You want to believe the Bible is the word of God and all these good things will happen to good people and this document tells you what you need to do.
Lets face it, that sure is a heck of lot more comforting to many people than “who knows WTF is going on” or “you die, thats it, non of shit matters anyway”.
But most of the Bible contains rules and old stories and punishment that do nothing to either prove or disprove it being a sacred document.
But wait, if you can read into something(s) in the Bible that have to do with the real world here and now, you are onto something. Now, twist or misunderstand some facts about the real world so they and Bible agree you’ve really accomplished something.
You’ve shown that the Bible says some important thing X. And you’ve “shown” that X is true. Well, that just shows what you wanted. The Bible is the real deal.
Or in other words, for many people, I don’t think they believe in creationism and related stuff because the Bible “says” so. I think they look to find reasons to believe in creationism to give credibility to the Bible. Now, most of this is probably more of a subconsious process for most people, but I can certainly see the “logic” and motivation for such thinking.
So is the belief that the universe is a simulation. Very few go to the church of general belief. Once you get beyond deism, many definitions of God are falsifiable, at least beyond reasonable doubt. Bi and tri-omni deities are logically inconsistent, for example.
That doesn’t explain Creationism specifically, though. Most believers in the Judeo-Christian tradition would agree that God loves us and has a plan for us; but a minority of those believe in a 7-day, 6,000-year old creation.
People find it comforting that there’s someone out there watching over them and taking care of them, righting the wrongs if not in this world then in the next one. To reach that level of comfort, some people will believe anything
In what way(s) do the better crop of Christians handle the concerns which motivate creationists to adopt their position?
What motivated the switch from dubious to anger and then to contempt?
Its just an extension of religious belief. First you believe in something, then your belief turns into religion, then the religion says something crazy that you are still forced to believe in.
I really think that its all degrees of belief on the same spectrum. Creationism isn’t different in that it requires a different reason or form of belief. Its just the consequence of a religion you’re invested in saying something else.
Not existing, once you have experienced existence, can be as terrifying as eternal torment. It hits the “was this all for nothing?” button.
Some sets of religious belief (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses IIRC) go right there and hold that the wicked are not to be sent to eternal torment but will be simply annihilated.
Actually, I don’t wear certain combinations of fabrics, because the Torah says not to. But I am Jewish, and I don’t think this law applies to anyone not Jewish.
Also, there is no law or commandment to believe that the story of creation is absolute fact. You are free to accept it as allegory, or myth. As long as we can study it and learn something from it, particularly about either the nature of G-d, or something we can apply to living our lives in a way that makes us better people, then the story has value. Personally, I think the story goes a long way to explaining why people have free will, and therefore evil must exist-- it’s tl;dr, though-- if you want to know, PM me, and I look for my notes. I led a Torah study on it years ago.
As well as all the points raised so far, I think it’s worth pointing out that evolution is somewhat counter-intuitive if you don’t think about it, or try to learn about it at all. Which someone motivated to reject evolution is of course never going to do.
Even the fact “humans are animals” is difficult for some people to accept when by many of the criteria by which humans evaluate other humans: ability to communicate ideas, learn etc, animals seem separate to us (yes physiologically the similarities are very obvious but like I say humans are inclined to focus on mental attributes).
Let alone wrapping one’s mind around hundreds of millions of years of gradual change.
