Blog

by Steve Risner

[This blog post is the first of a series. The next post is here.]

It’s difficult in these days to have an intellectual conversation if Christianity has some sort of direct or indirect relationship to the topic. Generally, I find that people very quickly reduce the conversation to insults, highly spun information, hand waiving, and a bunch of “Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!” This is true in the origins debate in general. I am not only pointing a finger at those who may disagree with me on origins. Everyone views evidence with bias. Everyone gets very emotionally involved in the discussion, so tempers seem to flare up and boil over quite frequently. I’m guilty of it and I am very concerned with that, personally. I have been praying about and working on keeping my cool when an evolutionist is in the middle of telling me how stupid I am, how anti-science I am, or while they’re arguing against some strawman creationist point they’re preparing to knock down. I’m a work in progress.

This is a strange intro, I realize. I’m trying to set the tone for a series of blog posts I am, at this point, planning to write in response to another blog post. This blog post, titled “Ten Theological Questions No Young-Earth Creationist Can Answer” can be found here. It is very difficult to read something where, from just reading the title, you know the author has not thought well on the subject. This introduction to this series will only deal with a little background information. The author, Tyler Francke, writes for God of Evolution and seemingly attempts to insinuate that being a Bible-believing Christian means you’re dishonest, uneducated, and unthinking. It’s unfortunate. As I stated in my opening paragraph, it’s very difficult to have a conversation with such people. In responding to his post on these allegedly impossible questions for Bible believers—what he terms “fundamentalists”—I have no doubt he is completely uninterested in my words. However, I will inform him that I am indeed going to answer his unanswerable questions. It’s very possible my answers will be mocked and ridiculed as it seems he is fond of doing. I say this hesitantly as I truly despise going there in this introduction but glancing over the God of Evolution site tells me he’s long since abandoned intellectual discussions and reasoning with people who disagree. It seems as if he’s moved to writing for rubbernecks who can pat him on the back.

Reading the testimonial section of the site, in my opinion, is sad. At the top of the testimony page, we see a call for submissions from those who feel alienated by their churches or by religion. This is odd, especially when you read the testimonies, since I am constantly bombarded with bogus stats that claim almost everyone, Christian or not, believes in Darwinian evolution. I’m very frequently told by theistic evolutionists that those who believe in the Biblical creation story are “fundamentalists” and a dying minority. So what’s the deal? In the call for testimonies, he says, “If you’ve ever felt alienated by your church or the larger Christian community because of its rejection of evolution and/or its hostility toward other mainstream scientific ideas, this community — and the world — need to hear from you.” I’m curious what are the “other mainstream scientific ideas…” that Christianity is hostile toward. But, as I’ve mentioned many times in other blogs and even alluded to earlier, Darwinism is a consensus science and you can find support for that claim on the God of Evolution website. Very frequently, you will find when pressed for evidence, there will usually come a point where the evolutionist will spout off something about “99% of all scientists” (or some such nonsense) believe in evolution. I wrote a small piece on that which you can read here. Suffice it to say, consensus science is opposed to free thinking and true scientific inquiry. It’s also noteworthy to mention that many of the greatest minds science has ever known were creationists. I hate to keep linking to other writings, but I addressed the nonsensical nature of the “creation science oxymoron” in a blog post you can find here. I believe it’s just a poor demonstration of one’s willingness to interact with, discuss, and work through the differences with people who disagree with you when this is the sort of thing we see.

Sadly, a reading of the testimonies gives us information as to who he’s targeting with his writings. One testimony writer says he “…came to the conclusion that evolution was true and Genesis 1-3 was not.” Rejecting God’s Word as a result of secularism is not something I would celebrate as a follower of Jesus Christ. It is Mr. Francke’s opinion, I believe, that Biblical creation is something that is harming Christianity the world over. This is, of course, not true at all. It’s true that churches, parents, and Christians in general don’t educate themselves enough on these subjects and, therefore, don’t educate their students on these matters. As a result, because of a lack of understanding of the topic, many “fundamentalist” Christian young adults will have their faith shaken when they get to high school or college. I was educated on the subject mildly and had no issues with the evolutionary and atheistic bias I encountered in college level biology or philosophy courses. If you’re a parent, I would highly encourage you to look into this and begin to prepare yourself and then prepare your children to enter into a world that hates Jesus. Something interesting to note is that Christianity isn’t suffering as many theistic evolutionists will proclaim. (A theistic evolutionist is one who believes God uses Darwinian evolution to create life on earth rather than how the Bible says He created life.) In fact, especially outside the Western world, the Church is growing by enormous numbers. In places not buried under the oppression of the religious zealots of Darwinism, the Body of Christ is expanding in large numbers. You can read a little about the growth of Christianity here.

One of the largest, if not the largest, issues with theistic evolution is that science is used to understand the Bible rather than the other way around. In other words, man’s incomplete, ever changing, and very limited knowledge of nature is used to determine what God actually meant in His Word. This is exactly backwards. Please keep that in mind and understand that “origins science” is nothing more than story telling—whether from a creationist or atheist, religious person or secularist, whoever. We grab some science and arrange it to tell the story we like. There is no such thing as facts for evolutionism and facts for creationism. There are simply facts. We interpret those facts based on our worldview. With Mr. Francke’s blog post, you’ll find it seems logical or common sense. But this is because it’s incomplete. When you evaluate the subjects he touches on, you’ll see very large amounts of information that seems to have been skipped or shoved to the side. So he jumps from a small statement to a huge conclusion. In all honestly, we’ve all done that and I know I do that even now. Because we already know what the evidence will tell us (because of our presuppositions, worldview, whatever) we find a small piece that supports it. Instead of following that fact to the next and so on, we jump immediately to the conclusion we wanted in the first place. This is why some of his points seem to make sense. And I do believe that he at least brings up some things to consider. But most of his “unanswerable questions” are nothing of the sort. It’s also telling that he claims “no young-earth creationist” can answer these questions. That’s odd. This would mean he’s asked all of us and we’ve all been incapable of responding. I actually know a lot of Biblical (what he terms young-earth—a misnomer) creationists who have not been asked any of these questions. I have never heard a single one and I’ve been engaged in this debate since 1993 to one degree or another.

I look forward to sharing with you and sincerely hope Mr. Francke will drop us a note in response. Stay tuned!

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