Author: blueridgemountain_man

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Not Your Grandpa’s Six Day, Young Earth Creationism

In the last few decades my studies have included other subjects specifically related to God’s Good Creation. So today I’m beginning a new category of posts that I hope you will find informative.

The new category I’ll be blogging about is Intelligent Design.

So Let’s Dig In!

When it comes to the Origin of Life & the Universe, there are only two world-view options available to us.

  1. Everything that exists in the Universe is a result of undirected, physical processes.
  2. Everything that exists in the Universe is a result of intelligent design.

That’s it. Those are the options. Which one do you believe?

Those who align themselves with option 2 typically fall into two camps.

  • Camp A) Literal 6 day, Young Earth Creationism (YEC) or
  • Camp B) Intelligent Design Creationism (ID).

Two Option 2 “Origin of Life” Perspectives

Intelligent Design (ID) and Young Earth Creationism (YEC) are two perspectives that seek to explain the origin of life and the universe. While they share some similarities, they have fundamental differences in their core beliefs and assumptions.

Intelligent Design:

  1. Intelligent Design posits that certain features of the natural world, including biological systems, are best explained by the action of an intelligent agent or designer, rather than by natural processes like macro evolution by natural selection. (ID affirms micro evolution, i.e., variation within species, or change over time, for example)
  2. ID does not necessarily reject the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the universe. It is compatible with a wide range of views on the age of the Earth, including the widely accepted scientific estimate of 4.5 billion years.
  3. ID proponents often focus on the concept of irreducible complexity, arguing that certain biological structures and systems are too complex to have evolved through natural processes alone.
  4. ID does not explicitly identify the intelligent designer, leaving room for various interpretations, including the possibility of an extraterrestrial or supernatural designer.

Young Earth Creationism:

  1. Young Earth Creationism is a religious belief that the Earth and the universe were created by a divine being, specifically the God of the Abrahamic religions, within a relatively short time frame, often interpreted as 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
  2. YEC proponents believe in a literal interpretation of key biblical texts, particularly the creation account in Genesis, and reject mainstream scientific evidence for an old Earth and the universe.
  3. YEC proponents typically deny the theory of evolution by natural selection, instead believing that all living organisms were created by God in their current forms, in a process known as “special creation.”
  4. YEC is explicitly religious in nature, and its proponents often work to reconcile scientific observations with their interpretation of biblical texts. For example, the Great Flood in Genesis.
  5. YEC is not considered a scientific theory and is rejected by the vast majority of scientists, as it contradicts a large body of well-established scientific evidence from multiple disciplines, including geology, astronomy, and biology.

Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism are both perspectives that argue for the involvement of an intelligent agent in the origin of life and the universe. However, ID is more open to the mainstream scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the universe, while YEC is firmly rooted in a religious and literal interpretation of key biblical texts.

Personal Clarification

I believe in the God of the Abrahamic religions, a God most fully revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish Messiah (Christ). But, I don’t believe in a literal Six day creation of the Heavens and Earth. Most ID proponents would affirm the same. But not all are Theists like myself.

Moving Forward

In the next year this blog will curate the most useful evidence for Creational Design among the hundreds available: books, articles, videos, and other resources. I hope you’ll learn from these. I know I will. And that you’ll gain a greater respect for God’s Good Creation. And most importantly, the Good Creator as well.

For those who might challenge the intellectual heft and rigor of ID Creationism, I challenge you to watch an episode of an interview show called Uncommon Knowledge. Uncommon Knowledge is affiliated with a Stanford University public policy think tank called The Hoover Institution. This two month old video already has 1.6 million views. Not bad for a topic like this one.

You will find the interview in a post scheduled for tomorrow; “Who’s Dead, God or Charles Darwin?“

But for now check out this short video and the array of scientists who support ID.

Video provided by Discovery Science.

Let me finish with a quote from NASA Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow1 Robert Jastrow was an American astronomer and planetary physicist who was a NASA scientist, populist author and futurist. He was the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor of geophysics at Columbia University.  He wrote several books on astronomy, cosmology, and the relationship between science and religion, such as “Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars”, “God and the Astronomers”, and “The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe”. He died on February 8, 2008 at the age of 82. So far as I know, he remained an agnostic.

From Jastrow’s book “God and the Astronomers” (1978) he writes:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

This quote expresses Jastrow’s view that scientific discoveries of the last 100 years led modern scientists inexorably to a shocking encounter with the old idea of a Creator.

Not a Bad Dream, But Good News

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The Transgender Children’s Crusade

With its vision of autonomous young people in touch with their innermost desires, gender identity negates all we know about growing up.

Kay Hymowitz: The Transgender Children’s Crusade

To grasp the novelty of gender identity, compare its idea of child nature with that of child psychology. The psychological approach is predicated on an idea that seems glaringly obvious to most people today: young minds differ from those of adults. Jean Piaget, one of the field’s first theorists of cognitive development, called the first two years the sensorimotor stage, when infants and toddlers explore the outside world through sensory means. They only gradually gain control of their arms and hands as they grab at their clothes and their hair, pull at their genitals, or reach for a caretaker’s necklace or hair. Anyone who has cared for a toddler knows that toddlers’ emotions are so fleeting that they forget the banana that they just demanded in a fit of red-faced rage, once distracted by a bright shiny object.

Here are other truths about young children known to experts and parents alike. They are prone to magical thinking; they believe, as Jazz Jennings did, that a fairy will change their penis into a vagina, or that they play with invisible companions, like the castle-dwelling ninjas that my grandson used to “fight” when he was five. Their sense of time is primitive. Young children have trouble thinking about being six years old; imagining themselves as 20, as they would need to do to know their identity, is like science fiction. Their personalities change; the placid infant turns into a chatterbox five-year-old, who suddenly turns into a withdrawn ten-year-old. Dysphoria itself is often a temporary condition. Assuming that they don’t socially transition, as Jazz did, the large majority of dysphoric young children will desist as they get older; most will become gay.

Yet pediatric gender experts have put psychology’s idea of the child out to pasture. In their view, kids, even those who have yet to pull themselves up in their cribs, are capable of insight that many adults don’t have. “Kids understand themselves better, and at a much younger age, than adults assume. This includes their gender identity,” theorists at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education maintain. Today’s prodigies intuit their gender identities before they can talk. Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California–San Francisco and one of the foremost exponents of youthful gender dysphoria, explained at a 2016 conference how preverbal children could communicate gender distress. A boy infant might pull at the snaps of his onesie, she answered, in order to “make a dress”; he is sending a “gender message” that he really wants to be a girl. Likewise, a toddler tugging at the barrettes in her hair is not trying to ease the pulling at her scalp; she’s demonstrating that she wants to be a boy.

In the past, when a child showed signs of gender dysphoria, clinicians took a stance of “watchful waiting,” an approach that recognized the inherent volatility and cognitive immaturity of creatures still sleeping in their Batman jammies and leaving cookies for Santa Claus. The essentialist logic of gender identity, however, requires teachers, parents, and therapists to take a “gender-affirming” approach. A boy who declares himself a girl must be validated: no questions asked, no therapeutic probing about anything else that might be troubling the child. The enlightened child has spoken. “If you listen to the children, you will discover their gender. It is not for us to tell, but for them to say,” writes Ehrensaft.

Source: City Journal

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Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion

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Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest

An excellent article by Jonathan Haidt helps us understand why our girls in particular have felt so alienated from the world around them and most importantly their own bodies.

I was first alerted to this disturbing cultural trend after reading Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” She painstakingly documented the sudden enormous increase in predominantly middle to upper middle-class white female adolescents who were identifying as other than their birth sex. This was occurring largely in liberal or progressive households.

The following post will give you the details:

Our Girls – Podcast 1

Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt documents a similar pattern in his latest very detailed substack article.

Cancel Culture’s Cognitive Distortions

According to Haidt’s research, in 2013, students on college campuses began pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech.

Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) noticed that these students were using cognitive distortions that were similar to those associated with depression. As a person who battles depression himself, he knew something about these distortions.

Here’s how his friend Haidt put it:

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

Because of what CBT taught Greg, he hypothesized that colleges supporting these distortions, rather than teaching critical thinking, could cause students to become depressed.

This idea was further developed in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind” which he co-wrote with Haidt.

In 2020, a study found that young liberal women reported higher rates of mental health conditions compared to other groups. Some explanations for this trend suggest that technology and social media, rather than politics, might be the main cause. Another theory is that depressed individuals tend to view reality negatively, and progressive institutional leaders may have inadvertently taught young progressives to catastrophize events to get what they want.

This focus on victimization and external locus of control (a belief that external factors control your life) could contribute to higher rates of depression and decreased sense of agency.

Phone-Based Childhood

In his substack article Haidt discusses how a phone-based childhood may contribute to passivity and mental health issues, particularly among liberal girls.

He suggests two main reasons for this phenomenon.

First, liberal girls use social media more than other groups, which can lead to reduced face-to-face interaction and contribute to poor mental health.

Second, the messages consumed by liberal girls on social media might be more damaging to their mental health than those consumed by other groups.

The article also points out that Gen Z as a whole has developed a more external locus of control, which means they believe their lives are more influenced by external factors rather than their own actions.

Liberal Gen Z individuals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating, as well.

Haidt also suggests that the loss of “play-based childhood” in the 1990s, when parents stopped letting their children play and explore unsupervised, might have contributed to this shift in locus of control.

And finally Haidt’s article explores the role of the social media platform Tumblr in shaping disempowering beliefs, particularly around identity, fragility, and victimhood. The podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” highlights how Tumblr’s culture war between young progressive women and right-leaning young men contributed to today’s cancel culture and may have influenced the development of distorted ways of thinking.

So, What Should We Do?

In his conclusion, Haidt argues that around 2013, many young people, particularly liberal women, embraced three Great Untruths, which caused an increase in anxiety and depression.

The Great Untruths are:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3). 

Haidt suggests that universities and progressive institutions have adopted these Untruths, leading to reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that exacerbates mental health issues.

And he proposes two policy changes to address this issue:

    1). Universities and schools should stop performing reverse CBT through programs based on the Great Untruths. Instead, they should focus on evidence-based practices that promote mental health and well-being.

   2). The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18, treating social media and other addictive apps like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. This would require parental consent for minors to sign contracts or open accounts, helping protect them from harmful content and potential mental health consequences.

Those are just the highlights. As usual. You should read the whole thing! And its Social Science details.

Companion Post

College Students Demand Protection From Words and Ideas

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