21Feb/095
How Can This Be?!
I thought the world was just a tad over 6,500 years old, so how could this be possible?! Even Fox, a normally reliable news source, has coverage!
Oh, wait, I think I remember hearing that on the afternoon of the fourth day of creation God created fake fossils, just to keep the scientists and the non-literal-bible-readers happy. Phew. For a moment I thought I was going to have to rearrange my world-view and write things into the bible just to keep it all straight.
Yes, some mornings I wake up feeling more sarcastic than others. 
February 21st, 2009 - 13:10
God planted it there to trick the facile and foolish and test the faithful. Also, something about Noah.
February 21st, 2009 - 14:15
The folks who bend over backwards to prove the biblical details are exactly true have “proof” that dating techniques are not accurate.
February 21st, 2009 - 14:42
It seems to me that it is harder to read the bible their way than the way I read it… You have to work so hard to disprove everything, rather than just looking for the truth in the message without trying to ensure that it is also literally true.
February 24th, 2009 - 09:40
One good thing about Catholic doctrine is it works with all kinds of speculative science (so geo- vs heliocentrism is a non-issue): some of us are literalist creationists like my good friend Jeff Culbreath; others theistic evolutionists, a view I’m happy with. The mechanics of creation don’t over-concern me; God the prime mover (as the Schoolmen said) got things going and at some point separated us (spiritual souls) from the animals (sensitive souls, like us but not quite). What we can’t abide is a view that creation was random and purposeless, along with the racist aspect of Darwinism that the Nazis and others glommed onto later (fashionable in the 1920s as you might remember from The Great Gatsby) and which William Jennings Bryan was horrified by as a Christian disciple (he gave the textbook in the Scopes trial a chance and found it wanting – Inherit the Wind is fiction).
So I don’t feel the need to poke fun at or be condescending to literalist creationists (the parable of the Episcopalian and the publican: I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like other men… like that fundy rube over there) nor does the late great Z the mammoth scare away my faith.
BTW yes, Jeff is concerned that I’m compromised by liberalism. Thought that would make you smile.
February 24th, 2009 - 21:17
My humble apologies to the literal creationists out there, I just needed to vent. Some days it seems like I am the lone voice for non-literal interpretation in my immediate world, and that can drive me up a wall.
In the end I, too, am not all that concerned with how God made the world I live in today. For me that’s the Truth of Genesis. God made everything. Whether it happened in seven days or a billion years, that’s the bottom line. And God made it in a certain way (giving us stewardship, making us to live in relationship with one another, in God’s image, etc.).
It still amazes me, though, how much effort some people can put into trying to make the world fit their viewpoint.
I will accept that my view may be invalid, and others may have the Truth of it, even when that Truth seems to fly in the face of what science seems to be saying. After all, perhaps God did pull some fast ones to keep the scientists happy, who knows…
But in the end, personally, I’m sticking with the fact that science might have something to reveal to us about just how wonderful creation really is. Rather than looking at science as the enemy, trying to lure me away from the correct interpretation of the bible, I prefer to see how it further reveals God as creator.
And yes, Father, that last comment gave me a big grin.