Quote:
Originally Posted by jonesy
If people believe in an infinite God, I don't know why they have to say the world is only 6000 years old...
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Answering this question is fundamental to understanding all creationist positions, and to uncovering what is really at stake for them. You are correct in creationists concerns are not about belief in God. All creationist doctrine and propaganda springs from a preposterous commitment to the infallibility of Christian scripture. Modern evangelicalism's roots are in fundamentalist Christianity, which began as a reaction to the emergence of critical scholarship and science, which both began to seriously undermine the received meaning of the biblical texts. This was tantamount to a disaster, since protestant Christendom depended exclusively upon the authority of Scripture as the founding component of their religious beliefs. It was thought that if the Bible was somehow not a flawless record that conformed to conventional teachings of history, science, ethics, politics, etc., then it would eventually prove to be useless, and the church irrelevant.
You will hear Ken Ham frequently refer not to his belief in God or to the atonement of Christ in his appeals to faith. Rather, he is wholly, and irrationally committed to this absurd idea about the flawless revelation of "Scripture". One could say that Ken Ham's god is actually not the Christian god. Ken Ham's god is the Bible, especially as it is understood by way of his horribly naïve and unsophisticated "natural" hermeneutic of simple reading for comprehension. He has no sense of language, literature, history, culture, anthropology, social theory, or any of the other rather massive factors that will absolutely affect the meaning of ancient biblical texts.