Hume SD day 4
Ok, Im tired now. Camp is fun, but quiet time starts at 11pm, and breakfast opens at 7am. Subtract the time it takes to get ready in the morning, and the time it takes to get 20 high school guys in bed and quiet at night, an d you have about 6.5 hours of sleep a night. For some this is plenty, for me it is not.
Today we broke into seminars, and the one I went to was called Creation vs. Evolution. It is a subject that interests me, and I like to see what people have to say about it. Not everyone knows this about me, but I was a huge six day creationist in high school. I have since become a little more liberal on my views, but still consider myself a strong creationist.
Anyway the teacher, seemed like a cool guy, but I totally disagreed with a few things that he said. He kept sharing about a story from the Bible and saying do you believe this? He started by making the issue a emotional one, and not a scientific one. I understand we want kids to have faith in the Bible, but the kind of faith that says, “the Bible says it and thats all I need” is the kind of faith that turns intelligent people away from God and the scriptures. So I don’t think we should be asking people if they believe it, instead we should be asking them to think about it. He also told them that “If one thing is wrong in scriptures you can throw the whole bible out.” Wow I was shocked that he was teaching such harmful theology. Here is the thing, I believe everything in the scriptures is true, but my faith is not based on the Bible being error free, it is based on the fact that Jesus died and rose again. The reason why I find that type of theology so dangerous is that kids hear that, and believe that. Then they go to college and something in the Bible is challenged, and that kids thinks well, if one thing is wrong, I need to throw everything out, and so they do. Its a lot like what Rob Bell says about brick wall theology, that our faith shouldn’t be like a brick wall, cause if one brick gets pulled the whole things crumbles. Instead our faith should be like a spring, or a sponge ball, where when something challenges a part of our faith, there is room to bend and stretch, as long as the essentials are not changed.
Anyway I didn’t say anything to the guy, or in the class cause I didn’t want to cause dissension, and this isn’t my camp, but that kind of thinking really bothers me, especially when it is taught to young people. OK, well I will get off my soap box now and go to dinner.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
Thanks for the comments. Hume Lake’s “official” stance is much closer to the the views you just expressed. Thanks for your restraint in the seminar, but even more thanks for commenting.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:09 am
This is a topic that interests me alot as well. Your comment on six-day creationism caught my eye, because there’s an issue that I’ve been struggling with in regards to this. I’ve been reading Lee Strobel’s “Case for a Creator,” and it’s a great book, and I’ve been a bit surprised that it doesn’t contend with evolution. That’s all fine and good, evolution is not a salvation issue and has lots of empirical evidence that is hard to disregard, but my objections to it are more theological than scientific. If God utilized evolution to bring about the human race, then that means that there have been a million, billion, shabalabadoo years of death, sickness and pain PRIOR to the point in time that man gained the mental capacities to indeed “fall” and sin against God for the first time. Hence, God is then the author of death and it is not a result of sin. To me, that is the one critical issue of this topic that I have never heard anyone talk about.
I appreciated your thoughts though.
July 4th, 2008 at 11:59 am
This is a huge problem I have with an old earth, or any theistic evolution story. However I am comforted by the fact that it just doesn’t matter that much.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:07 am
i don’t think that a physical death is necessarily evil. i should do more study on this, but in genesis chapter 2 you read that there is a “tree of life” of which adam and eve can eat from that is seperate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. i have absolutely nothing to back this next thought up, but i wonder if eating of the tree of life would allow one to avoid death? i wonder if we were created to die naturally?
also (this is probably a better argument), you seem to have the assumption that sickness, pain, and death would HAVE to exist if the earth was a billion years old. why’s that? i don’t think you HAVE to assume those things if the earth is a billion years old.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Well first off I think the problem is not in Genesis, but in Paul’s statement in Romans 5:12. Where he says, “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” So we get from that verse, that death didn’t happen until after sin.
And as for the billions of years, I would agree except there sure does seem to be a lot of old bones, and that would mean things died before Adam sinned. However, is he only talking about human death?
Or maybe we are just reading into a passage of Paul’s that is not supposed to reveal anything to us about creation, after all Paul was 1,000s of years after the creation story was written.
Anyway, again all I can say is I don’t know.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:36 am
i agree
if it was important for salvation we’d know