They call her "Ardi" and judge her, at 4.4 million years old, to be the oldest intact skeleton of an ancestor to humans discovered yet. 
Discovered in Ethiopia, she's all the news, not least because she's different from the chimps that many scientists had thought we humans evolved from, so many millions of years ago. Ardi wasn't a knuckle-dragger, but she probably did spend lots of time in trees (the thumb-like appendage among her toes makes it likely that she could climb pretty well.) She most certainly walked upright.
Science is a paradoxically humble endeavor -- theories can never be proven to be true, but they can be proven false. Science proceeds in this manner of discovery, evaluation and reevaluation that has made it vulnerable to the charge that "those scientists don't really know what they're doing." Therefore anything goes. But not everything goes.
I suppose that some creationists, determined to understand the Bible exactly as they read it (usually in English translation) will see as vindication the way that Ardi makes scientists rethink assumptions about human evolution. But of course it's much more complicated than simply filling in the blanks of human certainty in science with a different kind of human certainty based on interpretations of biblical texts.
I am especially interested in the ways that millions of other Bible believers reconcile their faith with the acceptance of scientific theories such as that of evolution. How do you?
Must something be situated in time and space to be true? Must one believe that somewhere on Earth there's an old boat that survived a flood sent by God in order to accept that the biblical story is, well, true? Some say yes. Absolutely yes. And so they search for the ark's remains... and search and search. Most recently, evangelical Christian explorers from China and Turkey who belong to an organization called Noah's Ark Ministries International claim to have found the boat's remains on a Turkish mountain called Ararat. Previous claims haven't held up to scientific scrutiny, as I note briefly in Bible Babel. It all leaves me feeling a bit melancholic. The people involved in such quests are passionate, determined believers whose confidence in their understanding of the Bible -- what and especially how it means -- is commendable in its way. But the faith of these good people is based on a way of reading the Bible that excludes the rich possibilities of poetry, metaphor, and the great deep truths that exist in the most powerful fiction. Yes, I said "fiction." Stories are a timeless human vehicle for expressing what defies the limits of language. Stories make room for God. I write this knowing that many readers will now assume that I dismiss the Bible as a collection of silly fairy tales with no enduring significance. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
