Does YEC undermine Christian faith?

It’s not YEC that undermines Christian faith so much as evolution, as shown by the Pew Research results. As William Provine said, Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented . David Barash understands this. There are some who attempt to combine belief in God with belief in evolution, not realizing the foundational nature of evolution’s connection to Atheism. The testimony of those who after learning about evolution in ‘science’ reject Christianity should alert church leaders to the incompatibility between evolution and the Gospel.

What is the EC view?

Sorry Chris, I am out of the country for a few days and only have my cell phone so I’ll let someone else, perhaps one of the moderators, respond.

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There isn’t just one EC view, but I do think most ECs would probably agree with a couple broad points here at least (and these are my words, not anything official representing Biologos or anybody else):

  1. That creation does also reflect God’s faithful providence, and so can be studied and understood, and “listened to”, so to speak. While we may misunderstand it at times, it will be a trustworthy reality to study, since it tells us of God’s faithfulness.

  2. God’s revelation in scriptures, and especially in Jesus [for Christians] when properly understood will also be part of that whole seamless truth. So nature, properly understood, should never be seen as a contradiction to what God reveals to us in Christ and in scriptures, properly understood. Not that creative tensions and paradoxes are never enlisted for good spiritual teaching … but ultimately, if God and reality don’t mesh, many (most?) of us would see this as a fatal disturbance to our faith. Of course this point is more specifically for Christian ECs.

  3. The testimonies of rocks, fossils, the cosmos itself … all seem to give an overwhelmingly consistent witness to a great age much deeper than thousands of years. And by “overwhelmingly consistent” I don’t mean to say there aren’t minor inconsistencies and of course lots of gaps. Of course our knowledge is not complete (much less perfect). But of all the knowledge we do have only the deep time and common ancestry perspectives are able to survive and explain the vast majority of data we do have.

  4. Causal explanations in terms of the observed regularities of creation (sometimes called laws) are not in competition with theological explanations of the same; any more than my teleological declaration [Polkinghorne] that the “kettle is boiling on the stove because I want tea” is in competition with a scientists explanation of the same by speaking of “heat transfer into water molecules.” The two simply do not contradict.

  5. We [YECs and ECs alike] already recognize our fallibility in science. In fact it is assumed and presumed, which helps science be more resilient. But ECs (unlike YECs so much) also recognize our fallibility in understanding the scriptural side of things. YECs tend to mistakenly take the mantle of scriptural infallibility and to extend it to also cover their own modern interpretations of the same. ECs may also have similar shortcomings in different directions (we all fall short on the humility front on times – I tend to be an expert on where others have, anyway. :grin:) In that spirit, but also with some seriousness, I do think that YECs would benefit from some self-reflection in that regard.

There is my “off-the-top-of-my-head” list for this morning. I suspect that the points at the top would net the most agreement among ECs, and that as I go down among my numbered points, more and more differences would become apparent.

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That was definitely not what the Pew results said. And evolution wasn’t invented, it was observed and described and presented as a model. The connection to atheism is what is invented. Evolution isn’t a some kind of rival belief system that undermines Christian teaching. It is a set of facts about the world that can be observed and have explanatory power. When these observations are pointed out, they clearly conflict with what some students have been taught they must believe in order to be a Christian. So they act on the false choice and leave the faith. The failure of the church is a failure to contextualize faith claims within our modern scientific worldview, not a failure to indoctrinate students hard enough that they can successfully deny scientific realities when they are pointed out.

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Evolutionary creationism is the belief that God created everything, and science gives us an accurate (though not complete) description of how God’s creation has changed over time.

It combines the belief that the Bible reveals the truth that God is the Creator of the natural world with the belief that the evolutionary model of biology reveals truth about the natural world.

Evolutionary creationism is not a scientific theory, it is a theological statement about God and nature. ECs accept the consensus of modern science when it comes to ideas like the Big Bang model of cosmology, the tectonic plate model of geology, and the evolutionary model of biology. They don’t propose a special Christian version of scientific facts, but they do acknowledge that scientific facts only tell part of the story when it comes to everything there is to know about reality. Scientific facts don’t tell us about our ultimate purpose or the meaning of life.

To answer our deepest questions we turn to Scripture and rely on the wisdom the Holy Spirit gives us to understand it. We see that life is not purposeless, all things happen according to God’s will and plan. Humans have a special place in creation as God’s image bearers. We acknowledge that God can do miracles that science can’t explain, the greatest one of all being Christ’s sacrifice for our sin and his resurrection to eternal life. We have the amazing hope we will someday share eternal life with Jesus in God’s new creation, heaven.

Evolutionary creationism says that God’s truth revealed in Scripture complements and harmonizes with the truth revealed in nature through science.

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Evolution has been taught in U.S. schools since the 1920s, but the trend of young people abandoning the faith is a recent development. If evolution itself was the cause of the problem, why didn’t the problem show up 50, 75, or 100 years ago?

Perhaps you should read this testimony again, because it is happening all over the country right now:

@aarceng

Evolution is not the cause of the alienation of Millennials from Fundamentalist denominations.

All you had to do was read the newspapers during the Supreme Court process on legalized same sex marriage:

Millennials attended school with gay friends of both genders. They saw that these normal-but-gay people were not monsters and had the same feelings as anyone else.

So when the “grown-ups” started ranting about how we had to bar gays from living their part of a normal life in marriage . . . the youth slowly shook their heads … and walked away.

Now, @aarceng, you are telling these new generations … that all the evidence supporting an Old Earth and Evolutionary development of life on Earth has to be trashed … why? Because of Adam & Eve … well, you can just imagine how well that goes over !!!

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That’s like saying Geocentrism doesn’t undermine Christian faith, it is Heliocentrism that undermines Christian faith.

I think you are missing the point.

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Now why would that be?

Then Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’

The bible is where you get your knowledge of Christ and build your faith on what comes out of that - i.e. you choose to believe that that part of the bible is true.

But that same bible also tells you about how the heavens and the earth came to be. But you don’t want to believe that part. How can this be? Is the whole bible not the word of God? Can God be trusted about Jesus and dying and rising but not about how God put it all into place from the beginning?
Who is building on sand here?

Actually, I rejected darwinian evolution because I found it completely lacking in credibility. I am an engineer with an additional background in investment management so I understand a little bit about probabilities. I also studied chemistry major in first year because I wanted to be an industrial chemist at first.
There is simply no way for biological life as we know it to arise from non-living materials all by itself via random chemical and physical processes given the complex internal organization of the most basic of living organisms.

Anyone who thinks that that is possible is fooling him or herself big time.

Then following on from that the same problem arises with any step towards organizational complexity towards multi-cellularity via random processes. Not to even mentions things like replication and reproductive systems, immune systems, circulation systems, repair systems and so on as found in highly complex organisms as ourselves.

I’m currently agnostic on the creation/evolution issue (certainly leaning hard against evolution though), but I think he’s only right if we assume naturalism (or Arminianism/Molinism :stuck_out_tongue: )

God chooses who He saves and by making this choice, He makes it so that those people will be infallibly saved and will persevere in their faith until the end. If someone loses their faith in Christ and dies that way, it is not because the evidence is weak or something else, it is ultimately because they are in rebellion against God and He has not turned them to salvation infallibly (Romans 1-2, 8-11, 1 Corinthians 1-2, John 6, Acts 13:48).

I’m coming to see it more and more that the only hope humanity has is Christianity. If it’s true, we have hope, meaning, etc. If it’s false, we’re living a cosmic joke and doomed to either die of madness or live inconsistently. Myers and Coyne think that Christianity being undermined is a good thing, but if their worldview is true, nothing is worth anything. They really hate Christianity. I don’t say that lightly. Myers publicly desecrated a Eucharistic Host, which is the holiest thing in my religion, that was one of the things that has been making me go toward YEC (along with certain statements by evolutionary creationists as I’ve said before) YEC is a refusal to concede anything to them, and I applaud that. Whether or not they are right, they are standing against the worst ideology out there.

Is that true though? Heliocentrism is a theory of cosmology, YEC is a theory of origins, where we come from. Whether or not we’re in the physical center of the universe, on a Young Earth view, we’re creatures of God with a purpose, able to be redeemed. On the consistent evolutionary view, we don’t exist for a reason and exist only because of natural processes. I’m agnostic on origins at this point, but I’m coming to think it is a vitally important question.

I hope you have better reason for your faith than that. It isn’t at all convincing from my point of view since I don’t acknowledge anything apart from the natural world and that which arises from it (such as our subjective experience). That is my unjustified (i.e. faith) position. But then I probably have a much more robust conception of the natural world since I think there is a natural basis for pretty much everything you suspect might be of supernatural origins.

Actually, you aren’t saying a thing about evolution there. This rejection is of abiogenesis, not evolution.

Finally, something about evolution, but it indicates a fundamental misunderstanding.

I’m pretty sure that natural selection is very nonrandom. Do you not know this?

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Teleology is not part of the evolutionary model and the model doesn’t “prove” purposelessness. If anyone claims it does, that is an example of adding naturalism and scientism ideology to science.

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You build on sand when you base the validity of the Bible on claims that are so easily shown to be wrong by the evidence around us.

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