Equating evolution with atheism

This is almost exactly what I took away from a long conversation on this topic recently with an anti-evolutionist, trying to discern why he would accept a spherical Earth in a heliocentric Solar system, but not evolution. I also gather it’s why Todd Wood believes evolution must be wrong even though be accepts it is very well supported by evidence.

The last sentence is a separate complaint that also comes up, and it rests on the false assumption that science requires philosophical materialism (philosophical naturalism) of anyone who thinks science has explanatory power with respect to the material world. It’s a ridiculous assumption but it’s prominent, I suppose due to the association between the two, and also the association between the corresponding opposites (theism and anti-scientism).

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That is definitely a possibility, as mentioned in my previous post.

I have seen some interest among YEC’s, but I think such YEC’s are rare. I do agree that the vast, vast majority of YEC’s are also hung up on literalism and concordism. If we concocted a YEC treatment, GAE would be just one part of it.

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Personally, I think you generally have more success convincing YECs to change their whole approach to the Bible (eliminating these points of contention in the process) than you have convincing them to accept an ad hoc approach that somehow makes room for evolution while humoring their literalism. We have plenty of examples of the former hanging around here, but I’ve yet to meet one of the latter in the wild. But to each their own. Maybe part of my issue is that I don’t really trust advice on building bridges from someone with a track record of blowing up bridges.

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That sure seems like a good idea. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they respond by objecting to all the positions they’re invested in which would be threatened. I think caring about process over results is an indication of real fatih.

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Or even thinking about the process as a result, or part of the results anyway, might be good progress.

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I think so too. And I don’t think “accept evolution” should be the result we are looking for anyway. If YEC believers aren’t experiencing any cognitive dissonance and aren’t evangelistically spreading lies about science and scientists and are living peacefully with the people who disagree, then I would let them be. People usually don’t have much use for answers to questions they aren’t asking.

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I agree. I certainly don’t think GAE is a one-size-fits-all solution, nor do I think it is the most useful approach. However, it might be the right approach in some situations.

That’s totally understandable. Even a broken watch is right twice a day. :wink:

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Aren’t we commanded to spread the Gospel to the ends of the Earth? And to participate in fellowship? If these are harmed in the service of YEC traditions, isn’t that something that should trouble us?

(Honest questions, not rhetorical!)

Yes. I actually work for a missions organization. Some of my colleagues are YEC. It hasn’t prevented them from being effective in sharing the gospel, because the gospel doesn’t have anything to do with how old the earth is or common descent. I think the greatest potential “damage” is to their own homeschooled kids who sometimes have a bit of a crisis when they get to college and realize they’ve learned things that aren’t true. But I don’t think it generally comes up in most people’s service or discipleship work. I haven’t noticed it affect our fellowship even though our organization has a diversity of viewpoints on the topic. It’s considered a non-essential doctrine. I think the number of churches who focus on YEC as if it is a major tenet of faith and practice is pretty small. So I think what should be concerning are people who link YEC with some kind of primary belief or think disagreement on Genesis interpretation is grounds for breaking fellowship with other Christians. But in my experience, I have not met those kind of Christians. I know they exist, I just don’t know anyone personally who approaches Creationism that militantly.

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Is it common in your experience to have membership-based churches that have an anti-evolution claim in their doctrine statement?

Does that harm opportunities for fellowship? Especially considering views on YEC may vary between family members?

Bless you and praise God for your missionary work. But in terms of the wider mission, I think it does cause harm. The association of YEC with Christianity as a whole definitely served as a block for me to even consider opening my heart to God, for 44 years, until this year I did it anyway. And even still it’s a source of such doubt and angst.

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I think it’s people like you that Biologos is hoping to encourage. Having at least some community around (or even just knowing it exists) who wish to remove these unnecessary burdens and stumbling blocks that would keep you from Christ - we’re all about that.

Or another way to see this is that perhaps the “YECism” is itself a symptom of something deeper that may be closer to a source of fomented mischief that disturbs so many of us: An underlying attitude about how the Bible is to be used. Many (perhaps not all) YECs see the Bible as a fact-book guide by which all thoughts and actions should be measured - the “objective standard” if you will, when properly understood of course, which always means “understood the way we understand it” (though you will never get them to admit that last part). It’s almost as if they take the verse (2 Cor 10:5) “… take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” and switch what Paul said to “make it obedient to the Bible” instead.

Alternatively, we can view the Bible as a collection of testimonies and accounts about how God has worked in the lives of so many, and how that culminated in and led to Christ’s work. When we stop weaponizing the Bible, I suggest that we can feel more at ease with our diverse points of view on peripheral matters - or we become more willing to marginalize our own opinions on such things to the periphery of our more important relationship matters in any case.

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Thank you and praise God. I’ve found BioLogos, and the resources I found through it, invaluable. :pray:

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This is why Biologos’ outreach to the Christian homeschool population is so important. When it is difficult for Christian homeschool parents to find quality science books that aren’t YEC it says a lot.

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I think anti-evolution is different than YEC, and there are whole denominations that have specific anti-evolution statements around Adam and Eve. But also lots of statements lean a certain way but try to make wiggle room. Like I went to Wheaton College where the doctrine statement is that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness. You could take that as anti-evolution, but some professors don’t. If I remember right, only the faculty had to affirm the belief statement, students just had to agree to the community covenant and not dance. :wink: (that rule has since been changed)

I have never attended a church like that (requiring affirming YEC or anti-evolution) in my lifetime. Where I’ve gone the hot-button issues that people get divided over are whether or not you have to affirm inerrancy, a certain idea of hell, and whether women can serve in certain capacities in the church. I’ve only attended middle of the road Evangelical churches. I’m sure there are some conservative fundamentalist churches that do require you to affirm literal recent six day creation, but it’s my impression they also are KJV only, think psychology and yoga are evil, teach that hell is eternal conscious torment, insist women wear skirts and not work and not use birth control, and are disturbingly white nationalist. So I wouldn’t really want in on their fellowship for a large number of reasons. Before I moved to rural Mexico ten years ago, I had always lived in urban areas where there was always a variety of Christian fellowships to choose from, so I didn’t know what it is like to have very limited choice when it comes to opportunities for Christian fellowship. Now in rural Mexico I have limited choice, but also in order to keep my development work visa I am not supposed to be directly involved in the ministry of any local church and can’t engage in any activity that is considered proselytizing. So we attend a church, but most of my “fellowship” is with my home church in the States online.

I think this is a good valid point, but also the strong association is going to depend on your cultural context. For example the Evangelical pastors I have personally known here in Mexico either don’t know YEC is a thing or think it’s a weird American fundamentalist hang-up. I was in a Nazarene church in a state capital where they threw out some Sunday school curriculum that had been donated by an American church with a Spanish language ministry because, as the pastor’s wife said, “There were pictures of the Garden of Eden with dinosaurs! Have you ever even heard of such nonsense?” I was in a different church, a large charismatic one, and the pastor started talking about this anthropology magazine he had been reading about new discoveries in the human evolutionary family tree and I thought for sure he was going to make some kind of anti-evolutionary comment, but no. He accepted all the science at face value and used the facts to support some other idea he was developing in the sermon. There was no sign that mentioning human evolution from the pulpit like that would be seen as controversial.

So I think your perception of how big a deal this debate is really depends on your social context.

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In my experiences I see YEC all over. I’ve heard dealt with it from people from every nation that income in context with. All the Americas, islanders, eastern and Western Europeans , from the Middle East and Asia.

True. And, in my country, compared to the US, a far smaller percentage of the public are practicing Christians, and most of those are Catholic, Anglican, etc, and overt YEC is seen as an American thing. But. Still, as a non-believer I never saw the mainline churches actively dissociating themselves from YEC. I understand why they don’t do that, but the consequence of that is that non-believers think or at least suspect that they’re going to have to believe in YEC if they’re going to become Christian.

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I grew up in a conservative rural region of the US, and YEC was taught to us in Sunday School (ca. early 1980’s). Some of my church friends were homeschooled and were taught YEC, and some of those families were involved in the Sovereignty movement just to give you a social context. I wouldn’t have called it a Fundamentalist congregation, but just an older congregation that was a few generations behind other parts of the country. A bit like the Waltons.

For me, it was normal to equate YEC with Christianity because that’s what I saw growing up. When I got into my teen years I was quite the science geek so I ignored most of the YEC lessons I had been taught. I never thought poorly of the Sunday School teachers nor of the congregation I belonged to. I just thought they were mistaken about something that really had no impact on the main theology of Christianity.

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