Religion 6, Christian Stupidity and Creation/Evolution

For cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/03/1101860 / The Expelled Evolutionist

Well, I started to read the whole blog before commenting, but first it didn't seem worth it, next it seemed not worth it. I do have a favorite entry, it's 6/4/08 1033. Scott's a scientist. There is a physical limit to how far back in time we can see. It has to do with distance. Big Bang light has long ago passed by any place Earth will ever be. Can't see it.

A lot of (real) scientists are so smart that all they can see is how stupid a lot of Christians are.

So Christian Education might be the best place to start. Some inherently stupid Christians take a literal reading of Genesis to mean that God created the heavens and the earth in the first 24 hour period. Now, you may ask, why is that belief inherently stupid. There is a Hebrew word translated in this passage as “day” that leads to this uninformed belief. It gets there through the fact that our day is roughly 24 hours so that must be what it means in Genesis. Genesis speaks of the darkness and the light of that, and following days. I can’t pretend to tell you what that light was, but I can tell you that it wasn’t light from the sun. Before you call me a heretic, stupid Christian, read what happens on day 4. For the first three days there was no sun, so I can tell you that this light of creation wasn’t sunlight, so the “day” wasn’t based on a solar day and the premise of 24 hours flits away. Next is the “day” itself. “Day” is a perfectly acceptable term in English for the term used in Hebrew in some circumstances. There are other perfectly acceptable terms in English in their circumstances. The term in Hebrew refers to an unspecified but definable period of time, and once the period is defined it becomes specified. Loosely explained, I’ll do to it sometime. Sometime is really vague. If I do it on some particular Thursday afternoon then sometime gets defined and specified – a year and a month and a date from 1 pm to 2:30 pm. The Hebrew term could mean the time of planting or the time of harvest, the reign of a king, often stated as “the day of King So and So”, the day of your destruction, the time when angels were making babies with those sweet looking human women, the day of our Lord, he does get more than 24 hours right? It can mean suppertime, it can mean an era. It can mean the time when God created the heavens and the earth. Now it’s defined. In Biblical terms there was darkness and there was light, during that time God created the heavens and the earth. It doesn’t say what the darkness means, it doesn’t say what the light means, and it doesn’t give us a time reference except the context. So, I tend to think that the darkness is down time, there’s God, bored, bored some more, bored too much, maybe he’s hanging out with the angels, no reference to when they were created, maybe they were before everything else, but finally … I tend to think that the light of the creation story is the creative action of God. So, in the light of the first day God created stuff. How long did that first day take? Well if God has always existed, and preexisted the things he made and didn’t speak himself into existence when he said “Let there be light” and if I’m right about the down time then the first day took all of eternity before creation plus however long God decided to take from “Let there be light” to the formation of Earth. Forgetting about the first part and focusing on the creation part, this could be a millisecond, it could be billions of years. God acts in ways that are right and just and holy. He could have taken the billions of years way, created heaps and gobs of, presumably, 12 basic building blocks of matter, let them interact according to the nature he gave them – which we call physical laws. Then, billions of years later, some dust coalesced into the earth. Or, maybe God created an entire, formed universe, with an earth that contained fossils that appear to be from animals and plants that never really existed, like a book written by a writer using a nam de plume. The fictional author was never born, never lived and hasn’t died. Maybe the fossils, or frozen “remains” have always been there since that instantaneous creation. So maybe he created using processes, or maybe he created all at once with the allusion of process. Considering the rest of the creation story, which is step by step and not the creation of all things at the 6th day state, I’m going with God is a god of process, which based on the evidence left by the process, infers billions of years. So day one is defined by the time from the first instant of creation to the formation of Earth, and that definition specifies a start and a stop point, except for the difficulty if you include the eternity before. The second day is defined by the end of the first day until the waters were separated, and that definition specifies a start and stop point. Now, we may not know what the exact dates specified by the definition are, but we know that they exist and are discreet. The time between them, certainly not eternity, probably not billions of years. Then the creation of plants and animals. Sure, God could have created them in a finished state, but I think he’s a god of process. What way did God choose to create, what process did he, in his holy wisdom, use? And what name would a scientist put on that process? And that’s the key point. If God created in an instant but created evidence that creation took billions of years then we know two things about God. 1) He’s deceitful. 2) He’s impatient. I don’t believe either of those two are true about God. If the evidence of creation says it took billions of years. There’s nothing in the Bible that says otherwise. This will be argued by the stupid Christians who think that the first day was marked by the darkness and the light of the sun three days before it was created.

So that key point, the crux of the argument. Actually, the reason there is an argument: The Bible says that God is creator and the evidence of God is all around for every man to see. That is, all around us is the evidence of creation. Scientists look at the evidence all around us and say billions of years. Stupid Christians look in the Bible and say days because they are stuck on a bad translation and accept the translation of the word as the word. Please see the aside below. I guess that would be an aunder. The stupid Christians call the scientists heretics and won’t listen because they won’t compromise their beliefs. And it’s just that, their beliefs. If they believed the world was the center of the cosmos and the sun went around the earth then don’t confuse them with the facts, it’s what they believe. If the evidence that God left behind, that extols his wonder, power and wisdom, is contrary to their belief then keep it to yourself. They want to hold steadfastly to their belief more than they want to actually learn about God. When our very public, very loud church leaders are, as has widely been the case, stupid Christians who say creation happened in days not billions of years, the scientists who look at the empirical evidence decide that the religious view must be wrong. If the Bible is wrong on this then it may be wrong on any or everything, so it is not to be trusted nor believed. The Church, at large, denies the science because they’re ignorant of what their Bible actually says, they’re lazy Christians who won’t bother to search it out and find it’s true meaning, not even the true meaning of it’s words. The scientific community denies the Church because so many church leaders speak in ignorance and arrogance, passionately misrepresenting God’s word because they’re too lazy or too busy or too important or too humble to search out the truth of God’s word.

As a Christian I say this. The argument is the fault of Christians. Those who say that the evidence of creation is all around but then refuse to look at it. The science is no more, and probably far less, imperfect than the religion. The imperfection of Christianity is revealed by Christianity. One faction says gays have no place in the church, another says the place of gays in the church is preaching from the altar. These views are mutually exclusive, they cannot both be right, but they can be, and I think are, both wrong. In any event at least one is wrong on this point. There are many other points. Some points may be just preference but many are matters of holiness or unholiness. Where these differences occur, at least one denomination is wrong, or unholy. I think that probably every denomination is wrong on something or other, so just a little unholy, and that’s unintentional. But we see that Christian character stand up where we’re going to stick to our convictions no matter what. No matter what the evidence God leaves for us says, no matter what the Bible actually says, no matter if God himself stands before us and screams the truth at the top of his lungs. Baptists are devoted to being Baptists and Presbyterians are devoted to being Presbyterians and in the process we’ve proven that we can’t stand to the rigors of scientific scrutiny and like any ridiculous theory we’re cast aside. By our ignorance and through our arrogance we’ve denied the gospel to thousands. I don’t want to stand before God and hear him say, “I spent billions of years creating, you called that truth a lie and pushed away all these people that I was seeking. They never came to me and shortly I will cast them away into the lake of fire because my righteousness demands it. It’s time for you to give an account. Why was it more important for you to hold to your institutional beliefs than to bring that one soul to me?”

The aside (aunder)

There are oodles of Christians who swear that the KJV is completely accurate. These two things kill me. In Luke 14:26 Christ says that you can’t be his disciple unless you hate your parents, siblings, etc. So if you want to follow Jesus, it’s not that you have to hate sin, it’s not that you have to hate “the world” in the way we commonly use that phrase, you have to hate the people themselves. You have to honor your parents, but you have to hate them. You have to hate your wife, so all those people getting divorced, those must be the Good Christians. Second, “Thou shalt not kill.” Now, here it says kill, period. Shalt not, strongest possible phrasing. Under no circumstance is it allowed to kill. Part A. It doesn’t say what you’re not allowed to kill, just that you’re not allowed to kill. So can you kill the sacrifice? No. God directed the Hebrews to do it but it’s a sin. KJV of altar sacrifice – sinning for atonement for sin. Part B. Saul was king. He’s directed to kill everyone and everything of the enemies. He comes back with the king as a trophy and animals that will make great sacrifices – the sinning for atonement for sin. Got got pissed because he hadn’t killed (sinned) enough. Moral, you have to sin completely and thoroughly to please God. Deduction – God delights in our sin.