<\/p>\n
Today’s New York Times<\/a> features a well-balanced article<\/a> about the differing perspectives of two different groups of rafters floating through the Grand Canyon<\/a>. One group was a “young earth” creationist tour, the other a tour organized by evolution apologists.<\/p>\n I was pleased to see an article in the Times that presented “fair and balanced” reporting of the different views in play. The YEC (young earth creationist) folks didn’t come across as backwoods yahoos or right wing nutcases, but rather were presented as sincere religious believers who were trying to make sense of their faith. I’m glad for that.<\/p>\n Yet, I ultimately found the article depressing for what it says about the evangelical subculture’s relationship to both the Bible and science. Promotion of YEC is one of the major reasons I don’t feel comfortable sending my kids to any of our local Christian schools (the other being cost). I’d prefer for them to learn the few snippets of evolution they’ll hear about in our town’s public schools, which I can easily supplement and correct with truth from scripture and ideas about intelligent design, than to be burdened with the false belief that all Christians who take the Bible seriously hold the YEC view.<\/p>\n Promotion of YEC is also one of the major reasons I no longer feel fully comfortable in mainstream evangelical churches. If our local spiritual leaders simply toe the YEC line, I wonder what other lines they’re throwing out to me. Have they really thought carefully about eschatology, the realtionship of Christian faith to politics and culture, the problems of pain and evil, and other tough questions, or are we mostly hearing a party line on those things as well? My heart hungers for an evangelical fellowship that isn’t afraid to explore tough questions like these without easy, predefined answers.<\/p>\n In many ways I wish we evangelicals were more like the Catholic church on questions of the relationship of faith and science. Maybe it’s because of the Catholic Church’s long and painful history on this front, but there is a willingness within Catholicism to recognize that, although all truth is God’s Truth, science and revelation to some extent address different concerns, and there will always be some degree of mystery in exactly how they relate. I wish it were easier to be evangelical in theology but catholic — both big “C” and small “c” — in outlook.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s New York Times features a well-balanced article about the differing perspectives of two different groups of rafters floating through the Grand Canyon. One group was a “young earth” creationist tour, the other a tour organized by evolution apologists. I was pleased to see an article in the Times that presented “fair and balanced” reporting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-44","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nI’ve written before about some reasons why I think YEC is mistaken (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). What depresses me is how pervasive and tenacious it is within our evangelical churches, schools and organizations.<\/p>\n