I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. But this endless arguing about how old the earth is doesn’t make any sense to me.
And like any child of the 90s, I think Bill Nye is great.
I’m an outsider on this conversation. The churches I grew up in had their own unique variety of fundamentalism. While I occasionally overheard the debates about “creation vs. evolution,” I was never indoctrinated to think “we don’t believe in dinosaurs.”
My question is always “how can we live as missionaries in present day America?” The Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate is a great example of how damaging such arguments are to this cause.
It’s hard to take young earth creationists seriously for three reasons:
1) Why are “creationists” arguing with science on science’s home turf?
Remember when Michael Jordan tried to play switch sports? Sure, he’s one of the greatest athletes of all time, but he was a pretty terrible Baseball player.
Why? Because he had spent his life creating a specific skill set for basketball. Then he entered an arena that required a different skill set. He was made for basketball. No amount of hard work would change that.
Modern science is based on a set of ideas that were developed in and after the enlightenment. It developed rules for ascertain patterns.
The Bible was written thousands of years before the frameworks of modern science were developed. It will never fit into scientic frameworks because it was never meant to.
2) Why does it feel like young earth beliefs are so often tied to a specific political ideology?
From my very outsider perspective, it seems that those who are attached to Young Earth creationism are also attached to a certain political ideology. It tends to go hand in hand with opinions about sexuality, reproduction and guns.
It’s hard to recognize someone’s “scientific expertise” when they seem to have a social agenda.
3) How does this help us live like Jesus or lead others do the same?
Jesus last command was to go to the nations and teach people to actually do what he said.
A quick skim of the Sermon on the Mount and other texts make it clear that Jesus is concerned with how you treat other people, trusting God and not using religion to beat people up.
So how does the age of the earth fit into that?
When creationist pick fights like this one, it looks an awful lot like a cat caught in a corner. The last gasps of dying Churchville, a culture that is used to having authority, lost in a new world.
An Old Testament professor in undergrad started me on a journey toward intellectual honesty. We walk word by word through the Hebrew of Genesis one and two. We discovered a beautiful hymn about YHWH’s sovereignty.
(We didn’t find a science textbook.)
The next step came from a book written by a Jesus-loving grandfather who writes goofy science songs on his guitar. Dr. Francis Collins was Bill Clinton’s appointee to lead the human genome project. He is one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologist. In The Language of God, he described his journey from atheism to faith. He also explained how evolution works. In all of this, he showed how he reads the Bible.
What do I believe about how creation happened?
Well…
I honestly don’t think about it a lot.
My fear is that people that do think about it a lot aren’t just wasting their own time. They are damaging the cause of Jesus.
While Bill Nye and Ken Ham battled it out, I was having dinner with five new friends. We’re working together to start a new church.
Our hope is, through dinners like this, we’ll start to know and trust each other. Then we’ll help each other do the things Jesus said to do. Then we’ll help others do the same.
Some people might respond by saying “different strokes for different folks.”
Sorry. No.
The world has changed, and the church has an ever shrinking amount of authority in our culture.
When some Christians make any one issue (young earth creationism, gay marriage or social justice) their defining attribute, they actually hurt the cause of Jesus.
We all have to start thinking like missionaries. Ideally, that should mean helping people see why following Jesus is different from any other way of life.
Unfortunately, debates like yesterday’s force us to take an extra step. We have to start by disentangling the Jesus way of life from specific scientific (or political…) ideologies.
In other words:
Ham and anyone else who boils the Christian faith down to anything besides Jesus is making missionaries jobs twice as hard.
This has to stop, because these days, we’re all missionaries.
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