Sorry if I have not responded since yesterday.
the way I see it we have two groups of people. All begging for proof or whatever they think they need. Or claiming there is no proof. So we are at a loss or a standstill.
There is no need to continue, The fact is no one will actually know until we are face to face with God and we can ask him. We can guess, We can make determinations based on the evidence we see. But non of us where there so non of us can know.
As for me, I believe the biblical account.
I believe God created the heaven and earth
I think we all (well again, those who are believers) agree here (if you do not agree. then there really can be no conversation between us because our base premis is apposed. and can not align)
Now. as a Gap OEC Person most of my life. by using the science everyone here speaks about. I believed there was a GAP between Gen 1: 1 and Gen 1: 3 where there was an unknown amount of time between the first created act of God. and the time God was going to restore his normal creation.
I no longer believe this
Another OEC theory is the day age theory. where each day consisted of an unknown amount of years. possibly millions) before the next day started. I do not believe in this either (One of my biggest reasons for disagreement is that God created all plant life on day three. and the sun was not created until day 4. So how could plants live with no son for up to millions of years? They could not) But they could survive a 24 hour day easily, and we have no issue.
so I believe in a 6 day creation.
I believe in Noah's time, the earth that existed then perished with a major catastrophic flood which changed the face of the earth. and what we witness today can be answered by that flood (I have seen the evidence presented. and see no reason to disagree with it)
anyway, again, we can feel free to believe what we want. But I am not going to fight over this, this is not even a salvic issue.. so I will be moving on.. Good day
I used to be a Young Earth Creationist. It's how I was raised. The Fundamentalist non-denominational church I grew up in, and later my Pentecostal church of later childhood and adolescence all taught Young Earth Creationism. I also attended a private school run by an IFB church (KJV-only and everything). So I grew up learning "Creationist science".
I also was a deeply curious person, and my parents encouraged me to ask questions and indulge my curiosity. Which is why they were fine with me watching science based shows on the Discovery Channel (back when it used to have science based shows), and check out books about dinosaurs at the public library. My favorite book, which I got as a gift as a child, was an illustrated book of prehistoric animals by Dougal Dixon. My parents cautioned me against evolution, and being the kind of kid that I was I listened to the people in charge of me, believed what they told me, and so even though I was learning a lot about science, about evolution, I treated the evolution as I did say, fantasy or science fiction.
The trouble was this: The explicitly Creationist sources that I was fed would often go out of its way to disprove evolution, and the reason why that ended up being a problem was because I had been exposed to--through my own personal interests--evolutionary theory. And I noticed that the way Creationist sources talked about evolution wasn't the way science-based sources talked about evolution. That is to say, it appeared as though the Creationist sources didn't understand evolution, and so what they argued against was a caricature, a straw man. Now, I didn't really let that bother me; but it's something I recognized at a very young age.
The reason why I accepted Young Earth Creationism and rejected evolution wasn't because my Creationist education presented better scientific arguments, the arguments weren't good. Instead I accepted it because I had been raised to believe that Young Earth Creationism is what the Bible teaches, and it's what Christians believe, and evolution was an anti-Christian belief system. So I was raised believing that I can either be a Christian, believe in Jesus and all that He did and said, believing in the authority of the Bible as God's word; or I could believe in evolution, but if I did that then I would have to reject my faith in Jesus. Jesus was more important, so I naturally rejected evolution. It was entirely black and white, entirely binary, there was room for no other way of thinking.
Then in my later teenage years as I found myself wanting to take my religion more seriously, to take Jesus more seriously, take the Bible more seriously, I started to study the Bible more. I started to study theology, and Church history, and as my family finally got the internet (this was the late 90s) that meant I could interact with people from around the world, with a lot of diverse backgrounds. That led me to discover religious discussion forums, where I discovered Christians of diverse denominational backgrounds.
I learned very quickly that I had a lot of wrong assumptions about different Christian denominations. I also, as I began to read the BIble more and had people challenge me to read the Bible more deeply and thoroughly, that there were a lot of things I had been raised to believe that I could not justify nor defend with Scripture. And certain preconceptions and doctrinal positions which I had never even contemplated questioning I was now questioning. This created a domino effect that resulted in me going through an intense and lengthy period of religious rediscovery and theological reformation that lasted into my early-to-mid 20s.
The TL;DR of that is I ended up becoming Lutheran--that is a story for another day however. Relevant here was my discovery that, in spite of all I had been told growing up, there were literally millions of Bible-believing Christians across all denominations and theological traditions that had no issue embracing mainstream scientific views about the age of the earth, about evolution, etc. They did so not by compromising their faith in Jesus or their belief in Holy Scripture; the two simply existed hand-in-hand. That's how my Young Earth Creationism crumbled. Realizing that I didn't have to make a choice between following Jesus or accepting the science--because that was a false dichotomy.
I learned about genuine scientists who were faithful Christians, people like Francis Collins and Robert Baker.
The only reason I held to Young Earth Creationism for as long as I did had nothing to do with the evidentiary support for it--because frankly, "Creationist science" is bunk--but because I falsely believed I had to in order to be faithful to Jesus.
And tragically, that lie, that one can't accept evolution and be a "real" Christian has resulted in thousands, if not millions, of Christians losing faith because when they discovered the overwhelming support of evidence for evolution, and the geological evidence for the old earth; it created despair. A despair and crisis of faith that they were not equipped to deal with, because their religious support structure failed them, it failed them by selling them a false bill of goods. It told them that they couldn't be a Christian AND accept the evidence. It lied to them because it said that evolution was a satanic lie, and part of a conspiratorial system of corrupt demonic influence in the world and that being against evolution was part of fighting the spiritual fight against the spiritual powers and principalities of the world. The very structures that were supposed to be there to support their faith were built, not on the solid foundation of Jesus Christ, but on the unstable, shifting sand of Young Earth Creationism.
And yet I continue to see Christian structures and institutions fail Jesus' Faithful time and again. And rather than taking accountability, instead blame is shifted and placed on atheists, secularists, humanists. Science itself has become the enemy of faith. And so these institutions fight tirelessly against basic science, not just evolution, or geology, but also climatology. And this has led to ever increasing trends of anti-education, anti-science. It is resulting in isolation and circling the wagons, and rather than engaging the world with the love and good news of Jesus, there is instead a rejection of that love, a rejection of that Good News. As "culture wars" are becoming more important than practicing the Christian faith. It's more important to win a political battle against the demonized opposition than it is to take up the cross and follow Christ.
And what I have continued to witness is a continued dumbing down of Christianity, an exponential increase in biblical and theological illiteracy. A fundamental rejection of basic Christian principles of ethics in favor of culture war BS.
Even in my super conservative Fundamentalist Sunday School classes I was taught that things like empathy and compassion, especially for the vulnerable and the hurting, were GOOD things. Yet I've actually been told, straight up, that compassion is not a Christian virtue, and that things like turning the other cheek, loving one's enemy, praying and blessing instead of cursing aren't things I should even take seriously. It's more important to win the culture war, by any means necessary.
Anti-evolutionism is simply a symptom of this deeply dangerous problem.
-CryptoLutheran
