The Slippery Slope to Atheism
In almost every young-earth creationist manual, some mention is made of the slippery slope from TE to out and out atheistic evolutionism. According to these young-earthers, those who adopt theistic evolution are on their way to becoming completely liberal readers of the Bible. If one accepts evolution, it will not be long before she is denying the virgin birth and the resurrection. If she does not go all the way herself, her children almost certainly will. Such Christians will only leave behind a legacy of liberalism and vacuous Christianity, meaningless except as a sometimes nice metaphor for how we ought to be good to one another. (Ironically, among Christians it is the young-earthers that are most often the free-market capitalists.)
Problems with this type of argument should be patent. It is a scare tactic. There is nothing rational about it. It is a gross misuse of statistics. It does not account for the masses of children who grow up to be fundamentalists whose parents were either liberal Christians or atheists. (I wonder if liberal Christian propagandists warn other liberal Christians not to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus because it is a slippery slope from there to inerrantism.) Moreover, and finally, it does not account for the masses of theistic evolutionists who continue to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and its essentiality to the Christian faith, in the virgin birth of Jesus, in the infallibility of the Scriptures, in the resurrection of the saints at the eschaton, etc., and for the masses of children they successfully raise to believe the very same things.
So far so good, on the sixth way.
Intro, Way 1, Way 2, Way 3, Way 4, Way 5, Way 6, Sabbath
Labels: Creation, Evolution, Science
3 Comments:
Some liberals do warn about the supposed "dangers" of believing in a literal resurrection, etc.! :-) Ironic, no? There's another side to this argument: Sometimes it is not the supposed slippery slope of TE that leads to loss of faith, but, rather the failure to present any other view than YEC as compatible with faith. Many Christians from conservative homes go to university and become involved in science and then lose their faith because they feel compelled to choose between what they learn in lab and field and text and YEC! This problem has increased since the homeschooling phenomenom because they don't encounter anything else until university--hot house faith does not do well outside the hot house.
You would not believe the number of people who have thanked me and other TEs for saving their faith or that of their children by showing them that they can believe in evolution and in God, the Bible, Jesus, etc. The look of relief on said faces is amazing--and I am just a popularizer. Real theologians who have also been trained as scientists (e.g., Glen Stassen, Nancey Murphy, John Polkinghorne, the late Eric Rust, etc.) report this constantly.
As you know, I love theological autobiographies--no matter the theological position of the author. So, years back, when I was much more conservative than I am now, I read The Living of These Days, which is the memoir of Harry Emerson Fosdick, the huge liberal of the early 20th C. He describes coming home from university for the holidays and announcing to his far more orthodox parents in a pretentious voice: "I have decided that I accept the theory of biological evolution, including the evolution of Man from lower animals." Dead silence. Then Fosdick's father looks over his paper and says, "Your mother and I believed that before you were born." The elder Fosdicks remained conservative Baptists and Harry became a flaming liberal--and a pacifist. But the question of evolution did not determine either course. I love that story for its humor.
Michael, you frustrate me. Your point here, that YECers are really the ones responsible for losing Christians over to a vacuous liberalism--I had meant for this point to be my big closing point and completely forgot about it because, well, because I wrote the paper three hours before it was due. Damn. I knew I had to rewrite it. Now I really have to rewrite it. Thanks for reminding me!
I don't say that YECs are the only ones responsible for losing folks to atheism. The YEC claim about TE as a slippery slope is true in some cases--but the other happens at least as often.
And you're welcome.
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