In this thread a standard issue creationist with the ironic name of nolies posted the standard creationist crap. I’m not interested in refuting it, which is being done fine in the thread, but why anyone would do it? (He started another thread before this.)
I know some people post to stir up trouble, but that can’t be the case here. I don’t think there is another topic on which Dopers of all religious and political persuasions are as unified as evolution. The same people bring out the same refutations and the same links to talk.origins. Not an argument amongst us to be found.
Can it be playing to some creationist gallery? Hard to believe, since these posters get so badly thumped.
Can it be to convert people? Usually one of our believing dopers gently lectures the poster that lies never got anyone to convert. If this was a sincere conversion effort, you’d think there would be a response. Never is.
The only plausible explanation I can think of is that these people are fired up by some church bulletin or something, and truly believe this stuff. They post in the expectation that all us heathen will see the error or our ways, and are truly shocked when we are unimpressed. I have seen only two cases where the poster had the intellectual courage to try to understand and refute the counterarguments. In the most common case, the response is incoherent or non-existent, which I see as a fear that their faith will be challenged.
They’re trying to convince themselves, not you. Why, if evolution is true, then we don’t need God! No-o-o-o, my life has no meaning without God to give it to me!
There was a recent posting in a Young Earth Creationists discussion recently from a former YEC. (GD, not the present nolies’). The post was civil and lucid.
In that person’s recollection, the wellspring was the balance of opinions the person was exposed to. Environmental factors, if you like. The authentic intention of evolutionary biology was seen as a wish to drive divinity from the public sphere, in favour of anarchic and atheistic culture.
If this thread remains less vituperative, there’s a chance a former Creationist may chime in with his/her views. Which I’d like to see.
I honestly feel that they think they cannot retain their faith in God without assurance from a Bible that they consider infallible, and that the result of entertaining even the slightest doubt about the Bible will be, on the one hand, a sense of insecurity that they can’t deal with, and on the other, the vengeance of a jealous God, always prepared to smite an unbeliever.
And because the Bible has to be infallible, and read as nearly literal as possible, hence you get the insane arguments for literalist Creationism.
Hey, I’m a Creationist – I believe that God created the Universe. But I believe that He did it in accordance with what we know as natural law, through the Big Bang, and that life came to be what it is through the evolutionary processes that we can demonstrate from biology and paleontology.
But to presume that Genesis might be anything other than a verbatim account of Creation and earliest human times is to deny the reliability of the Bible, and therefore to in some sense deny God to them. There is also a sense in which, because the Big Bang, Evolution, and the rest of the scientific panoply of origins concepts, don’t require God, this seems to them to be a way of denying Him.
And despite Scripture’s clear words about what sort of God the One who is said to have inspired it is, they remain afraid of getting on His wrong side, with truly dreadful consequences. (IMO this is probably a much bigger lack of faith than simple skepticism about His existence.)
Why disagree with him? As far as I know, his is the standard position for any religious adult who has thought through the issue.
I am a child of God, created in His image, and all that has happened in my life has been part of His plan to make me a better person in a better world.
I am also a child of George and Pat, conceived and born in the same manner as most any other mammal, and the events of my life are a combination of personal choices and random influences.
There need be no contradiction between these two truths…
Oh, and I have a thoery as to why the Biblical literalists seem to pop up and post the same old things ad infinitum.
They feel that the responses are also “the same old thing” which they have successfully rebutted in their opening statements. Remember, any geological evidence of a flood anywhere in the world is Evidences of The Flood. Anyone who argues against that is clearly trying to complicate the issue.
Also, we are a good place to earn Martyr Points, so they can go back to their Jonathan Edwards Memorial Meeting House with true stories of how they tried to bring The TRVTH to the HEATHENS and were met with ridicule. Earn enough Martyr Points and you can trade them in for fabulous prizes…
Being from Kansas, with that whole brou-ha-ha a few years ago about evolution and the public schools, I can never resist the chance to post the following, when I see a thread about creationists.
I think also the whole creationist mindset includes a concept of Absolute Truth. The whole idea that scientific opinions might change with new evidence is totally foreign to them. Not only are they trying to convince themselves, as **SPOOFE **said, but they’re defending their beliefs against the slightest flaw that could bring their whole system crashing down. At the same time, this leads them to think that if they can just poke one flaw in evolution, it will come crashing down.
I was suprised to see that **Nolies **was at least sticking around to argue, and hadn’t just come out from under his bridge for a drive-by. Bet he doesn’t graduate from guest to member, though …
The cynic in me makes me believe that the religious leaders who spout this stuff know darn well that it’s lies, but are using us/them politics to herd their flocks.
I wonder how long it will be until Christians give up on creationism and accept evolution as scientific fact. After all, the Catholic Church eventually did acknowledge Galileo’s heliocentric model of the universe…in 1850 or so. (Which, incidentally, contradicts the Bible in several places. The Bible also endorses rape, incest, child abuse, infanticide, slavery and genocide…all of which are conventiently ignored by those slavering bigots who point at two verses in Paul’s letters where he says he doesn’t like fags very much, and mistakenly interpret “day” in Genesis 1:1 to mean exactly 24 hours…even though day & night weren’t divided until the fourth “day”…)
I think you’ve hit the central nerve, Polycarp. (Actually your whole post did, IMO, but humongous quotes somehow just dilute the point. Never mind.)
I was reared Christian–mostly Methodist–but both parents, for lack of a better term, kept looking. Not unreasonably, they figured that any faith worth the name could, should and would stand up to reexamination to what active lives threw their way. If an unexamined life wasn’t worth living, neither was a religion. They ended their lives at very different places, spiritually speaking, but a certain core remained.
Strict, literal constructionists of any stripe–Christian, Muslim, factions, sects and whatever–frankly confound me because so much of it fire and fury seems based on details that, taken altogether, completely drown out underlying…subtle but ultimately stronger core truths? Insights? Separting the metaphorical jelly nailed and melted down the tree from the bark, roots, source and manufacture of the nail and the nature of sunlight? Theology ain’t my strong suit.
It reminds me of a long-ago column by Molly Ivins. (Shaddup, carpers, I’m just as fond of and amused by P.J. O’Rourke.) Anyway, the crux was it’s wrong to mock people muddling the best way they can through fear. IIRC she was considering militias, but maybe the metaphor stretches, y’know? People who feel threatened, beleagured–or maybe just lazy–may grab at whatever flotsom or jetsom floating past that looks like it might bear them to safety. That doesn’t make them remotely right, just…somewhat understandable.
Dang, that was a steaming load of blather. I’m up too late.
I’ll leave all the other stuff for someone who actually believes in the bible enough to study it, but as to the above: Numerically, most Christians do in fact believe in evolution (or at least don’t embrace literalism, even if they also don’t understand evolution well enough to “believe” it). Also, most theologians, church leaders, biblical scholars, etc. believe in evolution. The Catholic Church, for example, at least mostly accepts evolution – there is apparently some disagreement on exactly how much as Papal and other offical commentary on the subject has been a bit ambiguous, but they at least accept it enough to make your statement incomplete at best.
I’m stuck at mulling over a higher lifeform at the moment, namely tapeworms. They probably embody some hideously challenging but ultimately rewarding hurdle once the ick factor is surmounted. Never claimed to be all that evolved, sticking doggedly right to the topic.
The latest poll I saw showed that more believed that man was created in our present form than believed that we evolved directed by God. (The smallest response was thought God had nothing to do with it.) This is for the US - for the entire world I suspect you are right.
It seems to this atheist that the faith of those like Polycarp and Siege is much stronger than that of YECs for whom the slightest movement in the foundation of their belief would bring the whole thing crashing down.
Thanks for all the responses.
I’m always amused by the whole ‘bible as literal truth’ crowd, since they pretty much only exist as a cohesive force in the United States. Everywhere else, anyone who thinks the Earth was created less than 7,000 years ago in its present form is regarding as a nutter.