Which is fine for creationists because they are not trying to present a theory that competes with the mainstream scientific consensus in any way. They just want to allow their followers to feel comfortable believing what they always believed and not having those beliefs challenged. For that, having evolution be wrong is sufficient – no competing theory needs to be “right”.
It’s basically one big game of sitting in the corner facing the wall covering one’s ears and yelling “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! You’re not so smart! Lalala!”
It’s more of a massive excluded middle. They have a competing theory but assume disproving evolutionary theory is sufficient to show theirs is the correct one. Because clearly there are no other alternatives. Or, at best, no other non-Christian alternatives.
It’s a failure in logic. Basically a messed up inverse statement.
They accept the premise: If evolutionary theory is correct, then YEC is not correct.
But try to disprove it via a flawed inverse: If evolutionary theory is not correct, then YEC is correct.
I maintain that this is not the case, and they are not actually trying to prove creationism at all, not even by a fallacious excluded middle argument.
There is a long-established social convention that you don’t contradict people’s religious beliefs in polite company. You might privately disagree, but you keep your thoughts to yourself because it doesn’t really matter and it’s rude to make people uncomfortable. If someone says mentions a religious belief than happens to contradict one of your religious beliefs, you just smile and carry on.
But then evolutionary biology comes around and has the temerity to (1) speak about a field where religious people have opinions, (2) declare those opinions to be wrong, and (3) be taken from a tradition, science, that has a lot of success in explaining things. That breaks the social convention and makes people uncomfortable. I.e. it is “rude”.
Creationists don’t really want to promote their religious musings to the scientific arena, where things get proven or disproven and two contradictory things can’t both be right. Under such circumstances, very few religious beliefs would survive long. They want to demote evolution to “just another religious tradition” so they can go back to “religious discussion” rules where no one’s really right or wrong (or they are wrong, but it’s impolite to point it out).
And if they did only that I’d have no complaint, but then they want to elevate their own dogma to the same status of science without undergoing the same rigor as other disciplines.
It’s rather like a parent saying, I want my high schooler to play varsity baseball even though when he tries, he can’t hit, throw, or field worth a damn. Sorry but that’s not how you get on a varsity team.
I read it in Hebrew when I was in Hebrew School. It is day, in fact it is not just day, it is “it was the evening and the morning, the nth daty.” Doesn’t make much sense for ages.
Plus the order of creation is all wrong. Plus the crucial part of the story is that the seventh day is reserved for the Sabbath, which is hardly an age.
The poetry in the original Hebrew is far more beautiful than any English translation I’ve ever seen, by the way. It isn’t good science but it is great literature.
But Becket doesn’t seem to have read the article linked. Or maybe I misunderstood his point, because the article simply goes into detail about how the fossil is indeed 65 million years old and has soft tissue present.
The brief, readable, article ends with the following.
I appreciate the work of BioLogos in helping Christians to understand that we can welcome, rather than fear, the findings of modern science. Mary Schweitzer happens to be a devout evangelical Christian, who finds that her view of the Creator has been enriched, not diminished, as she learns more about the complexities of the natural world.
Yes and no, and I’ve listened to lots of creationists.
Most of them will clearly state that if the Bible is wrong in any particular they have lost the belief system that is the basis of their existence. Now they could get a new and more accurate belief system, and some people do, but the die hard ones deny anything that can show the Bible to be wrong.
I saw a clip of a preacher saying that if the Bible said that 1 + 1 = 3, he’d believe that 1 + 1 = 3.
And they want it taught in schools as equal to science so that their children in schools won’t be exposed to an alternate view. They kind of get that teaching it as religion directly won’t fly constitutionally, so they do try to call it science to be the equal of real science. (And calling evolution a religion is an attempt to bring it down to their level.) It is called Creation Science, after all, and their books try to look like science books.
This results in tying themselves up in knots. How to get the water for the flood? The obvious answer is that it was a miracle caused by God, but to look scientific they need all sorts of absurd mechanisms for the water to come and go, and for the animals to hyper-evolve and then move to their eventual homes.
I remember a TV show years ago (on one of the major networks, I think) that tried to explain how some of the miracles in the Bible could have happened. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego found a cool spot because there was poor air circulation in the fiery furnace. There’s a sand bar across the Red Sea and when the wind is from a particular direction and speed that bar is revealed. That sort of thing.
It seemed to be presented in such a way as to make things seem more credible, and to increase the viewers’ faith in biblical events. But at some point it dawned on me that they were, in a sense, undermining the faith that they sought to promote; God didn’t part the Red Sea, Moses just got really lucky that he showed up when the wind was just right.
Not only does that undermine the faith (and I’m not sure that’s even the intent,) but such explanations are ludicrous on their face. If a fiery furnace is hot enough to burn to death even the guards who open the door and throw the three men in, it’s certainly not going to be cool enough at ANY place within inside for three men to go un-burned. And given the Red Sea’s depth, it would take far-stronger-than-any-hurricane winds to ever blow the water away to reveal a sandbar.
I’ve always thought it was silly of him to make the great apes look so much like humans. There’s really no point to that (witness the multitude of different looking animals) unless he just thought it would be funny to confuse people.
Well in fairness, they say the evidence can be “interpreted” differently.
They don’t recognize that it’s always possible to come up with ad hoc excuses to defend any hypothesis. And that this is very different from what scientists actually do.
So it’s really important that people understand skepticism and how we gain confidence in claims i.e. how we know things. People like Kent Hovind will of course never be swayed; they are far too invested and the amount of face to be lost is too great.
But there are a lot of people out there who think of Creationism as a somewhat comparable scientific hypothesis to, well, pretty much all of modern science. Many of those people could be helped with a basic understanding of rationalism and the philosophy of science.
Nor does science. I believe leahcim was describing the perspective of some Christians, particularly Creationists.
It’s not that Hindus themselves consider themselves in competition.
Every single conversation I have had with a believer in creationism has ended with them promising to pray for me. They have been no more willing to try to understand “rationalism and the philosophy of science” than they are to understand the finer points of Vodou. As an example, one classmate (in a Graduate level Accounting class) said that Physics cannot explain a lot of phenomena without resorting to “imaginary” numbers. He passed Physics, Biology and Mathematics the same way I passed Islamic “Studies” in Pakistan. Basically regurgitating the answers that the teachers/examiners wanted while not believing any of it to be true.