I’ve mentioned previously that one of the major problems I have with Christians is this growing trend of only “believing” certain aspects of The Bible. Yes, I’m talking about those who have recently shunned away from creationist theory, seeing the scientific evidence as overwhelming, yet still abiding by the rest of the Bible. This is one of those “let me get this straight…” issues. So, even though the Bible says God, the invisible all powerful entity exists ,and created everything, they are choosing to believe God exists but not that he created everything? So what did the “creator” actually create?
As someone who likes to apply logic to much of what I do, I find this genuinely hard to understand. If I was reading a book, lets say an encyclopedia, and it stated that fire is wet, I’d question the validity and accuracy of the rest of the book. For some reason, Christians don’t do this. This fits in with my long held view that people are pre-determined by personality type to be religious. It may very well be that one of the personality traits that leads people to religion is the inability to question something you are told. This is the equivalent of repeatedly voting for a politician because they tell you your life is better, even though your life isn’t better at all.
For fundamentalist Christians, an even more worrying trend is emerging. While creationism can be disproved through science, there are Christians out there choosing not to follow parts of the Bible because they don’t agree with it. The latest “evidence” (I never truly believe surveys, so I use the word “evidence” advisedly) that supports this is a survey performed with young (under 30) Christians and non-Christians. A couple of striking facts came out of the survey. Firstly, both Christians and non-Christians feel that the image of Christianity is waning. The other striking fact is that both believers and non-believers feel that Christianity is too homophobic. And this is putting people off it as a religion. Once again, this came from Christians.
So, we have God creating everything, which is fairly clearly set out in the Bible, and Homosexuality, also fairly clearly dealt with in the Bible, being questioned by both believers and non-believers. So what else is up for the chop? My money is on Jesus.
It just seems that as atheists address the fundamental points of religion, and raise sufficient doubt in the minds of a religion’s followers, believers are going to have less and less to hang on to. You almost get the impression that everyone knows the game is up, followers of religion know they are wrong, but they have so much invested in this little game they won’t give up without a fight. So the way to do it is clearly to chip away at their most strongly held beliefs. Twenty years ago, it would have seemed absurd to have a Christian who wasn’t also a creationist, not so now.
I’ve written two posts which have some Bible Quotes that many Christians choose to ignore. The first one is here, and here’s the second one.
Could we just clarify that “creation” means making something “out of nothing”. The question of creation is: “where did everything come from” not “where did the horse come from”. Long before Darwin there were evolutionary sorts of theories. For example St. Augustine way back 1400 years before him had the idea of semines rationes (like a blueprint just read to unfold) buried somewhere inside creatures that allowed new species to come about. The problem of evolution is a scientific one principally, but also a philosophical one. Where Darwin ran into difficulties is the idea that “random mutations” could allow species to become gradually more complex. This is unreasonable because no effect can be greater than its cause. Augustine’s theory required an intelligent being (God) to plant these ‘DNA-type’ messages in the first place. I’m not saying Augustine was right, but that his theory is more reasonable.
In any case, my main point is that evolution and creation are separate questions.
Yeah. Any sane, rational, logical person should accept the beliefs which have the most hard factual evidence behind them. Most religious people I know take the word of god to be explanation for things formal logic and science does not have explanations to. The word of “god” is really no difference than the word of any philosopher. The Bible gives people reason to get up in the morning and toil in their monotonous jobs. Some people do not find pleasure in thinking about how the universe began, some people find it scary to envision what lies outside of the universe, or “where” the big bang occurred. If you choose to believe in god and creation, you get a nice (understandable) story explaining [i]why[/i] we are here. Explaining why you go to work, explaining why you should be good to other people.
When people turn to religion to fill in philosophical gaps, to inspire and encourage them to work hard and be good citizens, then who can blame them? Religion only becomes a problem when people start to ignore reason and take it literally.
The bible is a story. It is meant to help people understand their place in the world. If you leave it at that, nobody has any problems.
I wish I could edit my comment.. But ill just add:
Take the story of Genesis.
A Rational Interpretation: Even God needs to rest once in a while. Don’t work 24/7, do amazing things, but then don’t feel guilty if you want to kick back for a day or two.
Literal Interpretation: God created the world in 6 days a few thousand years ago and stopped on the 7th day. Memorize that and ignore anything to the contrary.
Hi,
I’m a christian and I think this particular article is so true. The idea that christians can pick and choose the bits they like is a nonsense. However, I disagree with you about evidence being against creation. I’d recommend the book ‘Who made God?’ by Edgar Andrews as a good case for believing in a creator.
Another thing I should mention is that there are plenty of atheists who have very little to back up their views other than listening to a few comments from others and trotting out the same tired old stuff such as: ‘If there is a God why is there so much suffering…’etc.
I’d like to make the point that as long as athiests approach religious people with contempt and disgust, all they’re is strengthen the view that you are all smarmy know-it-alls, that think you’ve got a perfect bead on everything. Atheists revert to the skeptical model to reinforce thier argument without really understanding the skeptical model.
One: Lack of proof is not proof of lack.
Rogue waves did not exist to science until very recently, and every captian that was sunk by them was a drunk halucinating idiot. As this example applies to religion, billions of people around the world have profound spiritual experiences. The stance that the athiest takes is the same as the stance that those scientist did. Such that those who have experienced this are mentally ill and those who believe them are gullible idiots.
Two:Observation requires investigation.
For arguments sake, lets say that only a few hundred thousand people make a spiritual observation
then the skeptics point of view is that those obervations should be thoroughly investigated.
The athiest point of view, however, is that every one of those observations is incorrect. Every single person is mistaken or lying, and therefor investigation is a waste of time.
Lets use a different example; Bigfoot. Of all the thousands upon thousands of fake or false pictures of bigfoot, what is the significance of the one that is real? Among the thousands and thousands of mistaken spiritual experiences, what is the significance of that one true experience, logically, inductively? The skeptics point of view is that they haven’t the evidance to make a descision, not that they dismiss the possibility of evidince they don’t immediatly have.
Finally, Id like to say relax. The truth is inevitable as long as you keep looking for it. To those Christians out thier, I think you’ll find that all things are ultimately mundane. To you atheists, give the universe a little more credit. There may be some spectacular explanation for the experiences of all these people that you have yet to understand. It can’t be any crazier then alternate dimension theory.