"The Religion of Evolution"

This post is part of a series of posts that deal with some common Young Earth Creationist (YEC) objections to theistic evolution.  The impetus for these posts came via a comment from a reader on a previous post.  An index of all these posts can be found here.

Here I would like to address this part of Steve’s original comment:

Evolution is the most dogmatic religion there is. In order to believe it you must trust in literally million of totally random occurrences happening over and over and over again through out billions of years.


[And then later]


Would you agree that it takes much less faith to believe a wonderful,loving, all knowing, always present, and all powerful GOD simply created everything perfectly just for us just because he loves us. Why must there be a greater reason or explanation beyond that. Why can't we take his word at face value?

Evolution is not a “greater reason” for God’s creation; it isn’t a reason at all, it is HOW God created, not WHY.  Steve is confusing purpose and mechanism; they are not the same thing.

Furthermore, evolution does not require “faith” and is not “dogmatic” because it is based on evidence.  As I describe in my previous post, there is a vast amount of evidence.  As new observations are made, theories are changed or abandoned to conform to the evidence.  This is exactly the opposite of dogma or the sort of faith implied above.

In fact, young Earth Creationism is actually more dogmatic, because it takes a particular belief, and (flying in the face of the evidence) claims that this is the way it should be, and any claims to the contrary are wrong.  It cannot accept that whatever God has done (As determined by biblical and scientific evidence) is okay.  This is idolatry, and this is wrong.