40% Of Us Are Young Earth Creationsts

Apparently, 120,000,000 of our fellow citizens still believe that our universe, including human beings in their present form, was created by God ex nihlo less than 10,000 years ago. This fact exemplifies the extreme danger of allowing faith to supplant reason as a method for selecting beliefs. If 40% of a modern educated democracy can maintain a belief so manifestly in conflict with the readily available evidence, what belief can’t be maintained by such people?

Faith often supplements judgment to good ends. But American Christians have been trained to allow faith to entirely supplant their judgment. This results in a blind, militant, destructive, and irredeemable "faith" with all of its attendant evils.

Hebrews 11:6 says “without faith, it is impossible to please God, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him.” Of course, this statement applies to any relationship we establish. If someone wants a relationship with you, you can’t please them without approaching them with the expectation that your ensuing relationship will itself be a rewarding experience for you. If they suspect you’re merely tolerating them, or humoring them, as a means to some other end, they won’t be pleased.

Fair enough. God wants us to approach him expecting that our relationship with him will be rewarding for us. He will not be pleased if we approach him as a means to some other end. I have no problem with “faith” so defined. It makes perfect sense

But Jesus also said, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed.” Here Jesus appears to proclaim that believing without evidence is a “blessed” state of affairs. However, those who believed in Jesus’ resurrection prior to seeing him alive had other reasons to believe. They had (allegedly) seen him do miraculous things, including raising the dead, during his lifetime. Jesus also told them that he would rise from the dead after three days. In the context of this story, Jesus appears to be saying, “Blessed are those of you who didn’t lose confidence in me despite your despair.”

Again, fair enough. We say things like that all the time. When we come through on a promise, and subsequently discover that there were doubters among the promisees, we naturally praise those who believed in us during the hard times. Jesus’ statement, in this context, makes perfect sense.

But American Christians have taken faith to an entirely different level. Our mantra appears to be, “blessed are those who believe whatever they find in the Bible, no matter what the evidence indicates, no matter how counter-intuitive the belief seems, and no matter what sound argument seems to prove.”

I honestly can’t see how this pleases God. Why would God be pleased with intellectual zombies? Why would he recommend an epistemological strategy guaranteed to deliver his people to delusion and radicalism?

I can see how this type of "faith" lines the pockets of the unscrupulous and allows others to amass power. But please God? No way!

Joe H.