Today’s meeting of the Church of the Infinite Chasm was prompted by a comment I heard last weekend: “The #1 cause of atheism is religion.” That’s like saying the #1 cause of obesity is Weight Watchers. Unfortunately however, it’s true (not in the case of obesity, but certainly when it comes to atheism).
EXAMPLE: There are religionists who believe and teach that God created the universe in six literal days about 6,000 years ago. The Bible says no such thing. In fact, it says God created the heavens and the earth (a.k.a., the universe) “in the beginning.” In other words, at some distant point in time long before the more specific creative “days” described in Genesis. As for those creative days, Genesis clearly paints them as figurative days, not literal days. In fact, after describing each individual “day” and what happened on each, the account then describes all of them collectively (in Genesis 2:4) as a single “day.”
Religious people also frequently misrepresent what faith is: to them it’s what you believe in when you have no supporting evidence. I’ll give you a personal example I’ve mentioned before. I called a Christian bookstore to ask if they carried any books that explored the scientific evidence in favor of creation. The clerk reacted like I was asking if they had any books proving Judas Iscariot is the son of God. “There is no such book,” he said. “No one was there,” he added, as though talking to a 5-year-old. I could almost hear a “Duh” coming, but he managed to control himself and tell me that belief in creation is something that just has to be taken on faith. I didn’t tell him that at that very moment I was holding in my hand a book of several hundred pages full of scientific arguments supporting the Bible’s creation account. I called because I wondered if there were others.
When religious people adopt a narrow-minded reliance on a literal interpretation of the Bible that goes against scientific evidence and then couple that with a catch-all reliance on some nebulous perception of “faith,” they’re practically begging intelligent, thinking people to say, “Well, if that’s the best they’ve got, I don’t think creation is something I can believe in.” These very religionists are the direct cause of cynical definitions of faith like those you see above.
The truth is, however, that belief in God and belief in science are not mutually exclusive. It’s not an either-or proposition. There are no scientific errors in the Bible, something you would certainly expect of a book that claims to be inspired of God. Want to read more about this, including how the Bible defines faith? Then I’ll see you in this spot next week.
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