Christianity or Young-Earth Creationism? Time to Choose

Last updated on: January 1, 2014 at 8:12 am by James F. McGrath

Christianity or Young-Earth Creationism? Time to Choose 2014-01-01T08:12:30-05:00 James F. McGrath

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It is time for conservative Christians to say goodbye to young-earth creationism once and for all, just as they did with slavery. It is hard to take a dramatic step, but a moment arrives when you simply cannot persist in doing evil any longer and retain even the pretense of being a Christian.

That moment has arrived.

Not because it is the start of 2014. The moment arrived in 2009, as it happens, but most of us blinked and missed it. But the blog Beyond Creation Science took note of the decisive moment.

Answers in Genesis began uploading Charles Spurgeon’s sermons to its website, but decided first to omit altogether, then to relegate to a footnote after being challenged on this, Spurgeon’s reference – made before Darwin published his theory, I might add! – to the creation of the world having certainly occurred millions of years before the appearance of human beings.

Young-earth creationism is built on lies. It cannot even fully embrace some of the greatest conservative Christian thinkers and preachers of the past and present who are honest about evidence. But since it cannot bring itself to repudiate them either, it rewrites and edits history, distorting the facts and hoping you won’t notice that they are approving individuals who disagreed with their central emphasis in a manner that they would condemn if they were alive today and not already respected by the donors and supporters they seek to court.

To be a young-earth creationist, you either have to tell lies, or repeat them without fact-checking them. To be a young-earth creationist, you have to pridefully and dishonestly assert that, because other mere human beings have told you so, that you know better than those who spend their lives professionally researching matters.

But if none of that carries any weight with you, then let’s put it this way: You have to be confident that you are smarter and better-informed than Charles Spurgeon, and that Spurgeon was wrong in such a way that Answers in Genesis ought to be attacking and condemning him rather than sharing his sermons.

When everyone but your own tiny group in a relatively recent time in history is considered to have gotten it wrong, and you are sure that you have at last got it right, you can be fairly confident that you are in a cult that has deceived you.

It is time to choose. Christianity or young-earth creationism? Truth or young-earth creationism? Spurgeon or young-earth creationism?

If the latter means more to you than the former in each of those instances, then why not simply say goodbye to truth and Christianity, and be honest that your bogus ideas about the age of the earth count more for you than anything else?

Otherwise, let’s see you lay young-earthism aside, like geocentrism and slavery and any number of other issues of the past, once and for all.

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