Know your Faith: Creationism

Many people ask me what my problem with extreme faith is. My answer is really quite simple.

Extreme faith leads people to assume things are right or wrong based on what is written in a book that has never been proven to be accurate. Many people claim it is the perfect word of God. Those people are generally called creationists.

Now, if we look at the bible, we can see that it's far from perfect. For example, let's look at Leviticus 11:13-19 which claims that bats are birds. We know that bats are not birds, because they're warm blooded, don't have feathers and don't have avian skulls.

So, do these people admit there's a mistake in the Bible? Of course not.

There is a website called "Answers in Genesis" which tries to give biblical accounts for what we see in the world today. By doing this, they hope to lend credibility to the bible. And I don't disagree with their goal. I know if I was trying to prove the Bible true, my first thought would be to see what the bible has accurately portrayed. Because if a large percentage of the bible is true and does accurately reflect the world we see, it may be worthwhile to read and consider honestly.

However, their own statement of faith shows their complete and total lack of intellectual honesty on the matter. And after a statement like this, it's hard to take anything they say seriously...


Wasn't the bible written by fallible people who didn't possess all information?

So, they have already decided that the Holy Bible is the sole authority and no amount of real world evidence will convince them. To them, bats are in fact birds. To them, Noah really did take every single animal into his ark, regardless of those animals being thousands of miles away. And of course, ignoring special diets those animals would have and let's not even get started on the inbreeding.

But in all honesty, if it was just a bunch of nutters believing in anything simply because they're told that it's true, I'd be ok with that. However, they're determined to have it presented in school! And what's worse, they want it in SCIENCE class.

That's right. Not only do they want us to disregard the first amendment (see my Blue Laws post), they also want us to put the stories from their bible on the same level as scientific principals.

Luckily for us, there are people brave enough to keep nonsense like this in check. You can google "Kitzmiller v. Dover", where an individual sued the Dover school board for bringing in creationism. Not only did the judge find it violated the first amendment, but he also found that it had no basis in science and was in fact a dogmatic faith.

What are your thoughts on others shoving their faith down your throat? What's your position on people who use the bible as reference for their decisions on stem cell research or something as basic as condoms?