# Creation Beliefs Delta Stories



## ZackF (Mar 4, 2018)

Over the past 10, especially 5 years my views on Genesis have change significantly. Things are still quite in flux. I don't have a settled belief but I'm much more open to young(er) earth/universe options. From junior high to about five years ago I considered myself some kind of theistic evolutionist leading to a literal Adam and Eve. I grew unsatisfied with that 'understanding'. I came to see it as a belief held together by the will not by sound exegesis and scientific inquiry. Jason Lisle has been the extra-Biblical author most responsible for me being willing to listen to other viewpoints. Some of the ID stuff out there has been helpful. Our own Wes Bredenhof's Blog is good too. I read Biologos material but couldn't find anything that smacks of exegetical consistency. 

I'd like to read about others' journeys (I know, I know) to other view points. From YEC to OEC or OEC to YEC? To and from Framework? From evolution to whatever?

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## arapahoepark (Mar 5, 2018)

When in AP Bio (that's a show now!) Junior year, I decided I was a theistic evolutionist and Francis Collins' book was very instrumental in leading me that way. That was until I voraciously read that blog Biologos. Far from just accomodating evolution, it was more like Deistic evolution. Christian beliefs were dramatically reinterpreted in light of evolution. I remember that was during the whole Enns debacle too. I resolved that I will believe the Bible no matter what because that was my authority not scientists who barely believed, if at all. I felt alone in my beliefs but, to my surprise a couple of years later, I found Creation Ministries and Answers in Genesis. I never knew it there were so many YECs. I have mellowed slightly with regard to the length of days, but I will never go back to TE. A literal Adam and Eve I think is far more important that day length, not that it is not important.

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## Jeri Tanner (Mar 8, 2018)

A questioning daughter caused me to dig in to study. Before that I’d been content to simply accept the traditional teaching on Genesis, but some of her questions and arguments caused me to dig in deeper. I considered for a while something along the lines of a gap theory. But in the end, the understanding of maturity at creation steered me back into taking the Genesis account at traditional face value. When Christ turned the water into wine, it was the best, aged wine.

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## Tom Hart (Mar 8, 2018)

As a young believer I was introduced to John Lennox and the Old Earth views of day=age creation. The immature and uncharitable Christian that I was, I even ridiculed the Young Earth position. My thinking was not based on Scripture; it just didn't make sense to me that the mountains and the dinosaurs could be only a few thousand years old. And I thought the Old Earth people talked eloquently, while offering a perspective that might be more viable in the scientific realm. For a while I didn't do a lot of thinking about creation, and so I remained a soft Old Earther for a couple of years.

Now, I've settled firmly on Young Earth. When I actually, finally looked into the matter, nothing seemed to treat the biblical text as fairly and straightforwardly as the Young Earth view. That, for me, was the priority.

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## RefPres1647 (Mar 8, 2018)

I've always struggled with this. Growing up in the 90's and new millennium is where a huge rise in evolution and spontaneous life really started to go from theory to "fact" (ask any evolutionist and they will call it fact, even without verifiable evidence) and that made it very hard to be a creationist at all. Once I became a Christian, I immediately let it go and let scripture tell me what it told me. God created the Heavens and the Earth in a week. If He created it in that literal time, then He did. If He created it with gap theory, then He did. If He created it to make it look like billions of years but it was only over 6 days, then He did. We can theorize all day and we can make it an almost perfect a theory that shows us how God may have created, but in the end, God created it because _ex nihilo, nihil fit, _and because He is God. And He did it in some variance of 6 days, the scripture gives us as much. I trust the God of scripture much more than unverifiable scientific "fact".

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## ZackF (Mar 8, 2018)

Jeri Tanner said:


> A questioning daughter caused me to dig in to study. Before that I’d been content to simply accept the traditional teaching on Genesis, but some of her questions and arguments caused me to dig in deeper. I considered for a while something along the lines of a gap theory. But in the end, the understanding of maturity at creation steered me back into taking the Genesis account at traditional face value. When Christ turned the water into wine, it was the best, aged wine.



Yep. Our Lord started his public ministry going on a booze run for his mother.


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## Afterthought (Mar 13, 2018)

Grew up believing a strange mish-mash of OEC and YEC. Studied the matter in my teens and was convinced of progressive-creation OEC (although later on, I gave theistic evolution some serious consideration after reading Francis Collins and others). I thought I had interpreted things according to sola Scriptura. However, after learning Reformed theology, I realized that my hermeneutic actually gave science a superior authority: it was being used to limit the semantic range of yom, instead of letting Scripture interpret Scripture and letting language speak for itself. I had thought that I was drawing out the meaning from the text, but I had actually been treating interpretation as a scientific hypothesis is treated: Could the words the Bible used be consistent with this interpretation?; instead of asking the correct question: What can be ascertained from the text? I had thought that I was not being biased by science in holding to the "two books" idea, but I actually had held science as absolute and unquestionable truth: Gravity is unquestionable, so why not the age and general chronology of the universe and earth?; because of that, I held that the YEC interpretation of the Bible was ruled out and another interpretation consistent with scientific findings found.

After understanding the true nature of my original methodology, I made an effort to interpret the Scriptures properly on this matter, but I could not; I simply could not understand the text one way or another anymore. At the time, I understood this as the Lord blinding me to the meaning as chastisement for treating his word so carelessly. May we all beware of such happening to ourselves.

Failing to make progress on the Scripture side of the question, I studied the philosophy of science: both in university with the usual thinkers and schools of thought and in my spare time. I found Rev. Winzer's (and Mr. Bottomly's) views on the Puritanboard the most helpful in clarifying the nature of science; Rev. Buchanan has some helpful posts concerning mature creation; Dabney has an interesting thought experiment on the matter; Turretin was a watershed in my thought on the matter. From my studies, I realized science was not as absolute truth as I had thought, and in this matter especially, given mature creation.

The presupposition of scientific authority in matters of exegesis taken away (and perhaps having gained more experience in interpreting the Scriptures too), I eventually was able to give an honest look at the passage again. I studied the matter and tried to figure out what could be determined from the text using the usual manner of interpretation--ignoring whatever scientific consensus currently says. I found Douglas Kelly and Joey Pipa's books very helpful in studying the issue and considering the other professedly exegetically driven views. And as a result of those studies, I eventually landed in the YEC realm, while holding to mature creation, although not needing a way to reconcile current scientific findings with the truth of Scripture anymore (as I once believed I needed to have in order to settle on an interpretation of the Scriptures).

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## sc_q_jayce (Mar 16, 2018)

I grew up as an atheist, so naturally any idea of creation outside of natural processes was foreign to me. When I started life as a Christian (seventh grade), my time from then through college I was a mish-mash of YEC and OEC. It was the default position that either were acceptable and it really didn't mean much for me to devote too much time to it.

In college I pursued Chemistry for my degree and became entrenched in the scientific world of creationism versus evolution debates. I even attended a debate or so pushing back against some well known intelligent designers. My attempts at refuting evolutionary theory at the time was completely inept and the more I tried the more I had no answer. By the time I finished college, I was a converted theistic evolutionist, though without any true answers to the theological repercussions of this belief.

These thoughts largely went on unchallenged until I started attending a PCA church plant in 2010. I began to realize that the conclusions of believing TE would betray my faith and I began to distance myself from it. Between 2008 and 2010 I read the PCA Creation Report several times and continued investigating until I found myself falling firmly in a Framework-Lite view of creation. I say Framework-Lite because I saw the proponents of it saying the Framework view was exclusive to other views and I was not in agreement with that. I felt that being the Creation Report allowed for this as an orthodox belief, I felt settled again.

In 2012 I dated and married my wife, who turned my Reformed understanding of things up to eleven. She was a YEC and it made me keep coming back to thinking about it every once in a while. Somewhere around 2014 or 2015 I read something from someone that really helped seal the deal. I realized that if I could not speak about Creation the way Jesus spoke about creation that there was something significantly wrong. Just like Afterthought's post, my development of understanding of the scientific field made me realize the many presuppositions behind grand sweeping narratives and statements put forth by many scientists who refuse to question their own scientific framework. By this point I put two and two together and boom. I'm a YEC.

People at my church are sometimes shocked to hear that I'm a YEC scientist, but they'll get over it. In the end, I need to follow the greatest expositor of the Scriptures - our Lord.

It also makes my wife very happy!

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## ZackF (Apr 8, 2018)

sc_q_jayce said:


> People at my church are sometimes shocked to hear that I'm a YEC scientist, but they'll get over it. In the end, I need to follow the greatest expositor of the Scriptures - our Lord.



People at church? What do people at work think?


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## sc_q_jayce (Apr 10, 2018)

As an analytical chemist, the issue of evolution doesn't come up very much so I'm not going around parading it or hearing conversations on it on any routine basis. In grad school I had to defend Christianity from being a "religion for stupid people," a paraphrase from my professor at the time.

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## Tom Hart (Apr 10, 2018)

sc_q_jayce said:


> In grad school I had to defend Christianity from being a "religion for stupid people," a paraphrase from my professor at the time.



Sounds like a charming fellow.


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## Dachaser (Apr 10, 2018)

ZackF said:


> Over the past 10, especially 5 years my views on Genesis have change significantly. Things are still quite in flux. I don't have a settled belief but I'm much more open to young(er) earth/universe options. From junior high to about five years ago I considered myself some kind of theistic evolutionist leading to a literal Adam and Eve. I grew unsatisfied with that 'understanding'. I came to see it as a belief held together by the will not by sound exegesis and scientific inquiry. Jason Lisle has been the extra-Biblical author most responsible for me being willing to listen to other viewpoints. Some of the ID stuff out there has been helpful. Our own Wes Bredenhof's Blog is good too. I read Biologos material but couldn't find anything that smacks of exegetical consistency.
> 
> I'd like to read about others' journeys (I know, I know) to other view points. From YEC to OEC or OEC to YEC? To and from Framework? From evolution to whatever?


Before the Lord saved me, I was very much into Evolution proper, of the Darwinian version of it. Once saved by the grace of God in College, i then moved into theistic evolution, but soon settled into my Younger earth, Creationism view.
The main things that persuaded me was that the Genesis account was historical nature, literal describing of what happened in Creation, that Adam was a special creation of God, there was a Universal Flood, and most of all, that Jesus and Paul saw Genesis as being a factual historical account.
Also, Genesis said that God created all things after their own kind, that there was no death/killing/evil under fall of Adam, and that there is now scientific way to explain how nature can give the additional Dna encoding required to do a species transition.
Basically to me, theistic Evolution is an attempt to have accepted "Evolutionary facts" get reconciled with the scriptures.


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