My Motivation

When writing about something like "My Motivation For This Website," there are an awful lot of things that come to mind. However, I think I can boil it down to three primary items:

And that truth does encompass some of what we know about this fascinatingly complex reality that we find ourselves in. Science, meaning objective examination of the world around us (and within us), can give us particular items of information that constitute what we call truth. In other words, we gather enough information such that an idea about reality becomes certain. The earth really is shaped like a ball. Geocentrism is totally wrong. The surface of the planet Venus is hotter than your kitchen oven on broil. The galaxy we call the Large Magellanic Cloud is about 150,000 light-years distant from the earth. There really are millions of “island universes” (galaxies), with hundreds of millions or billions of stars in each one.

People who make a practice of denying, obfuscating, covering up, misrepresenting, and distorting facts like these deserve all the criticism, rebuke, and condemnation they get — especially when, the whole time, they are pretending to be “the purveyors of truth” according to which anyone who disagrees with them is displeasing to God Himself. These are the “priests of pretense,” whose hypocrisy regarding truth should be forthrightly revealed by all who have any awareness and knowledge of their pretensions.

For truth-seekers who have some understanding of young earth creationism and its multifaceted fallacies, this task falls to us as our responsibility.

I was raised in the Church of Christ, in which young earth creationism has become a religious creed for quite a few decades now (in a church that routinely denies having any creeds). As I grew up and learned enough to understand the fallacies of young earth creationism, I rejected it. I did not do this lightly. There was a lot of personal anguish involved, as many who have been through that same kind of experience can attest.

But one thing I took away from that experience was an undying antipathy toward those who have taken up the anti-truth attitudes of young earth creationism and who promote these attitudes as ones that all who wish to be “good Christians” must uphold. I hate this pervasive (and perverse) hypocrisy. (So, I guess, you could call this my motivation for “payback”!)

The people I learned my young earth creationism from lied to me. They lied to me about truth. They lied to me about astronomy. They lied to me about geology. They lied to me about paleontology. They lied to me about biology. They lied to me about what they knew and what they didn't know. They lied to me about everything they laid their hands on. Every time I took up a specific relevant topic in order to learn about, examine, and understand the details, I found that the presentation young earth creationists had given me was substantially wrong. I also found that, in most cases, the ones I was learning from had absolutely no excuse for the presentation they had given other than their own purely intentional bias and obfuscation of relevant logic and relevant information. Most of the time, they did not even argue against the real thing, choosing instead to argue against a caricature they had developed that made a nice “punching bag” for people who had no intention of going up against the real thing.

The young earth creationists who pass themselves off as the leaders of young earth creationism (including the preachers) have developed nothing more than a systematic misrepresentation of everything relevant to the subject, to do whatever they feel is necessary to cast young earth creationism in a “good light” (and cast anything contradicting young earth creationism in a bad light), because they believe that it is good to do whatever they need to do in order to prevent “good Christians” from being led astray by the “atheistic influences” of science.

They can pretend to be “honest” and “sincere” because they make sure that they keep their own minds “pure” of these “atheistic influences” — which to them includes any empirical information “tainted” by the naturalistic bias of science and evolution. They never seem to comprehend that their systematic attitude of obstinance against learning about and understanding anything that contradicts their personal beliefs is simply a denial of truth-seeking itself. They proclaim that they have nothing to fear from truth, and then they proceed to carry out their war of propaganda against it.

However, we know them not by what they say at any one particular time, but by how they present what they say even after being shown very clearly the errors in their original presentation. In other words, you can claim to be sincere for a little while, but if you continue with promoting your errors even after being shown how wrong you are, then you have demonstrated hypocrisy, not sincerity. When you refuse to take the proper care with the information that you present, even after having your clear misrepresentations pointed out to you, then you demonstrate your lack of interest in genuine truth-seeking.

The great majority of young earth creationists demonstrate just this hypocrisy time and time again.

This is a war of ideas. Young earth creationists declared the war. It is the duty of truth-seekers who know better, having themselves escaped from the depths, to fight against these people who make war against truth.

This website is presented, in part, for them. I wish to assist them with my “hindsight” (you know: 20/20). I used to be where they are now. But in seeking truth I discovered that my own beliefs were wrong. Intellectual honesty compelled me to accept what I learned, and to modify my beliefs in accordance with this. You have to be true to the truth, regardless of how you feel about it, and regardless of the particular “cultural system” (religious or otherwise) you happen to be in at the time you make your discoveries.

There are some aspects of empirical information regarding the world around us that are very, very clear. One of them is that both the universe and the earth are quite ancient. You will see in the pages and links provided in this website that this is just the way reality is. You can either choose to accept it or not. But if you choose to not even examine the relevant information, if you deliberately choose to remain ignorant, then you demonstrate you are not a genuine truth-seeker. You can only say to yourself "I don't have the time to “dig into the details” right now" for so long. When weeks stretch into months, and then into years, you take on the mantel of purposeful ignorance, and you have absolutely no right to criticize those “non-young earthers” whom you believe are so wrong. If you choose to examine the relevant information, and you examine it and then try to pretend that it doesn't really exist, then you demonstrate you are not a genuine truth-seeker.

The path is drawn, the way is clear, and it is up to you to take the steps you need to take — if you are a genuine truth-seeker. Yes, it's not easy. Yes, it takes time. Yes, you have to put forth the effort it takes to dig into the details. Yes, your personal position in life might make it extremely uncomfortable for you to reject belief in young earth creationism should you learn and understand the information that shows that the universe and the earth are ancient. Yes, you might even need to modify how you interpret various aspects of the Bible.

Yes? Okay, truth-seeker. What are you waiting for?