Comment by arkey
4 days ago
Thanks to ubertaco for the neat response point by point, but I don't think any of your points are relevant, even if they are true.
I know a couple of big-scale farmers in the US. They are Christian, and believe in Creation. That doesn't stop them from using the necessary pesticides, or choosing the adequate strain of corn seeds, etc.
Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron. Believing God created everything according to a design and purpose is not incompatible with acknowledging the presence of similarities and design patterns throughout all of Creation, and believing that doesn't suddenly poof take away your rational capabilities to think and understand things.
Either way, I was asking for is a real situation in which someone will be negatively impacted because they hold a Creationist belief.
Will a Creationist live a sad life without fully embracing the misteries of goose-bumps? Will a farmer not use pesticides, or choose the wrong one because Creationism? Will Advil won't work on a Christian because they don't understand that rats and rabbits are our cousins? Will their knees hurt more (or maybe less?) because they think humans were standing up from the beginning?
More generally all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line?
"Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron"
You kinda do have to be a moron to be a true young earth creationist. I went to Lutheran schools that taught me that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago and evolution was an evil plot created by Satan. By the time I was 15 I realized how stupid this was and how the theory of evolution fits the evidence and is self-consistent. One of the biggest realizations I had is that the theory of evolution, due to requiring such VAST amounts of time for evolution to occur, actually has nuclear fusion embedded in it as a dependency because nothing else could allow a star to shine for so long. When Darwin first proposed the theory a major and reasonable objection was the timescales needed because at the time it was thought that the Sun was powered only by gravitational collapse which would last less than 20 million years. Then this utterly absurd source of power for stars was discovered that could allow them to last for almost 1000 times as long.
I'm actually sorry to insist, but whatever.
> all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution
Could you please elaborate? I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to the scientific method?
If so, I really feel the need to insist that being Creationist or Christian is not exclusive or incompatible with that. Guess what, I am Christian, I believe in a Creator God and yet I am (surprise, surprise) an accomplished Software Engineer.
I can understand if you think I'm stupid because of my beliefs. That's your opinion and I'm totally fine with it.
What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. We're just working with different assumptions.
You have faith in Nothing, from which everything came, I have faith in Something (God) from which everything came. And it is faith indeed, because you don't and can't possibly have definite proven knowledge of the origin of things. You weren't there.
To you, nuclear fusion is evidence of evolution. Fine. To me, alongside the rest of Creation, it is evidence of God.
Therefore, you will reason a certain set of things, and I will reason a different set of things. Because we have different starting points, we will reach different conclusions.
"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "
They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.
Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.
The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.
You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.