Hey all. Im a newly convinced EC. I really love science. I just want to dive deep. But im so discouraged by the fact that atheists want to disparage us too. How do I cope? I hate feeling attacked on both sides.
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Itâs not a war. You get to pick the perpective that is most compelling to you. Itâs not your job to convince anyone to join you. Find your people and engage in edifying conversations that make you smarter and better. People will always be wrong about stuff on the internet, itâs fine.
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Just remember, the world disparaged Jesus before it disparaged you (John 15:18-21). It might be hard but itâs worth it to try to find a Christian community/Church you can grow in. Itâs okay for people to disagree with one another but if people are disparaging, shake the dust off your sandals and move on. The internet is not real life and how people communicate here often does not reflect how those same people might do so in person.
Vinnie
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Hi, DEC! And welcome!
Just remember, most labels like âtheistâ, or âatheistâ lump together wide swaths of very different people! There are atheists around here that, far from disparaging science-loving and thoughtful Christians, actually want to celebrate and encourage anybody (Christian or otherwise) who values truth and wants to be informed by and about evidence. So, not all atheists are like the warring sort that tend to rise to the top of social media feeds. Not by a long shot!
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I guess it depends on whatâs being attacked? Is it just general belief in God or is it a belief like evolution is to tricky to have happened without a creator and you see evidence of God that you believe can be scientifically verified.
Hi
Mixing science and faith does not have to be the same as mixing oil and water. However it is not a quick answer. Just remember that science cannot see or accept God so a scientific theory will not allow for Him.
Many scientists here have a faith but you may not see that faith when they are talking science.
Richard
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Good to hear your voice, @DesperateEC. Iâve been around awhile, so while I know it can seem overwhelming at times, I have found such worries are really not very important in the long run. Most of my friends are not particularly open to EC, but love me anyway. It just isnât an issue for the most part. And most atheists also donât really care. The biggest attackers are usually the big organizations who see EC as an existential threat, which bothers me mostly because they cause division in the Christian community and potentially push people away from Christ. That, I worry about.
Even then, I find most people outside of those organizations are essentially unaware of what is happening. One thing that might help is knowing a little more of your situation, and how it is affecting you. Is it a church problem? A workplace problem? Do you find yourself isolated because of it? If the latter, this is a good place to kick things around. With friends and family, concentrate on your common areas of belief, and your relationships, and donât spend much energy on areas of conflict unless you can do so in a spirit of love and understanding.
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âDisparagingâ?
I think itâs worth mentioning that argument by ridicule, although effective, is not legitimate. It also might have a limited shelf life (case in point: Richard Dawkins).
Why point that out? Because forewarned is forearmed. If you see it, you can simply call it out.
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Mostly on Reddit, maybe once or twice here. I try to "screenâ posts for signs of whether the person is an âAtheistâ or not. Sometimes they even put the meta tag under the topic, which makes it easier.
Faith in Jesus the Christ is a personal and intimate choice. Period. Stop. End of paragraph. Not believing in God, if that is your choice, is okay.
But having said that, obliterating God from the Pantheon because you donât believe in Him/Her- if I donât believe in Him/Her, He/She canât exist at all, for anyone. Is flat out being disrespectful to others, while shaking your fists and demanding that people respect your views.
Now, closer to your point: welcome to the âfightâ. Hopefully things will be easier for you than they were for me.
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If God exists, God exists for everyone.
If there isnât a god, there isnât a god for anyone.
Itâs not possible for God to exist for some people, but not exist for others. Pointing this out isnât being disrespectful, itâs just a consequence of (a)theism.
In a purely objective sense what you wrote is correct. Either God is, or God is not. However, he said if the person doesnât believe in God. You are confusing someoneâs personal belief on the subject with objective truth. You might not have evidence for God whereas I find it in spades in my life. I think he is saying we should be able to coexist respectfully in our differences (the wording is a little unclear). Me telling you how wrong you are all the time is probably unhelpful anyways 
Vinnie
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As a Christian I postulate that God exists for everyone, but that does not stop people from ignoring his existence. The interesting thing is in the relational opposite, if we exist or do not exist for God, not in the way if he perceives our existence as he is omniscient by definition but in terms of our devotion to him.
Now when it comes to evidence for Gods existence we all have the same claims put in front of us +/- subjective experience and our ability to from a valid worldview that form a coherent picture of reality based on our beliefs. So if Atheists reject God as the causal element of reality they should deliver a better more coherent worldview, as that is how science improves our understanding of reality by finding theories that explain reality better. Now evolution by ânaturalâ selection is a better explanation of biodiversity based on the observed data, but that does not explain away God, only that God made mudpie humans and animals. Even if God would have created Lego he would have reused elements of his Lego set for all his creation so the similarities across species would be expected.
the question is if you accept evolution at a process level. You can look at it as a process with the purpose - to ensure the propagation of life under adverse circumstances - and the process control being anything but random but a feedback loop that ensures the benefit is written back into the process memory. and as any serious biologist can tell you - survival fitness is not who feeds fu**s and fights fastest but who serves creation best. it is not random at all, so it might use randomisation as input variable to protect against biases.
The key obstacle to overcome is the concept of death and suffering but as a Christian believing in eternal life that isnât (shouldnât be) a problem if you are logically coherent about it.
Iâve never encountered anyone who thought that if they didnât believe in God then God would not exist. Usually the disbelief comes from assessing the objective truth, not vice versa. If some-one doesnât believe in God, then for them no God is the objective truth, so the gap you think youâve found doesnât exist.
Agreed. Maybe you should show me instead?
I think he is saying even if you think God does not exist, you do not need to push this on everyone else or be disparaging to other views. You can choose to disagree.
Vinnie
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Itâs real simple, Pick a side. Nobody respects a compromiser. Darwinian evolution has been totally disproven as a fraud along with geological uniformitarianism. You donât have to compromise with fake scientists to be a real scientist. I suggest you log onto creation.com or the ICR sites and get an education how God could create everything 6000 years ago.
Hey Cliff, we donât mind you joining our fun and enlightening discussions, but you canât come to our party and start calling people compromisers and fake scientists. Itâs super rude, and if you canât be civil and behave like a decent person, I will block your account. 
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Well from atheists its that ECs are just coping and from YECs its that ECs are compromisers. It sucks. I wish we could all just leave each other be.
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Well, coping is better than not coping. 
I donât think we will ever convince the YEC contingent to change, so will have to leave them be, as you suggest. I have often thought that what we do with science and faith here is not compromise, but rather is integration. In my personal experience, I found that if I were to consider the Bible as true and science as factual, we have to be able to merge them into a cohesive worldview. That often means we have to consider our interpretation may well be limited or faulty, and we may need to change how we see things. It is more difficult for some than others to do so.
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LOL, Weâre all just coping. Thatâs like the human condition in a nut shell. We all pick our narratives and all of our narratives break down and fail us at some points.
I know my life got a lot simpler and better when I realized I didnât need to be right as a Christian, I needed to be good. If you think the Bible reveals truth from God and if you think Jesus was God in human form, and his message to the world is all the good news we need to be the complete humans we were created to be, then itâs not that complicated. Itâs pretty clear that we can be wrong about a lot and still love God and love our neighbors.
Also, my online conversations got a lot better when I stopped thinking about other peopleâs worldviews as a threat or insult to my own and just tried to approach other people with curiosity. (Itâs nice that here in this corner of the internet I have moderator buttons and if people want to show up and just be hostile, I can show them the door) Itâs actually kind of interesting how we can have such extremely different ideas about reality and itâs interesting how people got where they are. When you donât need to prove other people are wrong (about reality or about yourself), it takes a lot of pressure off. You donât have to interact with jerks. You donât have to explain things to people who want to stay ignorant. You donât have to defend yourself or your story to people who doubt you. You really can spend all your time talking to the people who actually want to talk to you about things you think are interesting and important.
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In my mind, the sense of wonder, awe, and beauty, that has the universe in all its varied spectacle emerging from a parsimony of principles, speaks much more highly of a creator than the static popping into existence insisted by YEC.
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