Creationists Lack Faith

Insisting that the earth was created in seven literal days reflects a lack of faith and a desire to control God. This is not to say that young-Earthers  have no faith. Clearly they do. Their faith -- specifically, their beliefs -- are so strong that they limit the possibility of knowledge that can be accepted. Stated in another way, what a person believes limits what said individual can accept as knowledge. 

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, claimed that people capable of comprehending the scientific realities of the world and discarding faith were "brights." The implication is that those who have faith are dim bulbs, and those who deny evolution are quite frankly burned out. Indeed, criticism of creationists generally stands on the notion that people who believe such things are stupid. 

A person's identity is tied up in his or her belief structure. If one's beliefs are based upon the historicity and factual veracity of the claims of the Bible, regardless of the genre of literature in question, then there is no room in one's mind for contradictory knowledge. Such contradictions are existential threats to one's entire identity and must therefore be resisted or thrown out. While many who hold to these beliefs may not be intellectual giants, they are not all stupid. 

What creationists fail to realize is how small and under their own control their God is. They define God by what they read in scripture and refuse to ask probing questions of the text, or to read one text against others. If they do read in this way, their beliefs predetermine the results. This means that God is only as big as the world revealed in the Bible. Ironically, this means that God is not actually to be seen in his creation unless what we discover fits neatly into the historical, factual confines of the creation stories. If those discoveries do not fit, they are quite simply dismissed as wrong.

But if God is bigger than the confines of scripture, what then? If God did not make clear through the Bible itself that there are vast areas of life and God's activity in it which are not defined there, how can we believe in him? If God did not actually take one week to create the world, can we actually trust that God raised Jesus from the dead? As an existential threat, this is huge. 

For this reason the doors of creationist churches are never opened very wide, at least not for very long. The group huddles close for protection against the threatening world outside, never realizing that the one who lives inside of them is greater and more powerful than the one who lives in the world, since he has conquered the world. If this is not evidence of a lack of faith in God, I don't know what is.