Yes, wouldn’t it be great if seminaries required a class like “how to respect professionals in your congregation” and they reviewed enough basic material so they would be able to avoid saying stupid stuff about psychologists, teachers, medical professionals, scientists, etc.
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This podcast was one of the first ones, and the topic was students coming out of YEC.
The YEC crowd likes to frame leaving YEC as the slippery slope to deconversion, but I met Garret at the BioLogos conference last March and he’s still very Christian, and Amanda joined Wycliffe and is coming to work in Mexico, so we get to be Bible translation colleagues soon. 
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Here in the UK we now have ECLAS based at Durham University’s St. John’s College, which itself includes the Cranmer Hall training college. The head of St. John’s College has Durham doctorates in both astrophysics and theology and helped set up and run ECLAS.
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Dear Marm. I like the umlaut. And agreed, nothing, no trivial distinctive, can get in the way of social justice. But for 1700 years at least, West and East, despite the Cappadocian Fathers, Christianity has pursued every adventure in missing the point possible. 150 years of YEC being a late one. I’m not interested in addressing YEC twiddly bits, going down that rabbit warren. I’m interested in confronting ourselves, confronting anything and everything that stops us actually being righteous. Christian.
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I saw this blog post in my email and just read thru it and wanted to comment as a friend. Hopefully this will encourage some to return to God’s Word as their source of truth and confidence in seeing His glory, majesty and purpose in creation.
My experience is just the opposite of CuriousBatman…and I am not alone by any means. God saved me out of a life of “science” focused influences and beliefs where Carl Sagan and others in his circle were my idols and I read his and other evolution-based authors with excitement and complete trust. Prior to God’s grace coming into my life, I was an all-in evolutionist (ie. Carl Sagan “billions & billions”) and border line atheist.
So as a new believer in Christ I came with a worldview that for over a decade had been consumed and saturated with evolutionist teachings. As a new believer I only knew the essentials that God is real, God is Creator, God is King, God is Judge, God is Savior and God has spoken. As I read thru the book of John for the first time, all those magnificent truths were revealed and I believed for the first time. I realized I was a sinner…a willful violator of my Creator’s authority, deserving of God’s judgement, could do nothing to save/justify myself, but God sent His Son, Jesus, the God-Man to save sinners like me. By the grace and mercy of God, He saved me and granted me faith in Christ as my Lord and Savior.
So what happens to a new believer in Christ? God’s Word says that we grow…grow in knowing Christ and in the “knowledge of the truth”. What is the source of this “knowledge”? It is God’s Word…the Bible.
I originally wrote several paragraphs at this point but will summarize as this. What did a new believer in Christ reading God’s Word learn about creation…and specifically the creation of man? Not evolution or “billions and billions” that’s for sure. God’s Word is clear and reveals His glory in creation.
And as a final summary of what one will see in God’s Word regarding creation using some of the comments in this blog as contrast:
God’s Word is Truth…not propaganda
God’s Word is Light…not darkness in a cave
God’s Word is Pure…not misinformation or lies
God’s Word is Living Water…not deadly Kool-Aid
God’s Word is Eternal…not clutching at straws
God’s Word is Freeing…not intimidation or upbringing
God’s Word is God’s Revelation…not an intellectual prison
Blessings,
Tom
1 Peter 1:24-25 - For, “ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY IS LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER.” And this is the word which was preached to you.
Just some of the key versus that changed my creation worldview to a Biblical worldview:
Genesis 5:1
Luke 3:38
Romans 5:12-21
1 Corinthians 15:45
1 Timothy 2:13
Jude 1:14
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your input here, and it’s wonderful to hear your story. I’m glad that you came to Christ and found more purpose than you did in science alone – you’ve given us a good picture of the limitations of science – it can tell us a lot about the world but it cannot save anyone and can’t speak to the supernatural. On that, I think you would find a lot of agreement here.
Well, sure, it wouldn’t make sense to expect modern science in an ancient text. But that doesn’t mean they have to be pit against each other. God gave us scripture and also the world around us – both are from him and can show us different truths. Biological reality doesn’t overrule his creative power.
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Glad you moved from atheism to Christianity. Growth is good, and hopefully we will all continue to do so in our Christian walk.
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I don’t call abandoning science a good picture of its limitations. That pictures the limitations of those who abandon it. What can save us from what? And what is the supernatural that science can’t speak to it? Faith that cannot include science is unsound. Has nothing to offer. And less when it blames and damns the professor. I’m not aware of any in BioLogos from Francis Collins on who reject science no matter how they phrase their piety.
PS Capitulating to science denying, pseudoscientific religion is not struggling to leave YEC. It’s YEC.
PPS Which has nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever.
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Hi Laura,
Thanks for your note. I agree, God’s Word is not pitted against science or engineering by any means.
Tom
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But we need to be saved from vaccines, antibiotics, clean water, artificial fertilizer. Who needs all these extra years added to our lives?
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What is the difference between creation and Biblical worldviews? And how did the above change the one to the other?
I will have to check out Hugh Ross’s book. BTW…not so lonely. St Augustine questioned it in his time, though the reasoning and science were different than today. Read America’s God by Mark Noll — esp the part on the history of YEC. Also read The Creationists by Ronald Numbers. This also is a history of the modern version of this movement. Helpful, I think, for people who want to think things through.
More evangelicals than you think are somewhere in the Old Universe camp.
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Hi Klax,
My wording could be more clear…reading God’s Word simply changed my worldview on everything including on creation and origins from one that was based on the theories of big bang and evolution to the truth revealed by God that He created as a supernatural event by His decree…He spoke the creation into existence and He created man (men & women) in His image…that’s all in Genesis. And that is the only possible interpretation for the Gospel to make sense:
- Adam, as the first man, by his transgression, brought death into the world.
- By the plan and purpose of God, Jesus, the second person of the Godhead or Trinity, come into time and space as the God-Man, to live as a man in order to redeem man.
- Jesus, as a man, came and lived the sinless life that Adam or any man after him, could not live…and then through His death, died a substitutionary death that satisfied the just penalty that death required.
- Jesus, as a man, was raised having conquered sin and death. And thru His resurrection, forgiveness of sin and promise of redeemed life is found in Christ.
This is the Gospel and it only makes sense if Adam was a man…and not an “evolved” man because death came by Adam’s transgression…not before which the theory of evolution relies upon.
Thanks,
Tom
If that floats your boat, go with it. But realize that many do not feel the mechanism by which God created defines his creative initiative. Whether by poofing dirt into flesh in an instant or by a long process is irrelevant to the gospel. And our sin separates us from God, whether Adam’s transgression was the act of one historical individual, or representative of mankind’s universal bent made manifest in our own lives and decisions.
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Hi Phil,
It’s not about my boat or anything about me. It’s about what God has revealed in His Word and whether we believe it. Contrary to the origin of man being “irrelevant” to the gospel, it is actually essential. How do you interpret this verse:
Romans 5:12 - Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned.
For one to insert an “evolutionary” process being the origin of the “one man” takes far more faith to believe than for us to believe that God the Creator called all things in to existence by His sheer power and purpose and created man in His image…just as Genesis tells us. And again, trying to insert that also goes against the revealed Word telling us that sin and death came thru Adam’s transgression…no death existed before that so any thought of “evolution” being the mechanism is contrary to the Word of God.
So again, not about my boat or your boat or anyone’s boat/feelings…but its about God’s revealed Word.
Thanks,
Tom
Hi Tom. Have we danced before? This isn’t going to go well. For me. You’re a decent, gracious, sincere chap. That is your gospel and so be it. I am not going to do battle with that. I don’t see how I can go for the trunk of the tree as to do so would be inevitably so destructive all round.
As a smarter, wiser, much more inclusive head than mine (Hi @Kendel!) has said about the importance of the social gospel, it doesn’t matter how we get there. I swim with English charismatic-conservative evangelicals, may of whom would agree completely with your *s, and a lesser number of liberal ones, in aspiring to the social gospel. I couldn’t do it without them.
His kingdom come.
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Hi Klax, I don’t believe we’ve danced before But I agree with you…His Kingdom come. Blessings, Tom
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Many of us here used to be YECs, my old self included, in my youth. God’s very cool creation reveals some irrefutable truths too though, and if they appear to conflict with the Bible, then the interpretation of one or the other or both is in error. A first reading of an English translation of early Genesis can certainly influence a new Christian to think that it is talking about things that are scientific certainty, but are they really, and is that really what is important, as long as we agree on Genesis 1:1
It didn’t take a lot for me to become an OEC, an old-earth creationist, partly because even as a kid I thought that YEC explanations of how there came to be light before the sun was created were stilted, forced and without any solid biblical basis. With some nuclear physics theoretical foundation and practical application behind me after that, I found the variability of radioactive nuclide decay rates that YECism requires for it to be true was a nonstarter, not to mention a variable speed of light.*
I accepted the ID movement’s claims for quite a while, but two things combined to allow me to accept the science of evolution. Learning that evolution could indeed produce complexity was significant. I was under the mistaken impression that it taught that a single mutation in DNA was all it took to produce a morphological change, and I had never heard of neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution – it wasn’t even a thing when I had biology in seventh grade, and it had not been mentioned in the few university level life science courses I’d taken after that. In the same timeframe as I was learning those things, I had a nephrectomy by which it was brought home to me in a dramatic fashion that God is sovereign over the mutations in DNA. When a Christian molecular biologist said to me,
…the most common mutations, transitions, are not really ‘copying errors’, because the keto-enol transition of the base is driving them and the polymerase is working correctly. So if you’d like, that can be seen as providence more than chance.
That was all it took (in God’s providence ; - ).
*An important verse:
This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…
Jeremiah 33:25
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In Romans, that is a difficult passage, but he could well be referring to Adam as a literary example. And to highlight in bold a little differently, “…death spread to all mankind, because all sinned.”
These arguments have been made and discussed over and over without any resolution, so you are welcome to your take on things if it helps you in your faith journey.
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Okay. Many of us became believers by reading the gospels. How long have you been a believer?
Growth in Christlikeness isn’t growth in scientific or intellectual knowledge. This isn’t news. What does “I am the way, the truth, and the life” mean to you? Speaking for myself, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t something found in textbooks.
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