[post removed, with apology]
Sorry about my pointed reply that I had up here, @Tim_Matter. Instead of welcoming you to continue sharing here (my job as a moderator), I instead launch into an attack of your position. I should (and usually do) know better. I guess I’ve been jumpy around here lately as maybe some other forum participants would probably agree too.
Your shared experiences are welcome here, whatever status of faith or non-faith you identify with.
MarkD- I’m not in any science field, but if I had been inclined to do that for a living, I may have decided against it because of Young Earth Creationisms anti science attitude. Anything that contradicts a 6000 year old Earth, and global flood about 4500 years ago that left only 8 people and a few pairs of each kind of animal alive on Earth, can’t be true. I didn’t realize it, but that cuts out most sciences that end in *ology, along with known history.
“I can’t tell if you’ve accepted OC or have given up Christianity altogether.” I’ve given up on the Abrahamic God altogether, and I don’t feel the need to investigate if any of the other gods people believe in are true.
If there was a true God, mine was it. I don’t think a deistic god can be disproved, but not much is claimed about him/it except that he/it is the “first cause”. At least he is not threatening to burn people in hell for not believing in him.
If you want to know more, is there somewhere off biologos so we can talk about thing that are off topic for this website?
You can always message MarkD (or any of us) by clicking on our icons and clicking the blue ‘Message’ button. Then only the recipient(s) that you choose will see your message and be able to respond to it in kind.
Melvin_Bitikofer- [post removed, with apology]
I was thinking of a reply when it disappeared. I saw you say the same thing before.
I guess I am disagreeing or agreeing with the YEC playbook point by point. It’s hard for anybody to be wrong all of the time.
yeah … none of us is brilliant enough to be wrong all the time! I like to remember that too.
If you still wanted to see and react to what was there, I didn’t mean to deprive you of a chance to give answer, and I could probably send it to you as a private message on request. But as far as public forum behavior goes here, … I thought my behavior there was probably cringe-worthy. I’d better scuttle off to get some sleep. Blessings to you.
Thanks Tim for sharing. The wall does seem to come tumbling down for many. I was also raised as a YEC. I suppose my experiential knowledge of Christ prevented the wall of my faith from being significantly impacted as was confronted by the science. I remember going through the same questions “If x didn’t actually happen, how can I trust what the Bible says about y?” But rather than throw out the baby of faith with the bathwater of YEC, I looked for solutions to harmonize my faith with science. The science challenged me to reconsider my long-held biblical interpretations (required for a YEC view). It was freeing to discover that these interpretations were flawed on their own merits, and that I had been reading the Bible wrongly all along. This has actually led me to greater confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible when understood rightly in what it is trying to teach. It never was a book about science. God accommodated to the pre-scientific understanding of the ancient world to teach us how to be in relationship with him and carry out his purposes as his image-bearers.
Young Christians are leaving the church – Here’s why
When asked why they didn’t believe, many said their views about God had “evolved” and some reported having a “crisis of faith.” Their specific explanations included the following statements:
“Learning about evolution when I went away to college”
“Religion is the opiate of the people”
“Rational thought makes religion go out the window”
“Lack of any sort of scientific or specific evidence of a creator”
“I just realized somewhere along the line that I didn’t really believe it”
“I’m doing a lot more learning, studying and kind of making decisions myself rather than listening to someone else.”
Chris, I agree with you. These are commonly stated reasons for abandonment of faith. From the YEC perspective, what would you suggest ought to be the solution(s)? (I am not being antagonistic to you here, but sincere. My best friend is YEC.)
But there need be no conflict if their faith was not presented to them as requiring the rejection of evolution and science. Why should religion depend upon what empirical facts can be discovered by way of science? Why should religion make empirical claims?
Does evolution undermine Christian faith? According to David Barash it does.
EVERY year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isn’t, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they don’t.
And why should we as Christians care what David Barash says about a faith he believes is built on the foundations of the argument from complexity and the illusion of human centrality, not Christ? Whatever religion he is describing, it isn’t mine.
“First, . . . to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth . . . revolves with great speed about the sun . . . is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
Building christian faith on the foundation of YEC is no different than building it on top of Geocentrism or Flat Earthism.
Chris, I’m afraid you’re conflating the EC view with that of dysteleological (naturalistic) evolution. This is a common misunderstanding among Christians. If you’re not aware of the difference, there are many of us here who would be glad to help educate you.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that YEC requires the rejection of science? A visit to CMI or AIG should disabuse you of that idea. It certainly didn’t stop Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, or Faraday.
YECs are happy to accept natural selection, change in allele frequency in populations over time, and speciation. How else would we get the vast number of species we have today from the relatively small number of kinds on Noah’s Ark. Darwin would have been right if he had just stuck to the origin of species. He erred considerably however when he extrapolated way beyond the evidence to hypothesise that all life began with a few, or only one, primitive life forms.
Friend, you won’t find anyone here that believes those sites are teaching anything more than pseudoscience. Authentic science doesn’t start with settled conclusions such as a young earth and work backward, finding any “experts” willing to support dubious claims. Evolution with common descent is proven beyond a reasonable doubt by comparative genomic evidences. What professional geneticist is willing to affirm YEC?
Here you’re accusing Darwin of doing the very thing the authentic scientific method is supposed to do. It starts with making an observation, asking a question and forming a hypothesis. This is precisely what the pseudoscience of YEC fails to do. The YEC position on origins in our day is analogous to the dogmatic geocentrist view of Christians in Galileo’s day.
I apologize. I should have said “significant portions of main stream science such as evolution”.
Romans 8:28 (NIV2011)
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.
This does not mean that the Church cannot fix itself rather than allowing the world to fix it. Church leaders, and we are all leaders to some extent, have a special responsibility before God to lead God’s people according to God’s Will.
It is hard to say that Ham & Co. are good people IF they fail to carry out this basic responsibility. We are responsible primarily to God and not to other human beings.
Actually, it reinforces the idea in spades. What they are doing is textbook pseudoscience.
At some level, I think you know that.
How so, exactly? The evidence is perfectly consistent with that hypothesis.
And when I make a statement about the evidence, it’s because unlike some others around here, I’m truly familiar with the evidence itself and am not simply parroting what someone else says.
You are aware that there was a time, before Darwin, when Christians whose profession was Geology were the first ones to point out that Genesis must be at least partly folklore, because they could determine from multiple frames of viewpoint that Geology indicated that the Earth was much, much older than just 6000 years old.
At the time, 100,000 years seemed like a lot. Then the estimates kept ratcheting up… to a few million… then hundreds of millions… and so forth.
Geology and fossil analysis, to a large extent, is an interrelated discipline. What is it about Geology that you think supports a 6000 year old Earth?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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