March 27 Flashback: Jenga

For 20 years now, this blog has maintained the distinction between a “blog” and a “post.”

From March 27, 2018, “Young-Earth creationism is cruel“:

Young-earth creationism is a cruelly efficient machine for manufacturing spiritual crisis. It has created more atheists than all of Richard Dawkins’ books put together. It exchanges the truth of God for a lie — a lie that’s spectacularly indefensible because none of the people caught up in that lie lives on a young Earth. They live, instead, on this one — this ancient Earth that confronts its inhabitants with its vast and incomprehensible oldness at every turn.

The “evangelical worldview” Nelle Smith describes binds that unsustainable lie to everything else that evangelical Christians believe: the existence of a benevolent God, the belief that life has meaning, the love of Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. All of this is bound together with the lie in a constantly repeated and reinforced if/then construction. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then God does not love you. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then all meaning is illusion. If the Earth is older than 10,000 years, then Christ is not risen and your faith is also vain and you are of all people most to be pitied.

This if/then construct is cruel to those indoctrinated into it and slanderous to everyone else. It presents a false binary between young-Earth creationism and nihilism. That supposed binary shouldn’t withstand contact with the wider world. Most people, after all, are neither young-Earth creationists nor nihilists, so it ought to seem patently obvious that other possibilities exist. But because accepting those other possibilities threatens the “evangelical worldview” just as much as trilobites and the light from distant stars, the reality of all those other people — those billions who are neither nihilists nor creationists — has to be denied.