Click for Radio Podcast: Fearful Faith (5:35)
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Transcript:
The friendly radio evangelist had been brought to visit by the local pastor. I liked him, for all his unusual beliefs. Creationism was his big thing. He had come to preach truth to a heathen.
I posed one of the traditional questions. If God had created all that he had created 6000 years ago, how would we explain fossils that were dated millions of years old. How about light from stars billions of light years away?
He had an answer. God had created his creation with the appearance of age. That was my introduction to what is known as the Omphalos hypothesis, named for a novel written in the MID-1800s. It has a certain chicken-and-egg logic to it. If God created the egg, it would appear to have come from a chicken. If God created a chicken, it would appear to have come from an egg. Both would have the appearance of age.
My visitor’s faith was very strong. Unbending, really.
I suggested that, if God had gone through that much trouble to give his universe the Appearance of Age, it seemed to me a bit unsporting for us not to surrender to his will and believe in all those contrived eons.
My new friend’s unbending faith was strong enough for him to find my observation completely nonthreatening. In fact, he laughed appreciatively. It was hard not to like him.
Not all creationists accept the Omphalos hypothesis. I don’t much blame them. The big gaping hole in it is that it can support pretty much any theory of limited existence. God created the universe last Tuesday. He did it with the Appearance of Age, including memories, pseudo-history, relationships, and a fictitious past. Why not?
My friend’s faith was strong and unbending, but his logic could support pretty much anything. So it pretty much supported nothing.
A few years ago, I happened upon an argument about all those light years of distance in observable stars. Andy Schlafly, the creator, as it were, of Conservapedia, considers Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and pretty much all science that flows from light traveling at a constant speed, as “heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”
Like my friend from decades ago, Mr. Schlafly’s faith is unbending and rigid. His faith is so rigid and unyielding on so many points, it makes me wonder what is at its core. His insistence that accepted science must be wrong, wrong, wrong, suggests to me that a faith that rigid is more than a little brittle.
Like most Christians, my own faith has its own vulnerability. It is historically based, at least in part. Christ died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. If I became convinced that Jesus died running from Gethsemane with a Roman spear in his back, I would be devastated.
I use that internal image to gain some empathy. If the slightest crack were allowed into any of the many crevices of the rock whose cleft shields so many of my brethren, the entire edifice might weaken and collapse.
I was reminded of the dangers of the single weak link in an unnecessarily long chain as I listened to small segments of the famous Creation vs Science debate a few months ago between Kenneth Ham the creationist and Bill Nye the science guy. Ken Ham was asked this:
Hypothetically, if evidence existed that caused you to have to admit that the Earth was older than 10,000 years and creation did not occur over six days, would you still believe in God, and the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and that Jesus was the son of God?
Mr. Ham began his answer this way:
Well, I’ve been emphasizing all night, you cannot ever prove, using the scientific method in the present, you can’t prove the age of the Earth. So you can never prove it’s old. There is no hypothetical. Because you can’t do that.
He continued for a minute or two, repeating variations of his theme. He doesn’t have to test his faith, even hypothetically, because the universe isn’t billions of years old. It just isn’t. It can’t, can’t, can’t be.
Although it is impossible to judge the inner core, the hidden strength, of Mr. Ham’s faith, I can see the Appearance of Weakness in his writhing efforts to escape such a seemingly harmless question.
Einstein’s theory must be wrong or else everything we believe will be at risk. The speed of light must vary over time or faith will die. A universe that is older than 6 millennia threatens God himself. We struggle within our souls against theocide.
A faith that shouts its unbending strength, its intractable rigidity, its brittle inflexibility, almost compels us to complete the circle. We have to wonder about the delicate fragility that fights so hard to avoid the slightest touch of factual contradiction.
Why will faith fear a touch, except that, like a fragment of ancient parchment, a touch will make it crumble?