Hacker News Reader

Comment by forrestbrazeal | Hacker News Reader

My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation.

Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. [0] This line works great to rile up the faithful, but...

Fast-forward to today, and you have an entire generation of young adults who can no longer square YEC with reality, going: "Huh, I guess I'm an atheist then?"

Ham-flavored fundamentalism rules huge swaths of orthodox Christian tradition out of bounds, and it's been devastating for the future of the American church.

[0] https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/a-flood-of-nonse...

View on HN

Except, mainline Protestants are shrinking at a much faster rate than evangelicals. If church attrition was driven by a rejection of fundamentalism we wouldn't expect Unitarians and Episcopalians to be losing members faster than Baptists and Pentecostals.

There are certainly other factors at play in the decline of mainline Protestant churches. I'm not sure that evangelicalism's problems (subject of my comment) imply anything about whether they should be shrinking faster or slower than other types of churches.

How did you personally abandon fundamentalism and end up still identifying as Christian? I grew up learning from Ken Ham (literally shook his hand at summer camp), but I'm now a genuinely atheistic apostate and I can't comprehend what you have left of Christianity when you abandon a literal understanding of the Bible.

Young Earth Creationism pseudoscience is one reason, but there are tons of others. Ham, I think, is mostly right: Either (1) it's all true, in which case you have all the problems of fundamentalism and have to disbelieve science. Or (2) or some subset of the factual claims it makes are true - the Bible as miraculously inspired and truthful, YEC, the very existence and nature of the supernatural, Old Testament miracles, New Testament miracles, eschatology, and so on - but as Ham eloquently points out, once you abandon one of the claims that the supposedly truthful book makes, you call them all into question. Or (3) none of it is true, it's all fiction, in which case you can use whatever you want as a moral framework, but it has no special value. In that case, it's merely a socially evolved construct like every other superstition throughout the history of our species.

I don't know you, but I love that you commented on this because your history and perspective is a perfect example of the phenomenon I'm talking about.

TO your question, I don't claim to have all the answers (let alone all the "Answers in Genesis") but I've come to understand there's a lot more nuance to a "literal" understanding of the Bible than Ken Ham may have led you to believe.

A couple of resources I've found helpful when navigating the intersection of historic Christianity and modern science are biologist Joel Duff [0] and physicist Aron Wall [1]. (Fun side note on the latter: he's the son of Perl creator Larry Wall.)

[0] https://thenaturalhistorian.com/ [1] http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/

The issue I have with (2) is that Ham's construction of the three choices doesn't take into account that what the modern mind and it's assumption about what is "factual" (and valuable) is substantially different from the ancient audiences that listened to these texts.

On the point of creation, while Ham contends we MUST take it literally or the entire veracity of the Bible falls apart, there is an inconsistency even within the literal YEC interpretation. Consider Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." If God breathed into the nostrils of does this mean that God had lungs? A YEC would say "of course not, this is a metaphorical/poetic description of the action". And thus they reveal their inconsistency: the YEC demands a literal understanding of the first six days, but when pressed for a simple implication like this, they revert to a metaphorical understanding.

For a fascinating and impeccably researched deep dive into this and many other questions of Genesis interpretation, see John Walton’s “The Lost World of Genesis One.” https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0...

Trumpism (and the past couple decades of political lead-up to it among fundamentalists) being the other big one. I think these are the two major forces that actively drive people away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com