Were you ever a creationist, and if so how did you give it up?

[Meadmaker]

We have had lots of threads over the years about what convinced you to give up Christianity. Many of us grew up as Christians, but gave it up, for a variety of reasons, as we matured.

I want a narrower topic, on why you gave up creationism.


It may be that there are few if any people who can answer the question here. I, for one, grew up a Christian, but I never, as an adult or even an adolescent, doubted evolution, so I can't really say.

For the people who participate here, I think that the way most people gave up belief in creationism was to give up belief in Jesus, and then there was no reason to believe in creationism any more. The perfect person to answer the qeustion would be someone who was once a biblical listeralist, but who retained belief in Chrisitanity, while rejectiing creationism. I don't know if anyone whom that describes actually participates here. Christians of any sort are few and far between in these parts.

By "creationism", I mean any variation of a belief that life arose in any way other than mutation and natural selection.

One special case would be "guided evolution", by which I mean evolution that occurred with God tweaking mutations here and there, but which is indistinguishable from atheistic/agnostic evolutionary beliefs. In other words, if you believe that evolution is perfectly capable of evolving complex and/or intelligent life, but God jumped in occasionally to direct it toward one, specific, outcome, in an indetectable way, that's not creationism.

What I'm looking for is some discussion about what actually works to convince people not to believe creationism. To be honest, I doubt I'll find it, but I thought it was worth asking.

 

[Dr.Sid]

AFAIK creationism is just an attempt how to get Christianity into (mostly American) schools.
I never met any Christian who would claim he believes because he don't think evolution can explain everything. It's usually hard concepts of soul and consciousness, which puzzles people. And then craving for justice and eternal live. Not counting indoctrination in childhood, obviously.

 

[8enotto]

I grew up in a catholic home and attended all the proper things we were obliged to go to.

Got tossed all the usual stories and fairy tales for years but didn't really care or listen all that well.

In school we were taught the science side of things and some of the material stuck. One point was being able to back up things with process and evidence.

All things religious just failed reality tests. While I had to be physically present at CCD classes and bring certain items I most certainly wasn't ever really there.

Much like the Simpsons episode where they changed to all bible study as science class, all one had to be was in awe of the power of god and his mysterious ways to please them.
Even if presented in a bored or uninterested manner.

 

[Meadmaker]

I grew up in a catholic home and attended all the proper things we were obliged to go to.

Got tossed all the usual stories and fairy tales for years but didn't really care or listen all that well.

In school we were taught the science side of things and some of the material stuck. One point was being able to back up things with process and evidence.

All things religious just failed reality tests. While I had to be physically present at CCD classes and bring certain items I most certainly wasn't ever really there.

Much like the Simpsons episode where they changed to all bible study as science class, all one had to be was in awe of the power of god and his mysterious ways to please them.
Even if presented in a bored or uninterested manner.

I, too, was Catholic, and for a time was quite devout about it. Briefly considered priesthood, even, but then considered the full implications of "celibacy", and decided it wasn't a good idea.

However, the Catholic Church did not reject Darwinism, at least by the time I was born, so I was never a creationist.

 

[Meadmaker]

One variant we might find is that there is someone here who was once a creationist, but who was persuaded that creationism was bunk, and gave up Christianity along with creationism.

That can happen sometimes. Faith can be a house of cards. If someone is arguing for biblical literalism, and that card is pulled out, the rest might collapse with it. Instead of going toward some brand of Christianity that accepts Darwinism, they throw out the whole thing.

I doubt we will find one of those people, either, but it's more likely than finding a currently believing Christian here, who used to believe in creationism and/or Biblical literalism, but no longer believes that.

 

[Norman Alexander]

Never. Spotted the bunkum at about 6 or 7 years old in Sunday School.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

I was raised Catholic, but can't remember ever really buying into the whole Adam & Eve stuff. I realized the inherent problems with one couple somehow populating the whole Earth even as a kid.

OTOH, for a long time I thought that men had one less rib than women. Way, way too long. I don't know why that nonsense stuck.

 

[crescent]

One special case would be "guided evolution", ....

A variation of this is "intelligent design" often still proposed by Christians in America. Of course they argue that such intelligence is necessary for evolution to work, that it could not work without it.

I find that when people say that God could tweak evolution, many people don't like that. But when Star Trek or other SF franchises have powerful hyper-advanced aliens doing it, people are more accepting of it (in Star Trek in-universe canon, that's why so many of the intelligent species look humanoid - a precursor species wandered the galaxy seeding planets with DNA to lead to that).

And people think that a sufficiently advanced alien tech might appear to be god-like to us. People think there could be alien species advanced enough to harness the power of entire stars.

If you imagine that sort of power as being equivalent to "God" and express it what way, a whole bunch of nerds accept the possibility of a sort of creationism - "God is an Alien" sort of creationism.

Anyway, I don't have much of a point. Just rambling.

 

[smartcooky]

I will simply repeat (for the most part) how I always respond when asked about my early religious views (and my apologies to those who have already read this from me before)

My mother was a Swiss Lutheran, my father was at one time a Baptist Lay Preacher (so by default, they at one time believed in a creator God). However, Dad's traumatic experiences during WW2 changed him. In 1939, he had joined the Royal Air Force along with a bunch of friends from his local district (London's East End). By the war's end in 1945, he was the only one left alive. He lost his faith, rejected Christianity and his Baptist upbringing, and took up as a Freemason (mainly because there were a lot of Freemasons in the RAF, and they were essentially the only people who bothered to help him when he was in difficulty).

Nonetheless, I was sent to Sunday School, presumably in order to widen my understanding of the world, but after a few weeks my parents were asked to remove me because I was disruptive in class. Apparently, I kept asking too many awkward questions that they didn't like and couldn't answer, like how could surface tension support Jesus' weight, and why can't I see heaven in a telescope? By the time I reached my teenage years, I realised that religion was nothing more than a tool for the powerful that they used to control the ignorant masses. I could no longer accept "because its God's will" as the standard answer to questions that seemed to have no explanation, so I walked away from religion for the last time and never looked back.

I am now almost 67; I have lead what I consider a worthwhile and rewarding life. I have led this life without the need to know why I am alive or what the meaning of life is. What I can tell you is this: the message of true Christianity is indeed valid. If the world really was a place without war and prejudice and greed and hunger and deadly sins, and people were kind to each other, then what a wonderful place it would be. But the method that Churches use to spread its message is completely wrong. Filling people's minds with dread and fear, while demanding obedience and loyalty to an invisible deity is not the way to instil righteousness. Look how often religion has been used to justify wars - how many wars have been fought over which religion is the correct one? How many opposite warring sides always claim to have "God on their side"?

In the current climate, faith in one god or another can literally get you killed depending on where on earth you happen to live, or where you visit, or what you wear. Whether or not you wear a beard can get you killed, and even if you do wear one, its style and/or length could mark you for summary execution!

It seems to me to be far safer to have no faith at all, except in one's own ability to live life in a responsible manner, achieving a peaceful existence by simply being decent and honourable, and accepting those around us as equals regardless of their skin colour, ethnicity, social status or sexual preferences. I do all those things because I choose to do so, not because I am told to by some arbitrary 2000 year old book written by a few itinerant goat-herders... and certainly not because I think it will earn me a better stead in some imaginary afterlife.

 

[arthwollipot]

I certainly was religious for a while, and the church I was a part of would absolutely have had creationist doctrines, but for some reason it just never came up.

 

[smartcooky]

A variation of this is "intelligent design" often still proposed by Christians in America. Of course they argue that such intelligence is necessary for evolution to work, that it could not work without it.

I find that when people say that God could tweak evolution, many people don't like that. But when Star Trek or other SF franchises have powerful hyper-advanced aliens doing it, people are more accepting of it (in Star Trek in-universe canon, that's why so many of the intelligent species look humanoid - a precursor species wandered the galaxy seeding planets with DNA to lead to that).

And people think that a sufficiently advanced alien tech might appear to be god-like to us. People think there could be alien species advanced enough to harness the power of entire stars.

If you imagine that sort of power as being equivalent to "God" and express it what way, a whole bunch of nerds accept the possibility of a sort of creationism - "God is an Alien" sort of creationism.

Anyway, I don't have much of a point. Just rambling.

"The Chase". That was a damned good episode which could easily have ben a two-parter, allowing them to delve more deeply into the origins and motivations of that pre-cursor civilisation.

 

[Robin]

I grew up in a churchgoing household, but a Jose also filled with books on evolution so I never had any creationist belief.

Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden were regarded as just stories.

One of my primary school teachers told the class that she had no idea why scientists thought there were dinosaurs since there were no dinosaurs in the Bible and God was there and the scientists were not.

I got a trip to the Principal's office for trying to explain how they knew.

 

[Darat]

We have had lots of threads over the years about what convinced you to give up Christianity. Many of us grew up as Christians, but gave it up, for a variety of reasons, as we matured.

I want a narrower topic, on why you gave up creationism.


It may be that there are few if any people who can answer the question here. I, for one, grew up a Christian, but I never, as an adult or even an adolescent, doubted evolution, so I can't really say.

For the people who participate here, I think that the way most people gave up belief in creationism was to give up belief in Jesus, and then there was no reason to believe in creationism any more. The perfect person to answer the qeustion would be someone who was once a biblical listeralist, but who retained belief in Chrisitanity, while rejectiing creationism. I don't know if anyone whom that describes actually participates here. Christians of any sort are few and far between in these parts.

By "creationism", I mean any variation of a belief that life arose in any way other than mutation and natural selection.

One special case would be "guided evolution", by which I mean evolution that occurred with God tweaking mutations here and there, but which is indistinguishable from atheistic/agnostic evolutionary beliefs. In other words, if you believe that evolution is perfectly capable of evolving complex and/or intelligent life, but God jumped in occasionally to direct it toward one, specific, outcome, in an indetectable way, that's not creationism.

What I'm looking for is some discussion about what actually works to convince people not to believe creationism. To be honest, I doubt I'll find it, but I thought it was worth asking.

The upswell in modern biblical literalism i.e. 1950s onwards that created creationism seems to have been a mainly USA movement and has spread via USA evangelism to other countries.

I doubt many people - outside the USA - who were brought up with a version of Christianity ever believed in creationism as it wasn't the doctrine that many churches subscribed to.

 

[Darat]

I certainly was religious for a while, and the church I was a part of would absolutely have had creationist doctrines, but for some reason it just never came up.

Are you certain? I'm asking because one would have thought my religious lot would have held creationist views given their very "fundamentalist" attitudes to a lot of "hardcore" Christian doctrines, but I know they didn't subscribe to the literalism that is required to come up with creationism. The nearest approach would have been a "how god created mankind is unimportant".

 

[Darat]

A variation of this is "intelligent design" often still proposed by Christians in America. Of course they argue that such intelligence is necessary for evolution to work, that it could not work without it.

...snip...

But remember "intelligent design" was a lie thought up by proponents of creationism to try to get creationism into science via a backdoor.

 

[Apathia]

One variant we might find is that there is someone here who was once a creationist, but who was persuaded that creationism was bunk, and gave up Christianity along with creationism.

That can happen sometimes. Faith can be a house of cards. If someone is arguing for biblical literalism, and that card is pulled out, the rest might collapse with it. Instead of going toward some brand of Christianity that accepts Darwinism, they throw out the whole thing.

I doubt we will find one of those people, either, but it's more likely than finding a currently believing Christian here, who used to believe in creationism and/or Biblical literalism, but no longer believes that.

Never give up hope. But this is why I didn't comment last night. I was a Creationist as long as I was reading within the Creationist polemic/propaganda. But then I had to go reading about Evolution as Science.

It was no biggy for me to go with the Science and say, "That's OK. I don't use the Bible for Science. I took the position that most educated Christians do that God tweaks the process from time to time.

I do have a friend who was a Bahai. As such he accepted Evolution over traditional Creationist literalism. However the Bahai teaching is that Humans are a special creation or tweaking, and that anything prior to Homo Sapiens isn't Human. When he learned the history of our Genus, he chucked his Bahai faith.

Well, that wasn't the sole reason, but it was a major piece of it.

Myself, I drifted away from the anthropomorphic, tinkerer, theistic God. Reality was just to big for those fairy tales.

 

[Meadmaker]

Never give up hope. But this is why I didn't comment last night. I was a Creationist as long as I was reading within the Creationist polemic/propaganda. But then I had to go reading about Evolution as Science.

It was no biggy for me to go with the Science and say, "That's OK. I don't use the Bible for Science. I took the position that most educated Christians do that God tweaks the process from time to time.

I do have a friend who was a Bahai. As such he accepted Evolution over traditional Creationist literalism. However the Bahai teaching is that Humans are a special creation or tweaking, and that anything prior to Homo Sapiens isn't Human. When he learned the history of our Genus, he chucked his Bahai faith.

Well, that wasn't the sole reason, but it was a major piece of it.

Myself, I drifted away from the anthropomorphic, tinkerer, theistic God. Reality was just to big for those fairy tales.

So, do you remember if there was a specific argument that you found persuasive, or was it more a case that you were never really invested in creationist belief anyway? Sometimes, especially as children, we "believe" something, just because we have heard of it and repeat it when the subject comes up, but we have never actually embraced the idea. We just didn't know of any other idea.

We might believe in Santa Claus because we are told, but then as we get to the wise old age of six we start noticing that this story doesn't really add up, and it's very easy to stop believing. (But don't tell mom and dad, because the toys might stop coming.) However, if we truly believed in Santa Claus, and had really argued about why reindeer really can fly, and showed scientific proof that through special fabric all the animals really could fit in the ark all the toys really could fit in the bag, it would be harder to let that belief go.

 

[acbytesla]

I doubt I was ever a Creationist although I did self identify myself as a Christian for the first 30 years of my life. The stories in the Bible were always metaphorical to me. They were never meant to be considered literal. They were like Aesop's fables. Fictional stories designed to teach a lesson.

Whether I always thought evolution and natural selection was the best explanation for the diversity of life is another question. I certainly didn't believe that before I was taught it some time around 5th grade. I don't remember disbelieving it.

I never thought to disbelieve the scientific explanation and instead believe the religious explanation.

 

[Apathia]

So, do you remember if there was a specific argument that you found persuasive, or was it more a case that you were never really invested in creationist belief anyway? Sometimes, especially as children, we "believe" something, just because we have heard of it and repeat it when the subject comes up, but we have never actually embraced the idea. We just didn't know of any other idea.

We might believe in Santa Claus because we are told, but then as we get to the wise old age of six we start noticing that this story doesn't really add up, and it's very easy to stop believing. (But don't tell mom and dad, because the toys might stop coming.) However, if we truly believed in Santa Claus, and had really argued about why reindeer really can fly, and showed scientific proof that through special fabric all the animals really could fit in the ark all the toys really could fit in the bag, it would be harder to let that belief go.

It was OH! We do have transitional Homo species in the geological record. Plus a better understanding of Natural Selection.

 

[Meadmaker]

It was OH! We do have transitional Homo species in the geological record. Plus a better understanding of Natural Selection.

Ok. Thanks. So, you weren't exactly a hard core believer, and when you found out that something you heard didn't add up, you transitioned fairly easily.

I think I can relate to something in my life. I was a Kennedy conspiracy believer. I had read all sorts of CT stuff. My dad was a CT believer. I of course believed that there was a second gunman, because the Warren Commission had all this lying stuff about the magic bullet and all that.

And then I found that my dad actually had a copy of the Warren Report, and I picked it up to read all the stupid stuff in it, and lo and behold discovered that the books hadn't accurately reported the contents. What? And...I stopped being a CT believer pretty quickly.

So, I was a firm believer before then, but a shallow one. I hadn't tested my beliefs and held fast to my conclusions. I just believed it because anyone who was talking about it also believed it. I never really saw the other side. As soon as I found out that there really was another side, I stared paying attention, and discovered that the other side made sense.

I think that works for creationism, too. It sounds like you were told that there were no transitional fossils, and thought some variation of, "Well how can they believe that stuff without even finding the links between the stages?" Then you discovered that there were, in fact, transitional fossils, and it was easy enough to dislodge the creationist beliefs.

I think the key to finding a convincing argument, i.e. one that actually changes people's minds, is to find one key piece of the puzzle that you can prove is wrong. The rest will come down pretty easily. In young people, like yourself, who are not as strongly emotionally invested in the correctness of their beliefs, that's fairly easy. For hard core believers, it's much more difficult. They have more practice at dismissing evidence.