Why everyone laughs at creationists

Ashley developed a lump on her leg, which turned out to be bone cancer. Instead of taking her to a doctor, they took her out of school and tried to treat her with prayer. The lump eventually got to be as big as a watermelon.

Child services finally took her away from her parents. But we can give her some time by amputating her leg. Instead, they put her in a Christian Science sanatorium, which, by the way, is subsidized by the U. Her medicine consisted of giving her water and prayer. She started shrieking and crying out. The thing was incredibly painful. But all they did was pray. Finally, she died. Her parents were prosecuted and convicted, but they were only given unsupervised probation.

In 43 out of 50 American states, faith healing that harms your children is not a civil or criminal problem. There are graveyards filled with dead kids who were given faith healing. Spiritual is an amorphous term. I study evolution and every day I read something that strikes me as amazingly wonderful. Richard Dawkins says the same thing. I am spiritual in the sense that I have this awe and wonder before nature. I love James Joyce and T.

It has to do with a commonality of feeling prompted by nature and the arts. So I prefer to use the word humanist rather than spiritual. All rights reserved. Take us back to that moment. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.

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I remember the first book on evolution my mum gave me when I was about nine, and how excited I became talking to her about australopithecus and Cro-Magnon man. I remember something else too, something more sinister. Whatever beliefs I held about God were switched off.

It is too long ago to remember who taught me this exactly, but I do remember one scientist who was important to me at the time: Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a man with a deep sense of awe.

Frankly I found all this a bit silly to begin with, but when a young-earth creationist scientist from a local university came to speak to us, he gave my awe a new theological language.

He showed us comic-strip pictures of a cow with a serpent tongue, wolf ears, and birds wings, asking if this was evolution. He asked us how evolution which required death to create new life could be true if death was the consequence of the fall. He asked us where the new genetic information required for one species to evolve into another came from.

He challenged any view of inerrancy that saw Genesis as containing scientific errors. He was not a manipulator or a firebrand, just a soft-spoken, genuine man of good faith. To a young person like me trying to be a faithful Christian, his lecture turned on a light in my mind. There are two things I was taught as a new young-earth creationist: Firstly, that there is a vast conspiracy within the global scientific community against young-earth creation science.

It is not the lack of evidence that leaves young-earth creationism outside the walls of the scientific academy, but the fallen nature of the evolutionary scientists themselves who sinfully reject God. Apparently, this corrupted society which felt free to leave God and his moral requirements behind and destroyed religious faith and moral life within the church.

For me, young-earth creationism was a happy experience. My degree was not in science and I had left my science-driven sense of awe behind years before. It brought my sense of awe front and centre into my faith again.

But there was a downside to all this enthusiasm. Secondly, my evangelism no longer started with Jesus but with Genesis, and my literalistic interpretation of its first two chapters devastated my ability to evangelise effectively. I became such an expert in young-earth creationist theology and science that it turned into a wrecking ball for my faith. When my new brother in law, who was a theistic evolutionist and a science major, nailed me in a discussion on the origins of DNA, the hollowness of my position was suddenly clear.

My experience of losing a discussion that I felt I should have won began the process of rethinking what I really believed. Young-earth creationism had simply failed every empirical test that mainstream science demands.

This is why there are no serious peer-reviewed creationist papers, and no scientists studying young-earth creationism in any secular research centre in the world. The same can be said for its theology. The raqiya therefore could not be solid, but must simply refer to the atmosphere.

Yet the cosmology of a solid dome was a common phenomenological belief shared by all ancient near-eastern people, not just the Israelites. Moreover, its solid state is described by other prophets, not just the writer of Genesis such as Job who describes the firmament as a dome made of lead , and Ezekiel who had a vision of the firmament being made of sapphire stone I once nodded vigorously when Ken Ham said that even if science was completely against him, he would still believe in Genesis as it was written by God.

Yet we can put rockets into space and there is no raqiya made of lead or sapphire to be found. When I was a child reading books on evolution, this was also true for me, but there was no theological channel for my questions or my sense of awe.

Later the only channel offered to me was creationism.