I work with/for a geologist who is also a Fundamentalist Christian/Creationist. I find this very strange. Not that it is inherently wrong, but I wonder what rationalization is at work to reconcile his personal belief in a Young Earth/6-day creation and his professional training that the Earth is billions of years old. I suppose it doesn’t come up much at work.
Anyone else find this strange?
Do you know someone who seems to have such strongly contradicting beliefs?
Perhaps he’s not a Bible literalist. I have met a couple of people who reconciled creationist/scientific views by saying such things as, “Each day it took for the creation of the world represents several hundred million years of Earth history.” One of these folks apparently had wrestled with the faith/science issue fairly early on, come to a compromise he could live with, and then didn’t think much about it after that - work was work, church was church.
Not that common in the circles I normally travel in, but perhaps it is moreso in the Bible Belt.
I had one of those in college. He really believed that world was made in one week about 6000 years ago. But he was prepared to lie his way through college just to get a degree. The word hypocrite did spring to mind more than once.
In college in northern California, I had an astronomy prof who saw no contradiction between his Biblical beliefs and the study of cosmology. Like Fillet said, my prof believed the six days/multibillion year dichotomy was a matter of poetic license (by an ancient people who couldn’t think in terms of billions of years) and the Big Bang was just a mechanism of Creation. He said the more he learned about the universe, the more deeply he believed in God.
If I may ask, do you remember his name? Where was this? I am about to move to NoCal!
But if this is true the Bible is not inerrant, which is a major part of the whole creationist credo. I suppose like any other religious faction, even creationism can have schisms.
The Bad Astronomer wrote:
You bet. Ever heard of the International Flat Earth Society? There’s a summary of their group’s shenanigans at http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fe-scidi.htm. They take the Biblical evidence that the Earth is flat very, very seriously.
Incidentally, are you any relation to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer of http://www.badastronomy.com/ ?
I’ve gone to church as long as I can remember and I have met a good number of Christians who believe in evolution, the Big Bang, or other things the stereotypical Christian doesn’t believe. Not all Christians agree on the character of God, homosexuality, and abortion just to name a few issues, they also don’t all agree on geological issues.