2: YEC, Born and Raised

This is the second in a series of posts describing my transition from young earth creationist to theistic evolutionist. In the first post, I described how Alan Roxburgh's 5-phase description of paradigm change describes this transition well, and I have been using his framework to shape this discussion. See the introduction for a list of all the posts in this series.

YEC, Born and Raised

This is the step in which I have spent the majority of my life. As a child, I was taught to believe that the earth, moon, and stars are all about 6000 to 10,000 years old. My Dad, a young earth creationist, (YEC) taught me that all the features of the earth, the continents, oceans, mountains and canyons were formed during the flood described in Genesis 6-9. Now, I won't attempt to describe all of the beliefs of YECs, but the core of their beliefs is that, as described by a literalist interpretation of Genesis 1 & 2, God created the universe in six 24-hour days. In the following chapters of Genesis and the rest of the Torah, there is a continuous narrative, including an unbroken genealogical record that can be used to calculate the age of the universe.




In addition to these beliefs, I was taught that evolution is false; an evil idea that scientists invented and continue to push in order to eliminate God from a complete description of the universe. Evolution was a tool of atheism, the two went hand-in-hand. I was also taught that evolution is scientifically unsupportable, and that everything that evolution attempts to explain can be better explained by YEC theories.

When I was about 10 years old, my Dad took me to a "creation conference" at a local Christian Reformed church in my hometown of Caledonia, MI. The conference, run by the Institute for Creation Research, consisted of talks and seminars with the aim of equipping the attendees to defend their beliefs against the onslaught of evolutionists. Book and video sales were heavily promoted. Ironically, the huge mass of pamphlets, VHS tapes, and vast collection of YEC books is the only specific thing I remember from the conference.

In high school, my youth group leader at Whitneyville Bible Church supplied the teens of our church with t-shirts to wear to school. I remember buying two which said

"I believe in the big bang theory: God spoke and BANG! It happened."

and

"Over millions of years, monkeys evolved slowly into human beings. NOT!"

My high school never taught about evolution. In fact, I don't believe I ever heard the word in any high school class. (I come from a very dutch, very conservative region of western Michigan.) Therefore, it was easy for phase 1 to persist until my sophomore year of college.

My next post will describe the next phase of my transition from creationist to evolutionist: Discontinuity.

1. Paradigm Change: Introduction

One of the most significant elements in the story of my faith was my transition from young earth creationist (YEC) to theistic evolutionist. I went from believing that the earth is about 10,000 years old to a complete acceptance of the current scientific consensus on the origin and development of life on earth.

This was not an easy process. It is a very long story. I recently read a description of this process that gives a very accurate framework of this journey. In the introduction to A New Kind of Christian, Brian McLaren presents Alan Roxburgh's teaching on the process of paradigm change. Although it was included in the book to describe the transition from the modern to postmodern mindset, as I read it, I was shocked at how well it described my change from YEC to theistic evolutionist.

Alan Roxburgh, a colleague in the Terranova Project (an initiative to explore how Christian faith will reconfigure in the postmodern matrix), teaches people that this painful process of letting go of life as we have known it and embracing a new life on new terms (the process of paradigm change) typically follows five phases:

1. Stability, when life is fine, current theories explain everything adequately, and questions are few—perhaps like Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz living happily in Kansas

2. Discontinuity, when the old system seems to be working less well—reflected socially in Dorothy’s conflict with her witchy neighbor, psychologically in her ambivalent desire to run away from home, and physically in the approaching thunderstorm

3. Disembedding, when we begin feeling that the current system is insupportable and we begin to disconnect from it—like Dorothy being carried away from Kansas by the tornado

4. Transition, when we haven’t fully left the old world and we haven’t fully entered the new world—like Dorothy newly arrived in Oz, trying to get her bearings

5. Reformation, when we decide to make a go of it in the new world we have entered—like Dorothy setting out on her journey to see the wizard, invigorated with new hope and passion

Of course, while we are going through an experience, we are rarely able to say to ourselves: "Oh, I just entered step 2 of 5." In the midst of paradigm change, our final state seems quite uncertain, and no "process" can be seen. Hence, I can only see retrospectively that the description above is strikingly accurate. It describes very well my change from creationist to theistic evolutionist.

I plan to use the next several posts to describe my journey through this paradigm change. Here are links to all the posts in this series:

1. Paradigm Change: Introduction (this post)

Phase 1: Stability:

2. YEC, Born and Raised

Phase 2: Discontinuity

3. Enter Kent Hovind

Phase 3: Disembedding

4. To Old Earth Creationism (via Clark's Gully)

5. A Bit of Light Reading

6. Four Tough Problems

Phase 4: Transition

7. Dealing with Atheism

8. Dealing with Atheism, Continued...

9. Dealing with Young Earth Creationism
10. Dealing with Young Earth Creationism. Continued...
11. Dealing with Genesis

To be continued..