“And frankly, the more the few Christians who believe [young earth creationism] push it, the more non-Christians look at Christianity and think, ‘Hmmm...every now and then I’m tempted to jump in but it means I’d have to believe in pseudo-science like scientologists or something. No thanks.’”
Would you say the same thing about Christ’s resurrection?
Creation was a supernatural event.
Christ’s resurrection was a supernatural event.
Whenever anyone becomes a Christian it is also a supernatural event.
People do not and can not become a Christian by responding to clever marketing or a better, more modern sales’ pitch. Christendom is quite full of “Christians” who have picked it or inherited it like a brand label. But that’s not genuine faith or Christianity.
If people are not compelled by the urgency of investigating their obligations to their Creator or out of concern for their accountability to the Supreme Judge when their lives are over, they just are not serious about matters of faith.
If being embarrassed to be associated with controversial things like Christ’s blood sacrifice, or His supernatural resurrection, or His creation of the universe by speaking it into existence is just too much of a burden then maybe they just aren’t ready (and maybe never will be) to escape the coming wrath of God on this wicked, fallen world.
Thank you!!
Exactly, Christianity is not, cannot be, a debate with science over the natural realm.
Rather the Bible tells us of a supernatural realm above & beyond nature, a realm which both created and controls nature, and on occasion overrules nature.
The Bible doesn't tell us exactly how God created nature, only that He did and declared nature, over and over, to be "Good".
So accepting Christianity doesn't mean denying science, only recognizing that God created & controls whatever it is science thinks it has discovered.
I think the main difference is nature can be observed and studied. But you can’t observe and study a risen Christ. I bet if I was able to study Christ first-hand I’d see evidence of what I believed (i.e. Thomas investigating Christ’s hands), even if it could be explained only supernaturally (i.e. only God could raise Christ from the dead).
So even if we can’t explain all of the things that God did to create the Earth and the universe, we shouldn’t go out of our way to explain away all the evidence that points to the Earth and the universe being billions of years old. In fact, the more we investigate them, the more we see how supernatural creation was.
For instance, when the Hubble Telescope was put up in the 1990’s and viewed much farther out than before, the prediction was that when we’d view really far out we’d be looking really far back into the past and see that the universe was expanding much faster then than now. The idea was that the oscillating universe theory (big bang repeated over & over) demands that the universe’s expansion slows, stops expanding, becomes a contraction, all matter goes back to a relatively small point, then repeats the big bang.
But the Hubble Telescope was our first viewing that the universe’s expansion is accelerating — meaning the big bang was a one time event and all of physics has to be right for life to exist (and atoms to retain cohesion for that matter) because there’s no second chance, or third chance, or any other chance for random chance to make it right.
But if you immediately reject such information you miss out on learning a “Yada, yada! My Bible was right yet again and the atheists were wrong yet again!” moment. And nobody will here the old earth Christians make points like these if the few Christians who talk about creation that are loudest are the ones going out of their way to “prove” the speed of light changes a lot, that dinosaurs lived with human beings, etc.