{"id":7664,"date":"2012-05-09T12:18:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T16:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=7664"},"modified":"2012-05-09T12:18:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T16:18:04","slug":"outgrowing-and-out-learning-young-earth-creationism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2012\/05\/outgrowing-and-out-learning-young-earth-creationism.html","title":{"rendered":"Outgrowing and Out-learning Young-Earth Creationism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

There are a couple of interesting posts around the blogosphere related to young-earth creationism. Fred Clark has a delightful post with the title \u201cAnswers in Genesis teaches how not to read a story.\u201d Here\u2019s a sizable sampling<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I know, I know, picking on the young-earth creationists is too easy. Fish in a barrel and all that.<\/p>\n

But they\u00a0invite<\/em> it. They\u2019re not just wrong, but\u00a0audaciously<\/em> wrong. The weirdness of their conclusions becomes all the more horrifying when you try to trace the arcane routes they traveled to arrive at them.<\/p>\n

Take for example the illiteralist fundies who sat down and calculated the hourly rainfall in the story of Noah\u2019s flood.<\/p>\n

This is how these folks approach this story. This is how they hear a story and how they read a story. They don\u2019t seem to notice that the story has a narrative, themes, characters, a beginning, a middle and an end. Or if they do notice those things, they don\u2019t care about them, because that\u2019s not what they see as important in a story.<\/p>\n

What they see as important are measurements, logistics and the calculating of numbers that do not actually appear in the story itself. They contemplate the buoyancy of gopher wood. They calculate the cubic cubitage of Noah\u2019s ark, the rate of rainfall and the capacity of the firmament canopy (don\u2019t ask).<\/p>\n

This is a dim, illiterate and aggressively obtuse response to a story. This is ridiculousness that demands to be ridiculed.<\/p>\n

Seriously, people, it\u2019s a\u00a0story<\/em>. If you don\u2019t know how to read\u00a0stories,<\/em> then you\u00a0don\u2019t know how to read<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t know how to read stories, then you become the literacy equivalent of that person who never lets you finish a joke because they\u2019re always interrupting with irrelevant questions and thinking they\u2019re particularly clever for pointing out that a bar stool probably couldn\u2019t support the weight of a gorilla.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also delightful is ex-YEC Libby Anne\u2019s response to claims made about her by Answers in Genesis. Once again, here\u2019s a sizable sample \u2013 and once again, I encourage you to click through and read the whole thing<\/a>. The section about being afraid to expose oneself to other ideas is particularly insightful:<\/p>\n

In the end, I didn\u2019t \u201cgive up.\u201d Rather, I realized I had been wrong. There\u2019s a big difference there. And once I saw that creationism didn\u2019t actually hold water, and that evolution was supported by the evidence, I had the intellectual honesty to change my mind. Why? Because that\u2019s what you do when you realize you were wrong\u2026<\/p>\n

And that last sentence? After studying at Answers in Genesis\u2019 knees for years, after attending their conferences and reading their literature, after searching the Bible and reading other creationist resources like the Institute for Creation Research and Henry Morris, I simply \u201cmisunderstood\u201d? I simply had \u201cexposure\u201d? Dr. Purdom is wrong, very, very wrong\u2026<\/p>\n

I wonder if Ken Ham remembers the little girl in braids who stood in awe in his presence and eagerly asked him for his autograph all those years ago. Probably not. But that little girl, that little girl fascinated by science and ever eager to find truth, she\u2019s still here. She\u2019s just sitting on the other side of the fence now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

HT BCSE <\/a>(also shared by Hemant Mehta<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a couple of interesting posts around the blogosphere related to young-earth creationism. Fred Clark has a delightful post with the title \u201cAnswers in Genesis teaches how not to read a story.\u201d Here\u2019s a sizable sampling: I know, I know, picking on the young-earth creationists is too easy. Fish in a barrel and all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,131,137,43,108],"tags":[445,662,782,1140,3217,6131,8171,10886,13965,14016],"class_list":["post-7664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-christianity-religion","category-evolution-science","category-inerrancy","category-young-earth-creationism","tag-aig","tag-answers-in-genesis","tag-ark","tag-bible","tag-evolution-science","tag-ken-ham","tag-noah","tag-science","tag-yec","tag-young-earth-creationism"],"yoast_head":"\nOutgrowing and Out-learning Young-Earth Creationism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There are a couple of interesting posts around the blogosphere related to young-earth creationism. 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