From: gordon brown (gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2003 - 17:59:42 EDT
On Sat, 4 Oct 2003, Don Winterstein wrote:
> Re: RATEHoward asks:
>
> "What do you (and other critics) think are the key concerns that lead good and intelligent people to support a YEC position in spite of its scientific shortcomings?"
>
>
> I've broached the topic with several "good and intelligent" YECs, so I'll take a stab.
>
> The foremost problem I sense is that these people have become very comfortable over many years with a traditional theological package that they learned in a conservative church environment, and an old Earth poses a threat to the package in ways they don't fully understand but are basically unwilling even to contemplate. None of these people in this category has had scientific training, and when someone who has scientific training (e.g., an ICR spokesperson) claims the science is wrong, they're eager to believe. If a scientist counters that the science is right, then it just boils down to a disagreement between two informed people, and they're going to side with the informed person who leaves their beliefs intact. Many of these people seem predisposed to accept that science is unchristian and likely to be wrong.
>
> It's traumatic for adults to fiddle with the beliefs on which they depend for their eternal salvation. Furthermore, they're well aware that Jesus never required scientific knowledge of the world. Instead, he praised childlike faith. Some YECs simply dismiss the whole topic by saying it's not a salvation issue and they don't want to be bothered.
>
> For me the great age of the world is a very important issue; for them it's either threatening, perverse or irrelevant. One intelligent, generally well-informed and otherwise competent lady told me condescendingly that, of course, I'd been involved so long in science that naturally my thinking would have become contaminated by it.
>
> I've thought the solution lay with the youth, who couldn't help but be exposed to the scientific scenario, would accept same and would adjust their theology accordingly. I still believe this, but the process seems achingly slow. One reason, I suppose, is that many youth are never exposed to the relevant science. A second reason is that YEC parents do everything in their power to indoctrinate their kids into the old theological package.
>
> Don
I think I am more interested in the question of how this situation arose
than I am in why it continues. It continues because people hear certain
things from tose they trust and believe them.
I am old enough to remember the days before Morris's writings appeared.
There were many YECs around, but they didn't seem to be militant, didn't
advocate flood geology, a vapor canopy, different physics before the Fall,
etc. They seemed to tolerate those believers who were old earth, although
it was probably better not to be a theistic evolutionist. Nowadays the
issue is far more divisive. I am afraid that we took the scientific
creation movement too lightly when it first appeared.
It appears that there are effective tactics for some movements to change
the beliefs of vast numbers of evangelicals. This is disturbing. Here is
what some of them are:
Provide literature, movies, etc. for Sunday Schools, home schools,
Christian bookstores, etc.
Give lectures.
Demand equal time in the schools.
Claim to be an expert.
Don't reveal the field in which you got your degree.
Loudly proclaim to be defending orthodoxy.
Label all who disagree with you as heretics.
Don't tell anyone that you borrowed your ideas from the Seventh Day
Adventists.
Someone in this thread indicated that YECs presented themselves as
defending Genesis 1 and 2. They do claim to, but this is ironic,
especially in the case of Genesis 2, where they ignore certain passages
and take others out of context.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Oct 07 2003 - 17:59:42 EDT