Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit in the virgin Mary, born as a baby, grew up and lived a perfect life, served his disciples in an earthly ministry, performed miracles to demonstrate his power and authority over creation, and chose to die on the cross to serve as a substitute and ransom for the sins who trust him. We believe he rose again from the grace to finally prove both his power to overturn death and to give us a glimpse of the ultimate resurrection to come. If you can’t affirm all those things as stated in the Bible you are not, in the judgement of Jesus and the disciples’ writings, a Christian.
Yet, many who believe all that then look at the Old Testament and immediately back pedal away from reading the first few chapters in the straightforward way they’ve been recognized for centuries. They do this backpedaling because they’ve been taught by secular humanists who do not accept God as a premise that the Universe looks to them to be billions of years old, that the fossil record shows life on earth to be millions of years old, and that the science knows these things with enough certitude that it’s foolish to think anything else.
They take this view that has excluded spiritual things a priori and combine it with their Christianity and come up with something that is neither scientific nor biblical. I cannot understand how one can accept the miracles and resurrection of Christ and admit that the Universe is ultimately a creation of God, yet can’t swallow the straightforward, clear language of Genesis about creation.
Regardless of what you believe, this is a trustworthy fact: All observations must be interpreted. An observation will always be known and believed and explained according to the assumptions of the observer, not the other way around. Therefore, if you presume that the biblical account of creation is correct, your observations will be interpreted and understood within that framework. On the other hand, if you ignorant of or presume that the biblical account of creation is irrelevant to your interpretation, you will come up with something entirely different.
The compromise position between these two positions of old earth creation and theistic evolution is simply confusing to me. It just doesn’t work.
