Is there any legitimacy to the claim that EC leads to atheism?

Just picked a random quote to say I’d give you two “likes” if I could. Great answer.

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That’s very encouraging to hear Marshall. I’m glad you listened to the podcast and could share so much about your wrestling with the text. I guess the big takeaway from this forum isn’t really any scientific evidence which I will certainly be studying in the near future. It’s the general idea of everyone here not simply disagreeing with parts of the Bible and cutting them out like Jefferson. It’s not even people judging God for slavery, hell, or whatever other thing you want to mention. I don’t see people looking to disprove every last verse of the Bible and trying to tear down inerrancy. I don’t see people who “just didn’t have enough faith in God to believe the Scripture.” I don’t see people who had one particular disagreement and sought ways they could repackage the Bible and make it more palatable to a 21st century audience. Overall, I see people reconciling faith and science. I see people who realize cartesian certainty is impossible in this life. I see people who actively wrestle with all of their doubts instead of bury them deep inside their psyches. It’s certainly not the impression my parents gave me of Christians in this camp.

Edit: I would add too that it’s not an inevitable domino effect to atheism either. Atheists are mad at YEC for rejecting science. They are also mad that people in the biologos EC community aren’t atheists. They view this as a preposterous marriage of faith and science and that everyone here is just holding onto a religion that nobody will believe in 100 years. In YEC, fear is a primary motivator. Fear that if God didn’t reveal his perfect Word in the Bible, why would he bother at all? I’d rather have a nuanced and slightly less simple view of Christianity then a black and white one.

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This is precisely what I said in post 42 happens. Once one starts cutting out inconvenient pieces of the Bible one slowly but surely keeps cutting and one realizes that there is no basis for Christian theology when all the cutting is finished. H. G. Well’s quotation I cited above, applies to this guy.

I have over the years asked liberals how much of the Bible can be false before you will say the rest of it is false. Often they don’t understand or like the question, but to me it is key. In science when we find a fact out of place or a falsification of some view, we must at the least rejuggle the logical structure of our science or give up on a preferred view. This seems not to happen in theology where Genesis 1-11 can be false, the exodus can be false, the miracles can be false, yet somehow it is claimed that the resurrection is true. That seems utterly illogical to me. It is why I came up with the views I did. If I had failed to arrive at those views, I would have chucked Christianity for being false. period.

Having been on some private atheist lists when I was in my doubting stage, I absolutely agree with what you describe as the atheist view of liberal theology and its adherents. If people think they gain respect from the atheist for holding to accommodation and for proclaiming parts of the Bible to be historically false, they are very very wrong. In some sense I felt that they respected the YECS more than the liberal Christians who knew science well but held onto a God who was a useless appendage to the cosmos. One guy said it was like having Caspar the ghost on their shoulders; no one could see Caspar and Caspar made no difference in their science.

I know this, I presented my concordistic views to atheists when I published my books. I wanted to know what their scientific objections would be. I picked 5 atheists and 5 YECs to review my book before I published. I didn’t get the reviews back from YECS, but the atheists did review it and picked up a few issues I needed to fix, but not many. They didn’t object to my science; they just didn’t think that my view was what actually happened. And of course, no one can absolutely prove what happened in the geologic past, but they never went after me like they do the Yecs. But I know they don’t think the liberal view is logically coherent.

Some of them. Some atheists/agnostics hang out here with us EC folks because they like science and we do too, and they don’t mind that we keep Jesus in our lives. Not everyone is threatened by people who see the world differently, and that goes for people on both “sides” of the God/no god(s) debate.

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The atheist channel (Doug) Pinecreek hosted Mike Winger, an evangelical pastor who holds to YEC as well as someone associated with Biologos for a video. Doug says Mike should study evolution but simultaneously condemns the EC guy for his beliefs. He is more anti-theist than some though.

If one starts from certainty in total darkness about reality that is not based on any of the laws of nature outside ones unknown (i.e. one isn’t aware of being in it) cave of unknowing and one lets in a glimmer of light, one can’t help but want more.

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The problem is NOT the Bible. The problem is not that the Old Testament/Covenant has been outdated by the New Testament. The problem is YEC theology is faulty, because it believes the Bible and not Jesus is God’s Word, and follows the false dualism of atheism.

The Gospel says In the Beginning was the Word, Jesus Christ. Salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and not through faith in the Bible. God created the universe through the rational Word/Jesus Christ, so the is no actual contradiction through good Christian theology and good science, including evolution.

YEC theology is not good Christian theology. Darwinian evolution is not good science, because it is based on Malthusian Survival of the fittest. We need to reconcile the two to make both whole, real, and good, which is why I wrote the book, Darwin’s MYTH, Malthus, Ecology, and the Meaning of Life.

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…that @gbob is a YEC. He’s not.

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I hope I’m not the only one who sees that as a strength rather than a weakness at least to some degree.

Maybe the question shouldn’t be “are they true” but rather “are they effective?” If religion is basically relational and about creating a proper relationship between the individual and that which is both beyond and most essential about us, then perhaps the effectiveness of holding certain claims to be true is more important than whether they are true in any straight forward way.

Again that assumes that God the Son and the Son of God were coterminous and that has all the problems of particularity in the light of the practically infinite peopled universe of infinite from eternity which the NT writers could not have foreseen assuming they made that mapping. Despite their contemporary Philo seeing them.

Roger, a moderator moved my reply to your post to ‘another tangent thread.’ I suspect you hadn’t seen my response and now, you will have to go to that thread to see my response to your points. If I am to be isolated off in ‘tangent’ threads anytime I express my views when directly questioned, this place isn’t going to be any fun any more

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There is no evidence that the universe is infinite or eternal, but the evidence is to the opposite.

Correct . .

Of course stars are not eternal either but that doesn’t mean we think they pop into existence from nothing. Apparently there have been generations of stars with materials being recycled. It isn’t known (and apparently it isn’t knowable) whether or not the material of this universe has been through other iterations of past big bang events. But so far as I know it can’t be ruled out either.

First time poster, long time lurker. I wanted to say one problem is people in evangelical circles (of which I am one) need to stop looking at the Bible as a single piece of literature. It needs to be acknowledged that it spans thousands of years, has multiple authors and editors, and has a variety of genres. I know we know this but when people say (not just here, I hear it at church a lot as well), “ if one thing is wrong or if Gen 1-11 isn’t literal then the resurrection isn’t literal,” I wonder if we really get the complexity of scripture. How ancient people talk about their history is not how moderns talk about our history. Modern christians and atheists like to smuggle modern expectations into and onto scripture all the time. We might not like the way ancients interacted or wrote their history, but we have to accept scripture for what it is and not what we what it to be.
Here are some resources and thoughts that have helped me on my journey:

  1. Look to our Catholic brothers and sisters. I’m not saying become Catholic, but the Catholic Church has been building theological models around evolution for awhile. Also, they have embraced areas of science and scripture that Protestants haven’t ventured as much. On YouTube checkout society of Catholic scientist, has some interesting videos. Same with our Jewish neighbors, “ trouble with OT stuff,” yeah they have been wrestling with that for millenniums, literally.
  2. Use Twitter to find people you wouldn’t normally find. I have enjoyed the podcast, onscript, which has faithful biblical scholars talking about their work and what it means for their faith, and if I liked the person I follow them on twitter and then twitter will start recommending others I might like to follow, and pretty soon you have a host of intelligent religious people you never knew existed and some idiots as well, but overall it has been positive and I have learned a lot that way.
  3. You will be stumped by questions and ideas that are presented to you sometimes, but just about every question and objection you have heard has been raised before, keep searching for good answers, you will find them.
  4. To go with 3, some (most?) Christians answers are not good, keep searching.
  5. Don’t spend much time on message boards and YouTube comments, most people, present company included, don’t know as much as they think.
  6. Most people think they are logical, however Christian and atheist arguments seem to be decided mostly with emotion. Arguments about hell and LGTBQ issues are rarely argued with cool logical heads.
  7. Finally, does EC lead to atheism, nope, but unchecked presuppositions do. We all have them, and they paint us into intellectual corners we don’t even need to stand in.
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Oh we can MarkD. The universe shows no sign of recycling or spawning whatsoever. Its expansion, driven by the expansion of space itself, is accelerating.

Welcome to the forum, Nate! I second OnScript as a a great resource for current discussions in biblical scholarship. :slight_smile:

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Welcome @NateH. Thanks for your helpful contribution.

I completely agree about YouTube comments sections - abandon hope all ye who enter! :see_no_evil:

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