Thank God for Creationism (In My Case)

If I hadn't been raised creationist, I would probably still be Christian. I'm glad now that I was exposed to this extreme set of ideas framed in a way that could demonstrably be proven false. If that hadn't happened, I might never have realized what it looked like to be surrounded by a network of ideas that wasn't being subjected to proper tests to see if it correlated with the rest of reality. If I had never realized that, I never would have started to test my other views to see if they were being insulated from proper criticism in the same way, so I probably never would have left the beliefs that were originally most important to me.

Judging from the way creationism was taught to me though, I can only assume that many people who find it to be an important belief would misunderstand the role it played in my leaving Christianity. This is because creationist rhetoric teaches the expectation that questioning the literal historicity of Genesis 1 will lead people to reject Christianity or to live as compromising, weak Christians. I hope the people from my old community would believe what I have to say about why my beliefs changed, but I don't know: We were all taught the importance of creationism so pervasively and with such a strong emphasis on the certainty that questioning a literal interpretation of Genesis leads to atheism, which leads to orgies and murders. Would they be able to look outside the pattern they've been trained to see and listen to my explanation of what actually happened, even though, as someone who does not share their beliefs, I'm now a part of the group of people they were taught to see as cowardly, dishonest, and immoral? I don't know.

It's a subtle difference, but I want to make clear that things did not transpire exactly as creationist educators predicted. I did come to think that the creation account was not a record of literal historical events, but this didn't lead me to think that the Bible was wrong about one thing so it might as well be wrong about everything. It didn't make me think of the Bible as being wrong at all, actually. 

When I realized that creationist claims didn't make sense, I at first came to understand the creation story as a metaphor and then, with some more thought, as an origin myth that God had always intended people to relate to differently at different points in history. All cultures had a stage where they made up mythology to answer the questions of where the world came from and why it is the way it is. Should God have prevented his followers from having this stage? Should he have sat them down and written them a textbook to explain astrophysics and genetics so they could get all the scientific details right from the beginning? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply guide their development of mythology so that it contained the correct theological information and let them mature in their understanding of the scientific details as their investigation of the physical world progressed through the centuries?

At this point, my view was that human stubbornness was the reason a creationist movement existed. God had given us a story intended to teach spiritual truths, and instead of valuing it for its intended purpose, some people had gotten offended at the suggestion that their understanding of its writing genre was wrong, and then, in the process of arguing for their position, they had gotten addicted to the high of impressing audiences with pithy oversimplifications that sounded better in a debate setting than careful explanations of experimental data.

I held that view for several years. The Bible was right; some people's understanding of the genre of the creation story was wrong. Accepting that biological evolution made sense didn't lower my view of the authority of the Bible and cause me to doubt core doctrines of Christianity. It wasn't all that different from what I would have experienced if I had thought the parables of Jesus were retelling historical events and then someone had convinced me that they were actually fictional stories Jesus told to teach lessons. Jesus didn't lie, and my view of his words wouldn't be lowered. He never claimed his parables were accounts of real events, and neither does the creation story make any claim about what form of communication it is. The fact creationists love to bring up, that Jesus mentions Adam and Eve, speaking as if they were real people, didn't seem any different to me than how people today talk about the prodigal son without stopping to remind everyone he's just a character from a parable every time. Plus, Jesus, if he was fully human, probably wasn't aware of the evolution of humans any more than he was aware of how to build an iPhone app. I didn't have perfect knowledge of how the incarnation worked, so why should I assume it meant that Jesus was keeping all scientific knowledge in his human brain all the time if the Bible never said this was the case? Far from making me reject the Bible, questioning creationism only made me reject some people's rigid insistence that the interpretation of the Bible that felt right to them had to be the correct one.

I only started to doubt core doctrines of Christianity when, several years after changing my views on creationism, I stopped to ask myself why creationism had originally seemed convincing to me in the first place. When thinking about how a view with so many flaws had appeared so trustworthy, I came to focus on the importance of the fact that it was promoted by people who really believed it. It disturbed me that people could promote something so flawed without lying. It shook my confidence in the rest of what I believed, especially when it came to subjects that were controversial outside of the sphere of my home church but had been taught to me there in the same way and by the same people who had taught me creationism. If creationism had felt convincing because many people who wanted to believe in it had never noticed how much they were insulating themselves from other viewpoints, it wasn't unlikely that other Christian ideas that non-Christians claimed to have good reasons for disagreeing with only seemed convincing to me because I had been equally as insulated. In contradiction to what the young earth apologists said, it wasn't the fact that I ended up accepting evolution that made me doubt Christianity but the fact that I had started out accepting creationism.

If I had grown up in a church that saw no disharmony between evolutionary theories and the Bible, I don't think I ever would have found myself in a situation in which my church told me that a certain view was scientifically sound and yet I could see that it wasn't. In this scenario, my idea that all the various criticisms of Christianity out there simply overlooked the complexities of what Christianity actually was might have remained unassailed. I think it took a situation as black and white as my church making scientific claims that could be scientifically disproven to get me to question their thinking. If they had had all their scientific ideas correct, the other areas in which I sometimes felt something was problematic might have always been too vague and open to interpretation for me to ever realize how problematic things truly were. I had to be confronted with something as obvious as a conflict between correct and incorrect scientific information to see that things weren't necessarily true just because my church said they were. And that's why in the end I guess I'm glad I was brought up creationist. If I hadn't been, it's possible I would still hate myself, and spend every day asking why God didn't talk to me, and think that the only way not to be terrified of death was to pretend it wasn't real, and feel unsatisfied with my own moral positions because they seemed so arbitrary, and suffer all the other problems that came along with my original beliefs. But instead, thanks to people like Ken Ham and Kent Hovind, I'm enjoying being married to the best person in the world, spending my time the way I want to, having fun writing about ridiculous theological details with no worries about orthodoxy. It's just like God knew exactly what church was best for me.

As moderate Christians often point out, creationists are only doing a favor to atheist evangelists when they teach people that their only two choices are Genesis as a history book or rejection of Christian faith. So shouldn't I keep quiet about this? If creationist movements make Christianity look bad, shouldn't I want them to thrive within churches? Shouldn't I want Christians to think that creationism is good for their cause so more people are exposed to forms of Christianity that are easier to prove wrong? Well, maybe I should want that, I suppose, if I was only concerned with trying to get people to agree with me, but that's not my only concern. I'm obsessed with accuracy. I don't know why. I just want things to be accurate. I just want people to have accurate information. And creationism isn't accurate. I'd rather have more people right now getting accurate information about what we currently know of the history of this planet than have them getting inaccurate information just so they might be more likely to agree with me on theology in the end. Plus, I don't really know if they would be more likely to agree with me anyway. It feels intuitively correct that you'll have more people eventually leaving a belief system the more you incorporate disprovable claims into the system, but things that seem intuitive aren't always true. It could be that a lot of people who are taught creationism will refuse to listen to challenges to their beliefs or that they'll be open to replacing creationist views with other views but never take the second step I eventually took of passing everything else through the same filter that showed them their creationist views needed to be replaced. 

I don't know if having more inaccurate information out there would lead to some greater good in the end; I just know it would mean more people were believing more inaccuracies right now. Even if it was pretty certain it would lead to that greater good, I still couldn't support it because there are better, more honest ways of achieving the same thing. So, while I'm glad the extremeness of my original views worked out for me in the end, I can't really wish it on others hoping they'll get the same result, and I'd rather get into the details of why creationism didn't have the effect on me its proponents claimed it would than ignore that fact and maliciously hope creationist movements will get stronger.