The irony here is that YEC demands that salvation must be scientific by insisting:
the scriptures teach us science, and
Genesis is the foundation of scripture, so thus
if Genesis isn’t 100% correct, then the whole Bible fails
Whether stated that baldly or not, that’s the syllogism they’re operating on – with inevitable results:
With reference to the syllogism above, they learn that #1 is false, but – and this is critical – they have nowhere to go because they didn’t also figure out that #2 is false! So they continue to stand on the false foundation, and conclude from #3 that the whole thing is false – and not just false, because they recognize that those who taught them in the faith were lying, they conclude the whole thing is a lie.
“For no one is able to put in place another foundation beside the one that is already being laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
YEC puts in place “another foundation” beside – that is, next to – Jesus Christ, making their stance twofold, and if you knock out one leg of a structure standing on two, it falls.
There’s an old hymn about that, and the opening line gets this 100% right:
“The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord”
I like to point out that there were Hebrew scholars back before Galileo ever heard of a lens who, purely on the basis of the Hebrew, concluded that the universe was incomprehensibly old and that the Earth itself was ancient beyond imagining. They had no external reason to try to make the text say that, they just found it by examination of the text. Given that these men were probably better Hebrew scholars by age twelve than most who read Hebrew today, and that they were certainly as good by age sixteen as anyone today with a PhD, I’m not even going to try to figure out what they found; I’d probably have to go back to grad school and focus on Hebrew for a master’s and then a PhD in ancient Hebrew just to get a handle on their insights (and I have my doubts about how well I could do on a GRE these days).
I’ve been wondering if it would even be possible today given the bad reputation the word “design” – and thus “Designer” – has been given by YECers. YEC was still “creation science” back then and “intelligent design” was a conclusion reached by studying science.
Churches which don’t violate the text of the scriptures the way YECers are required to should be providing training for their college students to help YECers when the crash comes! Quite simply they should be prepared to show that the true foundation is Christ, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and that’s where to turn when the crisis hits. Looking back I wish I’d been more pro-active, not just ready to step in when someone was discovering that they’d been given a foundation of sand but doing my best to get up in front of different Christian groups and pounding home that it’s all about Jesus, and if you’re leaning on anything else then you’re doing it wrong.
BTW, that’s something that burns me about Adam’s posts when he claims that only YEC can point to actual Redemption because anything else doesn’t require a physical Crucifixion – it’s not only an egregious and outrageous insult to others here, it’s also backwards because YEC doesn’t actually make the Crucifixion its foundation: as an Orthodox priest friend said more than once, if you’re not starting with Jesus then you’re not doing theology – and YEC doesn’t start with Jesus, they start with Genesis and use Jesus as a “defense exhibit” for why we should take the Creation story literally!
The wandering pole problem has multiple points of contact on the South American continent separated by hundreds of miles. What part of 18 cm/yr remotely corresponds to a single event that arose and departed within less than two years?
[[ In fact, no world-wide Flood ever happened. Genesis is theology. The Flood story compares I AM with the preceding coterie of thoughtless, promiscous, needy, vulnerable (etc.) deities who invented humans to serve them, forgot to limit their growth rate, then used a Flood to get rid of them. The Hebrew version shows God using a Flood (it was one of the checkpoints that people of that era insisted had happened) to show that God regretted the loss of ALL the pagans. The prior pagan set of godlets decided to let humanity continue, but limited their fecundity by means of disease and plagues. I AM on the other hand simply resolved to endure the pagans among His children. ]]
To be fair, you could argue they do start with Jesus as He quoted Genesis at least twice, in relation to marriage based on God’s creation of mankind, and the story of Noah and the flood. One could argue Jesus believed both to be literal history. I suspect Paul did - why wouldnt he?