I have occasionally considered having cards printed up with the Nicene Creed on them for the occasions when someone wants to know what I believe. As to anything beyond that, I just would say it doesn’t really matter.
When I’ve encountered those I’ve just pointed out that Paul uses the word “study” as an instruction, and that by Paul’s example study involves knowing how other people see the world, e.g. the Greeks.
It actually starts from the assumption that the scriptures were meant to be read from a modern point of view. The idea that for the Bible to be true it has to be 100% scientifically and historically correct does not come from the Bible, it comes from scientific materialism.
YEC begins by presuming that the worldview they grew up holding is the one and only correct worldview, a notion that cannot be found in the Bible at all.
But it doesn’t mean to become fools by being foolish, which is what YEC demands, foolish enough to believe in a God Whose Word is to be interpreted without actually learning what the Bible is, foolish enough to demand that the Holy Spirit had to inspire people to write for a modern worldview and thus fail to communicate with their own.
But YEC is based on the assumption that the Bible has to teach science! I ask once again: where in the Bible is any such claim made?
Without, according to YEC, actually bothering to study the texts and learn what they are, which is mnecessary to understand them.
If you’re including Answers in Genesis and their companion groups, this is false. They want you to believe it, but it isn’t the case because they don’t interpret, they lie. Lying Lisle lies and so do the rest. I hate going to the AiG site for any reason because I have yet to find an article there that does not lie.
I don’t know enough to catch them in most of the lies about evolution, but I know enough geology to catch them repeatedly.
There is no other option: if YEC is correct, then God is a liar, because His rocks declare that the Earth is at the very least many hundreds of thousands of years old – and that has nothing to do with theory, it has to do with measurements made in the laboratory.
Irrelevant, because the geological data I’m talking about doesn’t depend on any assumptions except that God does not play games with the universe.
I don’t say the YECists are uneducated, I just observe that they are liars. To say otherwise would be to lie as well.
You totally missed what he did. Try this again:
Given two interpretations of undisputed facts,
Either one interpretation is correct and the other interpretation is not; or
The other interpretation is correct and the one is not; or
Both interpretations are correct, which is unlikely; or
Both interpretations are incorrect.
All he did was to put the labels at issue in place of “one interpretation” and “the other interpretation”. This is beginning logic 101, it isn’t rocket science or ancient Akkadian, it’s reasoning skills that should be taught in fifth grade.
It’s not an opinion! There are only so many logical possibilities, and all Terry did was list them. That you totally missed that is astounding.
No, they aren’t. That’s the first AiG lie and they just keep on rolling with more. You’ve been shown repeatedly that they lie; the instances I remember had to do with geology, and the lies were so obvious it’s painful. The fact that they are highly educated only leaves two options:
they know they’re lying
they don’t know they’re lying
If it’s the first one, you should rebuke them in the Name of Jesus and refuse to have anything to do with them until they repent publicly and apologize for all the damage they’ve done.
If it’s the second one, then there are two possibilities:
they aren’t actually highly educated, in which case they should not be trusted
they are deluded, in which case they should not be trusted
Except if you want to use this comparison, the reality is that the YECists are only pretending it’s water, and they aren’t actually measuring anything, they’re just making up what should happen if they actually had water and knew that it had to boil according to preconceeived notions. That’s exactly what they do when the claim is made that rock layers don’t crack while positioning their students to stand in front of the rock layers that cracked!
That would require me to ignore the fact that the people you want me to “sit down as equals” with are liars, and in fact promise the world that they intend to lie.
Bravo!
And that is where my “bridge” comes in: I just patiently point out that Genesis is not the foundation of the faith, Jesus is, so even if it turned out that Genesis was copied from some ancient scroll from China that was written as fiction it wouldn’t matter because Jesus is still Jesus.
Adam loves to point to Bart Ehrman, but the above is exactly Bart’s error: he put his faith in a modern idea instead of in Jesus, so when that modern idea turned out to not match ancient literature he abandoned the ancient literature and thus abandoned Jesus.
It becomes a salvation issue the moment any one believes the nonsense that if there is a single error (as defined by modern science) in the Bible then none of it can be trusted. That is idolatry that leads to abandoning Jesus because it puts faith in the wrong place, and when people come to recognize that the Bible doesn’t care about science, much less teach it, if they have that notion in their head then they do exactly what the YECists say to do: abandon it all, including Jesus.
Not quite – the YECer makes the presupposition that the Bible is correct according to a modern worldview they won’t admit they hold. They never bother to ask if that worldview actually fits the scriptures, they just assume that since it is their worldview then it must be correct.
So ultimately the YEC position rests on assuming that their personal beliefs cannot be incorrect.
Which in turn is what anyone who has read the Bible should conclude because it is the only position possible if the Bible is correct and God is faithful rather than a trickster.
I say it’s better because it’s what anyone who has read the Bible should expect in a universe made by the Creator that collection of books talks about – in other words, the intelligibility assumption derives from the presupposition that the Bible is trustworthy.
Quite nicely put!
So what someone ought to say would be that “I am experiencing sensations which are in accord with the proposition that the Sun (as described by science) is in the sky”.
Which takes us to Descartes’ and his philosophy that should have led to despair: the only thing we can know by pure reason is that we individually exist, and we know it because there must be an “I” to be having whatever experience we may be having.
Yet taking the chance that on this day they will be would be worth the effort?
Yet they throw the historical aspect out the window when they refuse to treat the scriptures as ancient literature. So even this statement of faith is a lie!
That only works if you presume that whether those claimed “partial revelations” are consistent doesn’t matter (which is something at least one person here does presume).
Don’t see that in this thread. What does Adam say about Bart Ehrman? When I look into Ehrman I see a more complicated story than what you tell. At least… I don’t know what idea you are referring to. Care to explain? literary criticism? Of course, I am coming from the opposite direction (from Ehrman) not raised to believe Christianity and coming to see value in it despite many flaws. And I never thought there was much objective support for it. I simply like it. I am reminded of “The Last Temptation of Christ” where Paul tells the “historical Jesus” that he doesn’t matter – I thought that was hilarious (right at the heart of so many theological issues). Of course, I think that “historical Jesus” of Bart Ehrman and others is a total construct and I see little to make their idea any more objective and factual than the Christian one. It is certainly a case which can be made well if one is going to discount so much in the Bible as forgery, as Ehrman does.
The principle flaw I see in Ehrman is the highly Gnostic flavor of his notion that he had to find the correct understanding in order to be saved. I would thus conclude, from my perspective, that he didn’t lose Christianity (or Jesus rather) because he never had them to begin with (the same with many who call themselves Christian, frankly). Because if your faith boils down to an entitlement derived from thinking you believe the right things, I really don’t see the faith described in the Bible at all.
Ehrman applies things from a very narrow field concerning the Bible without having bothered to actually learn about the Bible. He gets scathing reviews from Old Testament scholars for taking things out of their biblical context and treating the New Testament as though it sprang into being with no historical context.
That’s exactly what, as a YEC, he was taught – the whole system is based on the idea that the Bible has to be read according to a modern worldview, and that this is the correct understanding that must be held.
I’ve thought the same about all the YEC students I watched abandon their faith; they were just doing what they’d been told, after all, and what they’d been told wasn’t actually from the Bible. But in those rare instances when I could intervene I always assumed that they really were Christians, just ones that had gotten some very misleading teaching. The only other option was to treat YEC as a non-Christian cult, and I didn’t see that as going anywhere useful.
There are other aspects of any revelation, which you (St. Roymond) have been so correctly pointing out. Revelation does not stand on its own as something with unambiguous meaning. First, the revelation needs to be understood - what is God trying to tell to the original recipient? This involves some interpretation, some evaluation of the words used to express the revelation, and some understanding of the context - cultural, historical, and maybe even hysterical - of the specific revelation (where was it, under what conditions, to whom). Now maybe this isn’t that critical for the one person who directly received the revelation, but for most of us we are reading or hearing about things that someone else claimed to be a revelation (another not so minor consideration: How reliable is this person’s claim that this is a true revelation? For the bible, most of us here would accept the judgement of many serious scholars that these books are valid revelations).
And once we have actually agreed that something is a valid representation of a true revelation, then I have the interpretation of what that revelation means for me today, in my specific circumstances, in my life in the 21st century. And I agree completely with what I think I’ve heard very clearly from you, St. Roymond, that the interpretation of something initially written to and for people thousands of years ago does not necessarily mean exactly the same things to me as it did to those in the original audience.
With these provisos, and recognizing that the different partial revelations that God has provided have all been subjected to human interpretations that may be introducing distortions into the original perfect revelations, I still firmly believe that God has revealed Himself to many people in ways that no one particular worldview - including a belief that certain things are based on God’s revelations - fully can see. I do accept what I have read, that God loves everyone; that God is not willing that any should perish. And I also firmly believe that God knew what He was doing when He created this world, knew exactly how everything would work together for good (not everything be good in and of itself, but even the evil things would combine in mysterious ways to result in something good [maybe not in this life?]).
I don’t presume that the partial revelations as interpreted and actually reflected in the doctrines of various religions or religious sects or denominations are consistent. I do believe that God knew how those religions or sects or denominations would develop, and still created this world this way.
And I do believe that the YEC basis for believing the absolute truth of the bible, as pointed out to me by my brother in an article written by one of his seminary professors: “If I don’t believe it is all 100% true, then I won’t know what to believe” is rooted in a desire for certainty, even though God put us into an uncertain world. We are here, in a place where we can choose what actions to take, and our choices do have real consequences (even if the scope of those consequences is limited on the scale of the universe as a whole).
I also have to think that in this thread, concerned with how to enter a dialogue with someone with a very different view of some rather important topics, we have to consider the specific nature of the individual with whom we are interacting. Some of the YECs I know are heavily invested in their own understanding and interpretation. Others are much less involved in the details, and only are accepting what they have been told.
That statement also shows a failure to grasp what human literature is. It’s a reason that the pre-grad school course of study I took required at least a full year of literature courses covering several centuries, different languages, and different cultures: someone who has seriously studied literature will grasp that the form of a piece – its genre – is determinative of how it must be read, so when you have a collection of books with multiple types of literature with multiple authors no blanket statement about their truth value is possible.
This does get at something that just occurred to me: I do believe that God is guiding me to read this thread, think about this subject, and hear some very good ideas from a wide variety of viewpoints (world views, even), to prepare me for a better interaction with my brother. He believes strongly in his understanding of how to interpret the bible. He does not believe he is lying. And I won’t have a reasonable interaction with him if I don’t work very hard to understand his reasons for believing as he does, and treat him as a rational, thinking adult.
I make a distinction between “YECists” and “YECers”, those who are part of the propaganda machine and those who believe what the machine tells them. The YECists are well-educated enough to know better, so they are the liars I referred to; I tend to see YECers as victims.
The main reason that YECers believe the YECists is because they are trained to read the scriptures as though they were written by a friend’s great-grandfather in a journal of things he witnessed, i.e. that what the English translations look like on the surface is what they actually are, so when it looks like history to them they figure it’s history. The trouble is that all the criteria used to insist that everything in the opening chapters of Genesis is history also apply to things written by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and more recently John Grisham and Tom Clancy, so to be consistent they would have to insist that those writings are also history.
The only way I know to counter that is if someone is familiar enough with foreign writers to grasp that books have to be read in their cultural and linguistic context to really understand them, or for that matter with English writers seven centuries ago. For some the common exposure to Shakespeare in high school and/or college should serve as an example: many editions of his works come with footnotes and even margin notes in order to explain what various things mean – and if that’s true of old writings in English, how much more must it be so for writings in ancient Hebrew!
To an extent it boils down to worldview: YECists and YECers rarely are aware that they are forcing a modern materialistic worldview on the scriptures; indeed in my experience few even understand what a worldview is. That’s crippling to communication because unless someone can step back and realize that they have a particular modern western worldview and that applying that to scripture is a mistake there’s no going forward.
Just to give one example, this is an example of a quote I have seen YECists/ers use.
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”
YECers will copy/paste this quote into forums like these from their favorite YECist website, and then pronounce loudly that the eye disproves evolution even according to Darwin. However, at some point one of the YECists had to read the original work and the context of the quote, which is:
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
[two paragraphs later]
In the Articulata we can commence a series with an optic nerve merely coated with pigment, and without any other mechanism; and from this low stage, numerous gradations of structure, branching off in two fundamentally different lines, can be shown to exist, until we reach a moderately high stage of perfection. In certain crustaceans, for instance, there is a double cornea, the inner one divided into facets, within each of which there is a lens shaped swelling. In other crustaceans the transparent cones which are coated by pigment, and which properly act only by excluding lateral pencils of light, are convex at their upper ends and must act by convergence; and at their lower ends there seems to be an imperfect vitreous substance. With these facts, here far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than in the case of many other structures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested by transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class. [emphasis mine]”–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”
This applies to many quotes floating around in the YEC bubble. At some point there was a YECist who knew exactly what they were doing and had no qualms about it.
They are more familiar with “worldview” language than perhaps most are - and they will freely admit that everyone (including themselves) has one; especially since they are often eager to use this as a free “get-out-of-jail” pass or permission, then, to ignore evidence or conclusions they don’t like, that (they would say) depend on a different worldview than their own. This alone is already highly problematic - but actually, I think the problem runs deeper.
While they do admit (when pressed) that, of course they have a worldview too, they functionally forget this in the heat of argument and effectively think that “worldviews” are what everybody else has. What “I” (the YECer) have is … the truth. And it’s at that point that the chickens have really come home to roost for them (and they can’t see any of them!) Everybody else can, though.
And of course this isn’t just a YEC problem - but a human one generally. Any of us are going to more easily see everybody else’s shortcomings sooner than our own - probably a lot more than we care to admit. How we handle that when pushed about it, though, is huge. Do I have enough humility to think I can be wrong even about important things? And do I have enough competence and confidence to also be able to stand persistently against ideologically motivated pushing that asks me to ignore significant portions of reality? It isn’t some easy “both sides-ism” because often it is one side that is ignoring significantly more reality than the other, and yet stubbornly chooses to remain blind to that.
They even consider quote mining to be a best practice. It was institutionalised by such books as “That Their Words May Be Used Against Them” by Henry Morris for example. They argue that what they are doing is exposing the “true thoughts” that the “evolutionists” supposedly don’t want to admit in case they lose their jobs.
The problem with this argument is that they never actually make it explicit that that is what they are doing. Nor do they give any evidence or justification for their claim that their out-of-context quotes really do represent the “true thoughts” of the people they are quoting. They rarely even acknowledge the context from which their quotes were taken, and when they do cite their sources, the citations are often opaque and difficult to pin down.
A useful distinction, though we probably need some better terminology to clarify who is who.
YECists love to make a song and a dance about their scientific qualifications, as if that gave them a free pass to be taken at face value. I always respond to them in the same way: YECers who don’t have a scientific background can plead ignorance when they’re told they aren’t telling the truth. YECists with science degrees do not have the luxury of that excuse. Bad arguments don’t become good arguments just because they’re being made by someone in a position of authority. On the contrary, knowing what you’re talking about turns a bad argument from clueless gibberish into conscious and deliberate lying.
Im honestly more of why build bridges when I can build walls.
Personally, I don’t like walk around and hate YECist. But I have no intention in seeking them out. 99% of the time YEcism is just one part of the divide. Almost every single YECist I know also shares a particular political outlook. They almost all seem to share this idea that tons of things are evil and demonic, and opens up pathways to hell and crazy other stuff. Like they will hear me talk about a horror film and in return mention it’s sinful to watch those things. They will hear me talk about veganism and mention things like “ god placed animals here for us to eat”. While even most evolutionary creationist eats the corpses of animals, they typically don’t fall into biblical literalism on why it’s ok.
Now I understand that not every single one will fall into those camps. You may find a vegan horror loving liberal YECist and we would probably get along for the most part. But instead, the YECist I typically find are the polar opposite and so it makes hanging out and having any real relationship just not likely and not worth the headache.
Now I can work with them and do, and get along perfectly fine with them. Small chit chat and so on. But I can’t imagine really hanging out as close friends.
When I’m hiking, I’m normally pointing out plants and mushrooms and with plants, often talking about things like the evolutionary history and coevolution of native plants and insects. All of which they disagree with.
When I’m not hiking, and I’m just relaxing in my house or a friends house, it’s almost always horror. When I’m not watching horror films, I’m watching documentaries on horror films or either nature which then is often heavy on the science of evolution.
So the only bridge that really gets built is the one where they understand my position, I understand theirs. We share greetings, be well and what have you. Maybe talk about work or something and the whole event lasts about 5-10 minutes. Then it’s a week, or weeks, or even months until this small chit chat happens again.
This is what my ABeka book course said in my 5th grade class–a bit more positively. I’m glad I had a terrific, Christian evolutionary biologist teacher in my 11th grade correspondence (through the University of Nebraska, which took care of a lot of expats’ kids back then).
She pointed out my own cynicism (the term she used). It was great to have a mirror raised to me.
I appreciate this, but I still think that with the strong pull they have, I’m not sure they fully understood. It’s amazing how we can fool ourselves–YEC or not. It took me a long time to exit the mindset, and I came by degrees. The part that helped me the most, I think, was my parents’ tendency to believe good intent of others (thus, to consider the argument for what it was, rather than attribute bad intent); and their modeling that it was ok to ask questions, so I wasn’t afraid of God being upset at me for doing so!
I’m sure grateful for their modeling.
Thanks for relating your experiences. It really does help to get a different view.
I keep flashing back to the movie “My Cousin Vinny”. In the movie, one of the characters is accused of killing the sheriff, and the response was “I killed the sheriff?”, stated as a question. When the transcript was read back in court the question mark was removed, “I shot the sheriff” (also some Bob Marley vibes). That’s what some of these YEC quotes remind me of.
There was a moment in the past where I broke through with a YEC on the problem with these quotes. I told him that even the Bible says that God does not exist:
Psalms 14:1 “There is no God”
When he looked up the full verse it clicked for him.
As @St.Roymond states, there is a difference between people like Morris and the YEC’er in the pews. I don’t fault any YEC’er who puts trust in someone with authority in the church. Trust is an important part of any congregation. I do fault the YEC’ist who knowingly takes advantage of that trust.