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.