Posted by Siamang on: 05.29.2007 /
Rob Knop, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University writes:
It’s embarrassing. It’s deeply embarrassing. It makes me hesitate to admit that I’m a Christian in many crowds, because the association is immediately going to be with the ignorant jokers who put together high-funded and very slick marketing crap like this Creation Museum. I have nothing to do with them, despise what they are doing, and am very angry that they are besmirching the name of my religious tradition.
He issues a call to arms to his fellow Christians:
Christians, wake up. Decry this ignorance, for that is what it is. Take back the name of your faith, and call out these ignorant creationists for what they are. Don’t let them claim that any sort of Biblical literalism is at all holy or pure or a evidence of strong faith in the face of a cultural assault. Paint it for what it is; willful ignorance, held to and promoted, an embarrassing excuse for a religious tradition, an embarrassing excuse for human activity.
Comment by: Andy
1Rather I will decry the dichotomy of you calling yourself a Christian but being so afraid to believe that the timeline presented in the Bible cannot possibly be accurate. I put my faith in God and His Word before I trust the Evolutionist. Despite the walls of Evolution crumbling around us, many still refuse to consider the Creationist viewpoint. As Ken Ham says, God was here in the beginning, and He knows what took place and when it took place. Then he made sure it was accurately recorded in the Bible. One simple point: the Bible teaches there was no death before The Fall. That one simple piece of Biblical doctrine is enough to refute Evolution. The geneologies are enough to refute the old earth viewpoint. So my question to the reader is this: why are you so afraid to believe the Bible? If you can believe it for Jesus, why not Adam, Noah, and Abraham?
Comment by: Stephan
2Andy, I’m not afraid to believe the Bible, but when it conflicts with science I need to decide how to believe. Do I ignore science? Or do I find a way to read the Bible that fits with the world around us?
I see the Genesis creation account as poetry and analogy, not science and history. It makes the point that God is the creator and sustainer of life, but is not meant to be a science textbook.
Comment by: Karen
3Crumbling?!? LOL - not quite.
Oh, well, if Ken Ham says it - that’s good enough for me! :-)
Comment by: Phil
4If it wasn’t rebellion against God’s rule (aka “sin”) that brought death into the world, what did? If our current human model was “chanced upon,” what exactly is Christ saving us from?
Comment by: Laura M.
5This post was written and posted by Siamang, an atheist, on a blog entitled ‘ebay atheist’. I think it’s safe to say that neither he nor most of his readers take biblical accounts literally.
In other words, most of us believe death did exist before ‘the fall’, we don’t actually believe there was a ‘fall’, nor do we believe ‘Christ is saving us’.
What we do believe in is science.
I don’t believe most Christians take the bible literally either, even the ones who claim to. If they do, why are they ignoring so many of the directives given to them in the bible they take so literally? After all, so few Christians anoint their head with oil and wear only white (thanks for that one Helen), or give all their money away to the poor.
Comment by: Siamang
6To be fair, a number of Christians also post here, including my co-blogger Mike O.
I think there’s a wide variety of Christians and Christ-followers in the world. That is, unless you’re the type of Christian who defines the word so narrowly that only those who go to your church fit.
I find it very hard indeed to imagine Jesus, willing to die for the world, but then really being a noodge about every fine detail it took to be saved.
I mean, what was Jesus, an estate attorney? I guess the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away:
YOU ARE SAVED (except if you don’t take every single teensy weensie teeny tiny bit of every part of the bible, old testament and new as if it was written to be interpreted with a naiive literalism in its 21st century english translation. offer revokable at any time in perpetuity throughout the known universe and heaven forever and ever amen.)
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
7Siamang, you just don’t get it, do you? He is God - he has the right to have whatever fine print he wants!
Jesus died for you and all you can do is quibble about details? How about some gratitude for a change?
;-)
Comment by: Mike O
8Ugghh!
This is a perfect example of what Christians need to STOP doing. I have been a Christian my whole life. I know what I think about evolution vs creation. I also know what Siamang (an atheist) and others think about evolution and creation. And I know there are other Christians who will disagree about how the whole thing actually went down. And I know we don’t agree.
SO WHAT?!? Even amongst we Christians, we are saved by grace, not a full and complete understanding of all of the ins and outs of every portion of scripture, or a correct parsing of every doctrine that has evolved (hmm, intresting choice of words!) since Christ died for us.
I don’t think we evolved, I think we were created. Old earth or new, I still lean towards new earth creationism, but in the infamous words of Ricky Ricardo,
There are a lot of things that, if we take the new creationist view, we got some splainin’ to do. And we got lots of splainin’ to do if we take the evolutionist view.
When the theif on the cross turned toward Christ, he didn’t have a lot of time to sort all this out .. he was almost dead.
When the 3000 got saved in Acts chapter two, how much of this do you think the disciples actually explained to them before they got their membership card? In fact, how much of it did they even understand themselves??
I guess I said all that to say this, whether you believe in evolution or creation has nothing to do with whether or not you are a Christian. Christians are saved by grace and live by faith and we believe that Jesus Christ was his son and came to die to save us for us and rise again to show his power over death. Beyond that, it’s just religion.
Evolution vs creation is fun fodder for discussion and debate. But it has nothing to do with whether or not you can be a Christian.
Comment by: David H
9I heard Francis Collins talking on an NPR show a few weeks ago. He is the author of “The Language of God” and headed the Human Genome Project. Collins believes in God. He also believes that the Human Genome Project proves conclusively that evolution took place. He noted during the radio discussion that the hate mail he receives comes almost exclusively from Christians. They have sent him death threats as well as called him every epithet under the sun. So much for “they will know we are Christians by our love.” Heck, so much for “love your neighbor as yourself.”
A question I have posed to many dogmatic Christians is: Would you still believe in God if something in the Bible was proved to be false? I haven’t received many thoughtful or considerate responses from most of those to which I have addressed this question. However, it has always seemed to me that insistence on literal, young-earth creationism may eventually force the believer to make such a choice.
Ken Hamm has alarmed me since I first encountered his teachings because he works very hard to make creationism the foundation for Christianity. I always thought Christ was the foundation for that particular belief.
For myself, I have never been afraid to believe. But I am afraid of those who use belief as an excuse not to think.