Yes, for many people, everything becomes a major issue. Everything is gloom and doom for some.
Re: navigating the topic at hand. Ive learned to live with the lack of certainty and that opinions on almost every issue can differ from person to person. In my opinion, less defensive, more learned and reasonable Christians can clearly distinguish between salvific and other doctrinal concerns.
My Bible study on Monday nights is all conservative but me. But the people running it are of the opinion, if you love Jesus that is all that ultimately matters. I think accepting his divinity is also an expected and unspoken rule. Our group focuses strictly on reading scripture and trying to get closer to God. We try to avoid debate and simply ask questions like: what does this mean for you, name a time in your life where this has been relevant…are you struggling with such and such? We just keep it personal and find spiritual meaning for personal growth rather than engage in theology and try to make sure we understand everything fully. Yes, differences inevitably pop up but we try to move past them. I know I am respectful of their beliefs and will say “I know some is us think Adam and Eve were literal but from my perspective…”
Non-scientific people disregarding evolution in favor of the Bible is at least a bit understandable. The Bible is God’s word, God is real, he guides them, He saved them, they perceive scripture as being fulfilled all the time in their lives. It is true and authenticated in their eyes. Their salvation is incorrectly viewed as being based on the veracity and literalism of the text. Let me get real: I was just reading Sparks and he pointed out the irony of a famous apologist needing to create an entire encyclopedia of Bible difficulties to solve and I immediately recognized what work he meant and chuckled. But if we take it literally, there are all manner of scientific and historical errors, immorality, propaganda and primitive beliefs in the Bible. Despite this, those holding on to inspiration offer some very convoluted theories about the nature of inspiration from the modern perspective. In my mind the evolution-believing Christians are often drowning in the middle. Their exegesis is not conservative enough to join club fideism and not critical enough to join club Ivy League. I tend to perceive it as no-man’s land here in the states.
Also, I think it’s legitimate to ask if science can compete with a genuine salvific experience and personal relationship with God? Not for a lot of people. Science is just something they don’t know about and their knowledge isn’t even sophisticated enough to evaluate the arguments. It’s the misogynists, homophobes and those who seem to lack compassion in the Church I can’t get along with. Every single one us must have some incorrect doctrine or understanding on some point. Getting Genesis right has nothing to do with salvation. It absolutely is a secondary issue in a closed setting of believers when you are there to grow closer to God and lift one another up.
When it comes to witnessing to the world at large, it can be a very open stumbling block. But in today’s world so can repentance which I hear some churches don’t teach very much anymore. For many, the Bible is the stumbling block as it’s commonly understood. Much of it is still a stumbling block for me! Also, countless people have been saved under the guise of incorrect doctrine. God is real whether or not our personal doctrines are correct.
In my experience directly confronting someone’s beliefs as wrong doesn’t tend to go over well. To me you have to plant seeds and just ask the right questions. I can’t just sit down in a few minutes and teach someone the basics of chemistry and radiometric dating or the basics of geology and paleontology.
My opinion is before anyone politely approaches (confronts?) YECs in a closed setting, you have a real good alternative to the literal creation story. Personally, I don’t see even those who accept evolution as getting much of the story right. If you don’t accept a form of the documentary hypothesis, that there are two different creation stories and that is it based on similar stories of the time, your exegesis is no better than the literalistic YEC model. I think evolution believing Christians just read it in light of what they already know about God and read that back into the text. We see this with the very beginning which does not conclusively state that God made the entire universe. He may have formed a pre-existence void. But the majority of Christians take this one way because it’s convention to think the universe was created today. In some ways the YEC interpreters are at least trying to accept scripture at its word and let it serve as conscious and corrector. Non-YECs are just naively trying to read meaning from their current beliefs back into the narrative. For me, you have to become a redaction critic. We absolutely know it’s based on and existed with earlier myths. The parallels are way too extensive. Seeing how the Biblical accounts diverge from the other similar Mesopotamian creation myths is the key to unlocking most of it in my humble opinion. The divergences get you into the mind of the writer. What is needed is a mock synopsis of the various creation and flood myths of the region. But how do you explain ancient Mesopotamian history, the historical critical method and science in one fell swoop to a YEC?
Few will be satisfied or accepting of what you are selling if you undermine the epistemic basis of their intellectual beliefs without giving them something that makes sense in return. I realize what Christy says about “literary references” not necessarily implying factual existence but even to a super-liberal thinker like me, this is unsatisfying. I can’t shake the fact that much of the NT takes the OT at its word. Accepts much of it as history and so on. I mean Luke traces a genealogy back to Adam and Eve! To most conservatives, and I wholly agree with them, it is absolutely silly to think Adam and Eve were literal people and maintain the other 90% of the creation narratives are mythological. That is such a dubious hermeneutic I sympathize with them in rejecting it. Not to mention once you accept science on Genesis 1-11, why are you not accepting archaeology on the Exodus or rejecting many traditional ideas critical scholars now reject. YECs rejecting science in my eyes, is little different than non-YECs rejecting most of Biblical criticism. Obviously hard science is far stronger in certitude than Biblical criticism but to me, this is just the pot calling the kettle black.
To me the issue is not really about YEC. It’s about the nature of scripture and inspiration. It’s really about “inerrancy.” Viewing the Bible as something it’s not. In my mind most Christians seem to think that since the Bible is God’s word you should be able to believe the plain sense of what is written in there. I even have friends who ask me “you don’t believe that? But isn’t it in the Bible?.” In my neck of the woods, to regular folk outside universities and on some message boards debating finer points of doctrine and Biblical exegesis, most people think in simple terms like this. The real question is how do you present a good alternative to this? Approaching a pastor, even politely, with the facts of evolution is probably not itself going to be fruitful. In my mind, verbal-plenary inspiration is the real problem in all of this.
Vinnie
before RTB was even officially a thing, ca. 1982. More recently, though, primarily due to learning of the neutral theory of evolution and neutral drift – I had never heard of it, even though it has been around since 1968 – and its ability to produce complexity, and secondarily because of God’s providential timing of mutations in my renal DNA (those of you who have read my nephrectomy account might recollect), I now endorse evolutionary science.