For far too long, a particular segment of conservative Christianity has been successfully lobbying Christians that the only way to be a Bible-believing Christian is to be a Young Earth Creationist. This has been so strong for several decades that our children have all too often concluded that they cannot be conservative Christians because they do not believe in Young Earth Creationism.
On the other side, people who are not conservative Christians have successfully convinced the public that any belief in creationism means that the person is rejecting science. The fact that there are versions of creationism that are nowhere near being Young Earth Creationism is not known. So successful have been Young Earth Creationists in silencing any other voice that the claim that to be a creationist is to be against science is actually believable in this country.
But, finally, there are very slowly beginning to be conservative Christian voices that are speaking up and saying that this is not so. To my surprise, one of them has been Pat Robertson, see the segment above. At the beginning of the segment he says that he will probably be lynched for saying what he is about to say. If you do an online search, you will find out that this is exactly what is happening. Of all people, Pat Robertson is now being accused of denying the Bible!
Hopefully, the stand of Pat Robertson will give some courage for other Christians to stand up and reject publicly Young Earth Creationism. I am of the opinion that it is the strident preaching of Young Earth Creationism that led to the failure of the Intelligent Design movement back in the 1990’s. I have written on this several years ago. There is little doubt in my mind that a movement that was meant to allow the schools to teach the possibility of the guided development of the universe was taken over and twisted into a vehicle to force the teaching of Young Earth Creationism.
As a result, even some early supporters, like myself, ended up having to reject the attempt. Today, the attempt survives in the incessant book battles that are fought in the State of Texas over the science curriculum, and in Kansas over teaching models, etc. These are not battles over Christian principles, but battles over a particular theological viewpoint of Scripture, a viewpoint that allows no one else to call themselves a Bible Christian unless they also call themselves a Young Earth Creationist.
Should you wish to teach yourself other conservative Christian viewpoints on the beginnings of God’s universe, please go to the BioLogos Foundation website at http://biologos.org/. You will have many days of good reading, and many reasons to not be a Young Earth Creationist. Pat Robertson is right on this one.
I think the problem here is the widespread notion that every single thing in nature exists solely to have a relationship with human beings. The idea of a world without human beings upsets people with that viewpoint as they see no purpose in it. And the same people who speak so glibly and so faithfully about “eternity” are terrified out of their wits to imagine God spending more than six days making a world. Most people can’t conceive of a billion of anything. If billions of anything frighten you, imagine meeting God face to face…a God who has ALWAYS been here and who ALWAYS will. Folks, if you are going to have a relationship with God, you’d better get over your fear of the billion. God is all about billions.
“If billions of anything frighten you…” what will Sagans of anything do?
What you are talking about is Fear of Deep Time. And Fear of Deep Space. Yet of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Christianity is best equipped to deal with it through the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Because of the Incarnation, no matter how deep time gets, no matter how huge space gets, God remains on a one-to-one human scale through Jesus Christ. So why are Christians the most freaked out about it?
Without delving too deeply into psychology, I might say that anything that makes humans look insignificant in either our temporal or spatial dimensions troubles us. Yet it is only really troubling when we insist that we are supposed to relate exclusively to the entire universe in time or space. If, in fact, God had other uses for the universe than to support and impress us, our species then becomes one bulb screwed into a comfortable socket on a huge marquee, provided with our need for current and blissfully independent of the millions of other bulbs who derive a similar satisfaction out of their existence.
I don’t subscribe to the young earth myself. That would suggest to me that dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, sabre tooth tigers and trilobites lived meaningful lives and pleased God and served a purpose that had little if anything to do with mankind. That idea appeals to me, actually. I am one of those privileged people to have held a fully grown mountain lion in his arms. I did not have to be told that this cat was much like the Shakespearian appeal, “If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? If you wrong us, are we not revenged??”
To deny an independent meaningfulness to other forms of life and other inaccessible places sounds like the coldest possible expression of the maxim, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no human being to hear it, does it make a noise?”
Accept that there are other purposes to nature, and the grandness of both space and time take on a richness and fullness such as we might never dream rested there.
I do not accept Young Earth Creationism. Dinosaurs and human beings did not live together; on the contrary, they are generations separated from one another. God the Father through His Son, Jesus Christ, could have used any method to create the universe. This includes BioLogos, also known as Theistic Evolution. He could have used some other Old Earth Creationism too. Father Cuban seems to be a man of our Lord Jesus. It is good that we Christians have him.
Father Obregon,
I am sorry I confused your name in my previous comment. May God bless you and your ministry. Charles
I do not know what happened to my first comment.