Mmm hmm, this is the passage that set me on the this line of thought.
It doesn’t seem to be a comfortable observation, for anyone involved. But I thank you and praise God for the insight.
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It’s not a satanic Angel whispering in their ears. It’s just plain
dummies being dumb. It’s the living stereotype of the loud and uneducated annoying people. They sincerely don’t understand science very well and they sincerely believe they are right and you are wrong and they think they know more than younand so they take pleasure in their “defeats”.
Young earth creationism , nor atheism, is caused by Satan. It’s just the conclusions people have came to.
YECs with no scientific training, perhaps. YECs with a background in the sciences … not so much.
The “my password is qwerty because I’m not Fort Knox” crowd can be excused as not understanding what they are talking about when they make bad arguments. Anyone who has a science degree or a career that demands a strong level of scientific literacy does not have the luxury of that excuse.
I’m just speaking in generalized terms about the person they mentioned. Someone bullying them online and in person with arguments like 6k year old earth and people walking with dinosaurs. Plus it’s a step up from being a satanic evil.
Thank you for this discussion. We need to understand the spiritual origins of YEC if we are ever going to free ourselves from its negative influence,
It began during the end of the 1800’s more than one hundred years ago, when the Bible was under real attack from scientists and thinkers who were mainly in Germany. At that time Germany was the leading scientific nation in the world.
To “protect” the Bible a new movement developed in the USA called Fundamentalism, which said that the Bible is true because it is the revealed Word of God, so it was imperious to any kind of criticism. This was well intentioned and would have been good if it were true, but it is not true, which makes it a lie.
How can I say it is a lie? Because John 1:1, that is the Bible itself, says it is a lie. Jesus Christ the Messiah, the Second Person of the Trinity is God’s Rational Word/Logos, not the Bible.
We do not need a conspiracy theory to explain YEC. The truth is plain enough. It is bad theology used in an effort to protect “the truth,” which is no God’s way.
What we need to do is confront the lie about the Bible with the Truth of the Bible found in John 1:1 If YEC believe the Bible as they say they do, they must agree that Jesus is God and the Bible is not.
This does not mean that this process is simple, but we need to have patience with others as long as they are willing to dialog with us.
The vast majority of people I know who believe YEC are in the not-in-a-scientific-field-just-misled-not-lying category. The ones saying that anyone who disagrees with them is an evil brainwashed idiot are not doing a great job of paying attention to concepts of loving one’s neighbor. The ones blatantly misrepresenting published research or ignoring giant error bars are lying.
Resources to further investigate the claims made in this article? had some discussion on a similar topic.
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Satan gets a really bad press. Blamed for all our evil. And his is nothing compared with the God of the OT and Revelation. I mean who did he actually kill apart from Job’s children and servants? God’s OT kill rate is myriads of times higher. His Revelation kill rate is hundreds of millions of times more. YEC only has evolutionary origins: we are not primarily rational creatures by a country mile.
Hi Russell,
You’re right that there’s a spiritual problem at the root of YECism. Part of it is the spirit of our age, the arrogance people are raised in that encourages them to think their opinions are as good as the considered findings of other people. Americans today hate to be told that they aren’t qualified to speak on any subject. So, I agree that YEC is a lie but I don’t agree that they “know they are not qualified to speak on the matters they speak on.” They think the article they read on some YEC web-site or the lecture they heard from Ken Ham gives them the qualifications and then they’ve been encouraged to assert their opinions and not listen to anyone else. Pride is at the root of it and you’re right that that is a satanic quality.
That attitude then leads to a hasty reading of scripture which causes them to be careless and jump to conclusions. They don’t notice that the initial creation is clearly at an undisclosed time before the six days and so they conclude the Bible teaches YECism. In this article I show that the Bible does not teach Young Earth Creationism because it doesn’t establish a dateable chain of events back to the original creation: "The Beginning of Days”, JBTS (beginning on slide 71, p. 153): https://jbtsonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/JBTS-6.1Part-2.pdf. Please use it to refute YECists claiming that they’re just believing the Bible.
The Lord Jesus calls scripture “the Word of God” (Mt. 15:6, John 10:35).
As a former YEC, I think it’s important to point out that not everyone whose beliefs fall under the YEC label is going to take a hardline stance on it. I take an EC view and my husband is more YEC, but not of the AIG variety that considers it something that the validity of the entire Christian faith hinges on, so we get along fine. For a lot of people it’s just part of their church culture and not a big deal.
As for those who do take a hardline stance on it, some are dishonest, sure (but that could be said of all kinds of church movements), but others sincerely believe that they are interpreting the Bible correctly and that if they don’t, the church could lose future generations due to a lack of taking the Bible seriously. I know that probably sounds weird to those of you who weren’t raised in that mindset, but to me it was a very real threat, and I was kind of raised to be in this “spiritual defense mode” that did not hesitate to “take a stand” against perceived enemies – I believed what I was told, which is that teaching evolution has contributed to racism, violence and a host of other social ills. And if you believed that, wouldn’t you try and combat it too?
Around the time I started college, I did become aware that, despite all I had “learned,” I was still pretty ignorant about science – at least, I didn’t understand enough to give a really thorough, technical defense of creationism, which is why I just kind of avoided any situation where I thought I’d have to do that.
I guess my point is, many people who take a hardline stance on YEC mean well and believe they’re doing something that others simply don’t have the courage to do, and that’s something we have to take into account. I know “good intentions” is not a hand-wave defense of anything, but it’s something to think about as we engage with people, even if they are perhaps not being honest. The best thing for me was to begin to realize that I didn’t need to have “all the answers” for everything – that my faith didn’t depend upon that. That’s something anyone can begin to learn if they’re willing to honestly evaluate what they’re placing their faith in.
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Good observation, John. I think pride is a big part, but also tribalism and the desire to be accepted by one’s peers. If you are in a YEC church, the pressure to agree with those around you exceeds the desire to be correct most often.
It seems we have the tendency to add to what the Bible says. The Pharisees did it, the Catholic Church did it to the point of needing a Reformation, and we do it. Perhaps the evangelical church is worse than either of those, because we should know better. Thus we see dinosaurs on the ark, and the various end-times prophesies derived from texts that say no such thing, as we have to put those things in to make the scripture say what we want it to say, not what the Spirit leads us to understand.
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Why invoke the supernatural. Surely this can be explained as a fundamentally emotional position, just like adhering to conspiracy theories?
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Not sure this is germaine to the topic any longer but I’ll take the chance and say I agree with you completely regarding a devil being essentially a powerful God. While I can make sense of and value what it is that gives rise to God belief I have no use or respect for Satan belief. The best I can do is equate it to Jung’s concept of “our shadow” but that seems plenty different to me.
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The Bible, and the Lord Jesus in particular, teach that Satan exists.
Yeah, that’s right. Good insights.
For me, I was confronted, as a pastor, with a couple that were adamant about YECism, making it a test of believing the Bible. They were divisive about it and wouldn’t listen to reason. I started looking for Biblical scholarship to prove the YEC interpretation wrong and found little. So I decided to write an article myself, have it approved by a peer-reviewed academic journal and published. It took about five years but just this week it is out.
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That may be so but I personally don’t find any use for the idea. While I get why God is compelling I find no case for Satan - as a non Christian.
Hi,
In the Bible, Satan is a rather minor character, basically the prosecuting attorney in God’s courtroom. As in the story of Job, he can’t do anything without God’s permission. He’s not a rival god. Many religious people today have a more Zoroastrian (dualistic) view of Satan, as if he were nearly equal to God and the fate of souls and the world is still to be determined in a competition between the two warring deities. That’s thoroughly unChristian.
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That doesn’t make it so even if He was the real deal. The Devil is easily seen as a metaphor for the human dark side, especially in Jesus’ starving vision from the mid 70s Quelle source (redundant phraseology I know) used in the synoptics. Jesus was FULLY human, whatever else He was.
As a narrative device it kind of makes sense I suppose. I’m probably most used to hearing it spoken of in my own family as a kind of malevolent force. Thanks.
Since the Bible is the Word of God and Jesus is God, what the Bible (and thus Jesus) says is the absolute truth. So, yes, when the Bible and Jesus say something (like Satan) exists, that does make it so.
Jesus’ temptation narratives are not presented as visions. Besides, there are numerous other accounts in the gospels of Jesus interacting with demons.
Also, since the synoptics were likely written before AD 70, Q existed prior to the mid-70s. I’m not sure where you get the assumption otherwise.