrong. After all, if the fossils had been in the ground as long as scientists say they had been, then there should not have been any blood cells here. While keeping my views quiet for now -I am still a theistic evolutionist- I thought that I should tell you all about this. I'll would leave you with an excerpt, showing that the writer is obviously baffled at this finding:

"The conventional wisdom holds that when an animal dies under conditions suitable for fossilization, inert minerals from the surrounding environment eventually replace all of the organic molecules—such as those that make up cells, tissues, pigments and proteins—leaving behind bones composed entirely of mineral. As I sat in the museum that afternoon in 1992, staring at the crimson structures in the dinosaur bone, I was actually looking at a sign that this bedrock tenet of paleontology might not always be true—though at the time, I was mostly puzzled. Given that dinosaurs were nonmammalian vertebrates, they would have had nucleated blood cells, and the red items certainly looked the part..."

Isn't this crazy? No matter how this finding plays out, though, it is important to think about how the Bible and science work together (or do not work together) in our understanding. Those of us who represent the Christian faith to others should be prepared "to give an apologetic to anyone who asks [us] for a reason for the hope that is in [us]" (1 Peter 3.15), and thinking about how the Bible and science intersect is a major part of being able to do that.