ON BEING FRUSTRATED BY CREATIONIST ARGUMENTS

Creationism is still a problem in the United States.  According to a 2014 Gallup poll, 42 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years.  Sadly, this percentage hasn’t changed much over the past three decades.  Encouraging, though, is the fact that the percentage of Americans who believe that humans have evolved through natural processes and without intervention by a theistic god has more than doubled over that time period and now stands at nearly 20 percent.  Of course, Western Europe is way ahead of us in this regard.

Evolution is an area where the conflict between science and fundamentalist Christianity is most acute.  Creationists have not been able to reinterpret their beliefs regarding the origins of life and of humans in the same way that they have regarding such matters as the age of the universe or the age of the earth.  That is because they haven’t found any way to concede generally accepted evolutionary processes and still maintain belief in the Genesis creation story.  Instead, creationist apologists have been reduced to denying the facts of evolution and to posing a number of arguments intended to refute evolutionary theory.

THE 2300-DAY PROPHECY

The 2300-Day Prophecy?  My guess is that most mainstream Christians have never heard of it.  Or if they have, they think of it as some weird passage irrelevant to their faith.  But for Seventh-day Adventists, at least when I was growing up in the church, the 2300-day prophecy was fundamental.

When I abandoned my belief in God and religion in high school, belief in the 2300-day prophecy automatically fell as well.  Recently, though, I decided to take another look.  I wanted to see how my childhood religious training compared with a more, shall we say, secular understanding of this scriptural passage.  In addition, I wanted to see how the SDA church now treats this concept that had been important to its history.