Fundamentalists Lacking Conviction

Robin Parry has a post on the blog Running Heads entitled “Fundamentalists – Have the Courage of Your Convictions.” In it he writes,

I wonder why fundamentalists are so keen to believe in a literal seven-day creation and yet do not campaign against space flight (in case someone crashes into the sky-dome and cracks it) or organize recruitment drives for the Flat Earth Society. If you really want to use the Bible to derive cosmology then it seems the way to go…So the dilemma remains: if one wants to be a thoroughbred fundamentalist one really ought to believe that the sky is solid (with heaven the other side of it) and that the earth is flat (with Sheol/Hades literally below it). As an aside, I wonder how many fundamentalists would be so keen on “Big Oil” if they thought they might accidentally drill down into Hades!

Click through to read the whole thing. I agree that fundamentalists who claim to be literalists are for the most part selective literalists. They oppose evolution because it wins them popularity among people who don’t understand and don’t like science. But their Biblical literalism stops at precisely that point at which science has become all but universally accepted. And so their stance is one of deceit, hypocrisy and pandering.

If such a stance does not sound attractive to you, and you are a Christian, then you are in luck. There is another option, namely historic Christianity, in which, as Robin points out, “the likes of Aquinas and Calvin” said “that God accommodated himself in his communications with humanity.”