What are the motivations behind Creationism?

[cmkeller]

Really Not All That Bright:

It doesn’t say that the first human being was created roughly 6,000 years ago. That is what Ussher’s chronology says. The Bible doesn’t say anything about dates.

Genesis Chapters 1-3 make it clear that Adam’s creation is the beginning of humanity.
Genesis Chapter 5 gives the number of years that Adam and nine generations of descendants following bore the next generation, culminating in Noah, born 1056 years after Adam was created.
Genesis 7:6 says the Flood was in the 600th year of Noah’s life, which would be either year 1655 or 1656 (a combination of other verses indicate it would be 1656, but I don’t wish to complicate things) from the dawn of humanity.

Since you already conceded (or so it sounds to me) that the Flood chronology is supported by the Bible without external sources like Ussher, I won’t bother (at this time, unless someone really wants me to) citing the verses that date the Flood relative to the current day. Taking that as a given, the Bible alone can also be used to date the creation of the first human being to 1656 years prior to that.

[Trinopus]

@RealityChuck

. . . nor do they argue that pi equals three.

Well, yeah, some of them still do.

[Skammer]

I attended a Creation vs. Evolution debate a long time ago, I think when I was in college. Most of the audience, of course, were creationists. And the guy who was debating the creationist side basically said, “This is what the Bible says: God created the world in seven days. If the Bible is wrong about that, it could be wrong about ANYTHING! Why would we trust anything it says? We might as well toss it out. So if you have any reason to believe the Bible is right about Jesus Christ, you HAVE TO believe in a literal seven day creation!”

That reasoning seemed - faulty - to me at the time. As I’ve matured as a Christian in the decades since, my response to that argument has gone from being dubious, to anger, to contempt. Few doctrines make Christians look as silly as biblical literalism.

[Skammer]

@ftg

Some of the first posts touch on this but the main common theme I see in a lot of this kind of thinking is insecurity. They do not have a well founded basis for their beliefs. So any tiny little thing that intrudes on their belief system must be refuted from the get go. Since they have no reasoning behind their beliefs, they do not need reasoning to refute other beliefs. (Hence “Science is a religion, too.” type statements.)

Speaking as someone who is familiar with this particular subculture - this about nails it. If you don’t take the Bible literally, it requires a lot of work to understand and interpret it, and you run the risk of being wrong. But if you’re a literalist, it’s all black and white, and you don’t have to do any thinking.

[TriPolar]

Just like Conspiracy Theorists these people like the special knowledge they about the ‘truth’, and the sense of superiority they gain from seeing us ignorant fools deny the ‘obvious’. The CTs don’t have it as good as the religion game though, the religion specifically tells their flock that they are superior merely for holding a sincere belief in the religion. And it is much easier to succeed by holding a sincere belief than it is to actually accomplish anything and hold the respect of others who don’t share your belief. So anyone that questions the basis of the belief diminishes the believer and the result is disdain for scientists and other rational people who try to confuse the issue with facts.

People of little faith walk a tightrope, always afraid that doubt will cause them to lose their balance,so they’ll never consider alternatives seriously and they have no need to bring clarity to their own side of the argument.

[gytalf2000]

I was raised in the ultra-conservative fundamentalist “Church of Christ”. They have a fanatical devotion to the Bible as the utterly-inerrant and literal “Word of God”. It simply cannot be wrong about anything, in their eyes. So what Genesis says goes, despite any scientific evidence to the contrary. Because, you see, if it ain’t all 100 % true, their insulated little bubble of a world collapses!

(I never believed this, myself, but I stayed in the Church, physically at least, for longer than I care to think about…)

[MichaelEmouse]

So far, it reminds me some of the arguments against gay marriage which saw omens of man & dog marriages.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Bridget_Burke

Not every Christian believes in the absolute, inerrant truth of every word in the Bible. In fact, most do not.

True. Most Christians in my experience (I’m not one even though the family tried their best) pay much more attention to Christ’s actual teachings, about humility and loving and respecting and helping each other etc. But the ones who believe in everything else in the Bible, seeming *except *for all the stuff about Christ that’s so much hard work to live up to, are the ones who get most of the publicity and give the rest a negative image.

Believing in every single word of the King James Version, as God wrote it, or at least the convenient verses of Genesis and Leviticus, is so much easier, and feeds one’s need for self-righteousness so much better. Just don’t ask them why their faith is so fragile.

[Voyager]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

It doesn’t say that the first human being was created roughly 6,000 years ago. That is what Ussher’s chronology says. The Bible doesn’t say anything about dates.

The flood thing is obviously problematic.

Please. You are giving atheists a bad nae (and I am one.) cmkeller is absolutely right. There are plenty of dates in the Bible, and they take us down to things accepted in history, such as the existence of the city of Ur.
As for the beginning, the use of evening and morning shows that the seven days are seven days, not millions or billions of years.

All of this explains creationists. Far from being stupid, they see that trying to fit the creation story into science does not work. You either treat it as a story (which is how my Hebrew School handled it) or believe it all the way. And once it is a story it isn’t hard to reject the whole thing, which is just what I did.

[Wesley_Clark]

The desire to believe that life has an easy to understand plan and that a loving creator is watching out for us.

[Fear_Itself]

@Velocity

That’s Old Testament.

So is the creation story.

[CCitizen]

How would an Atheist feel if they were destined to millennia of extreme suffering. Most Rabbis do not believe in eternal punishment.

[CCitizen]

@cmkeller

Orthodox Jews believe it’s a sin (the word translated into English as “abomination” is not used in that particular passage) to wear clothing made from a mixture of wool and linen, which is the specific combination mentioned in the Bible.

Only for a Jew – we have 613 Laws. Non – Jews have only Seven Laws.

[ElvisL1ves]

@cmkeller

Orthodox Jews believe it’s a sin (the word translated into English as “abomination” is not used in that particular passage) to wear clothing made from a mixture of wool and linen, which is the specific combination mentioned in the Bible.

Wouldn’t a better translation be “fashion faux pas”?

[Baal_Houtham]

@Crotalus

I attend church with some educated people who believe in Young Earth Creationism. I will try to explain.

They were raised in families and have always gone to churches that believe in a very strict form of biblical inerrancy. This means that they would claim to believe, if pressed, that the bible is literally true and accurate in its entirety. These folks are usually very familiar with select parts of the bible, but with big gaps in their knowledge. Surprisingly to me, they are very familiar with every word of the four gospels, yet see no issues with the variations in the stories told there.

These folks see any flexibility in their belief in the bible’s inerrancy as the worst sort of slippery slope. If they allow themselves the freedom to interpret any bible story in a way that seems to be going in the direction of “not literally true”, that way lies apostasy and perdition. I have had more than one intelligent person express that position to me explicitly.
… .

This is it. It could also be phrased as “fan wank refined for centuries, and endorsed by the authority figures of your childhood.”

[msmith537]

I was going to say “because people are dumb as shit” but I think it goes beyond that.

I think religion is not fundamentally different from people on message boards arguing over the minutiae of Star Wars, Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or violently arguing over which ballplayer was best. Why do fans get so worked up over the slightest change in an adaption of their favorite book? Same thing.

The world is too big and confusion for most, if not all people to comprehend. Therefore, it is useful to create elaborate narratives to provide a social, moral and historical framework. It’s particularly useful if that framework doesn’t have to actually reconcile with reality or history.

So the motivation behind creationism is no more than defense of a narrative, the truth of which that quite honestly has little bearing on most people’s day to day lives.

[Bricker]

@White SIFL

I’m not understanding the OP’s confusion. It seems to me that the bigger credibility gap is believing in a God at all. If one allows themselves to believe in an omnipotent sky fairy, believing in a wrong age for the earth would be nothing.

The general belief in the existence of God is unfalsifiable.

The belief in a young-earth creation is falsifiable by any number of tests. The Earth’s age being 14.6 billion years is a model is that, thus far, consistent with every observation we can make.

[Totenfeier]

It’s my opinion that the reason that Biblical literalism (Fundamentalism) got such traction in Evangelical Christianity, especially in the U. S., is that the Bible is a “paper Pope” - i. e., a source of comforting authority; as others here have noted, comfort and security is valued by many more that uncertainty, curiosity, exploration, and excitement are.

What gets me going is the idea of “The Bible says it; I believe it;” or “This is not my opinion; I’m just teaching the Word of God. If you don’t like it, take it up with God, not me.” In other words, the whole idea is that the Bible (and by the way, depending on what group you’re dealing with, that is either the King James version, or the New American Standard Bible, 1977 edition, of course, or the New International Version, 1984 edition, of course…no, wait…that version comes straight from the pit of hell…um, which one? What? Where was I…?") - well, anyway, the Bible says right there in plain English everything you need to know for salvation. “God wrote a book that he wanted everyone to understand.”

No text, in and of itself, says anything. Leave your Bible on the coffee table, as many do, and it’ll never utter a peep. All text has to be read, which in itself is a very complex skill; comprehended and understood (harder still); and then interpreted - the hardest of all, requiring extensive knowledge of context, culture, figurative language, the nature of language itself, etc. (Another one that really steams my ship is the folks who demand a “literal” translation into English. They mostly seem to think that translation works like: “O.K. - here’s my English sentence: ‘Dogs are cute.’ Now, I want to translate that into - oh, I dunno - Lithuanian, maybe. All I gotta do is find out the Lithuanian words for “dogs”, “are”, and “cute” - well, there ya go!”).

I’m just venting, really. I know I’m “preaching to the choir” here. It’s just that my job involves teaching people how to process text, and it’s hard enough with short stories or essays, let alone The Word of God.

[John_Mace]

@Bricker

The general belief in the existence of God is unfalsifiable.

The belief in a young-earth creation is falsifiable by any number of tests. The Earth’s age being 14.6 billion years is a model is that, thus far, consistent with every observation we can make.

The Earth is about 4.6B years old. You added an extra digit in front!

[Me_Billy]

It is because we are “born” and that is what they know about and base everything else on.

It is beyond their mind to consider any other possibility. Note some astronomers also think the universe was “born” (Big Bang). They can’t comprehend that the universe was just always here - something different than a being “born” type beginning.

It is possible there was no “sudden beginning” as such!

Also people can’t comprehend that we simply do not exist anymore after death.