I learned about all that from you!
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This is really how I feel as well. Luckily, I really have enjoyed learning about creation over the past 5-10 years. A lot of it for the first time. But it’s the YEC baggage that is both frustrating but also driving my pursuit for truth. I don’t need an answer for everything but I’ve found that there are a lot more answers than let on by the YEC world. Lies. Manipulation. Ignorance. That trinity dominates the YEC world. To varying degrees and intensities.
To me it is discouraging bc YEC and lazy homeschooling killed off learning and possibly potential careers and college opportunities. For me there’s real regret and even resentment.
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I have to think it depends. There are some gentle souls (perhaps not many ; - ) who have next to no scientific aptitude nor exposure to scientific principles and understandings and whose faith is based on the ‘plain reading’ of an English translation they have been taught since childhood. It does add some weight to James 3:1 though doesn’t it:
Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
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To answer your question, most of the objections I hear to Christianity are moral objections related either to the problem of evil (why would a good God allow suffering) or bad things that the church has done. They are less commonly because of a perceived conflict between faith and science.
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Wow, I can only be thankful that I have not really been in the thick of it nor have I personally been very involved with it much. There was one LCMS pastor and his home schooling family whom I knew and who were dangerously homeopathic as well, but they lived about 50 miles away and I saw them relatively infrequently. I also remember being given a VHS cassette of a Kent Hovind presentation maybe three decades ago that I stopped watching after no more than 10 minutes, he was so nasty, derisive and demeaning (but the family who gave it to me left our church not too long after).
A verse comes to mind and it’s sad that it is applicable to fellow Christians, but it is:
Fret not yourself because of evildoers…
Psalm 37:1
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An alterative picture of what the Bible universe is:
In the linked pdf pages 523-528 is discussion of this topic. Raqia thoughts
I apologize for the pdf rather than a web page.
Hi,
There is only one raqia’. Sun, moon, and stars are placed in it. Waters above is the heavenly sea; waters below is the earthly sea.
Best,
Denis
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Still sounds like a figure of speech as in the ANE worldview there still would have been floods, earthquakes, and sink holes. There is also a character of Scripture where a passage can mean one thing in one historical context and another in a prophetic context. I forget what OT scholars call this, but I recall reading something about it once.
Exactly what is a figure of speech?
Are you thinking of double fulfillment, or double reference?
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That and I also had in mind something I read by Longman with regard to Daniel and a “tunneling” phenomenon in prophecy.
“a word or phrase used in a non-literal sense for rhetorical or vivid effect”
I know what a figure of speech is (of course), but what are you referring to?
Oh yes, that makes more sense…the immovable earth can be seen as a figure of speech.
Only if an expert in Hebrew and the culture agrees. I believe sometimes a Hebrew figure of speech gets lost in translation. The Hebrews believed the earth didn’t move because that is what their eyes told them.
It’s not a figure of speech. If you think the ancients believed the earth was moving, in what way did it move? Please refer to Denis Lamoureux’s diagram.
There are multiple references to the quaking of the earth in the Bible and presumably in ANE literature, so it did move, but was yet immovable.
Yes, parts of the earth were believed to shake rattle, and roll. But the whole earth? I don’t think so.
Suit yourself
I don’t think it’s impossible that the astrologers in Babylon had an idea of the earth revolving. The Greeks later apparently did: