The Christian Creation Story

An example of how Christianity is not compatible with the scientific worldview

Article originally published on MissionKaali.org

Christians like to boast that their religion is more aligned with science, and that other religions, including Hinduism are superstitious.  That is not the case.

Many, if not most Christians, are told by their pastors that the bible is the word of god, Yahweh.  And if it contradicts what science has told us about how the planet was formed, how light, the atmosphere, land, water and all the creatures of the earth were created, then they are told to discard what science teaches.  In other words, the bible is the sole authority on everything.

So what do Christians believe about how the planet was created.  It comes from the first chapter of Genesis:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light…And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day”. (Genesis 1:1-3,5).

The second day saw the creation of the different bodies of water, the third day saw the creation of plants and trees, the fourth day saw the creation of day, night, the sun, moon and stars, the fifth day saw the creation of the different animals.  And finally, on the sixth day, human beings were created from the dirt in this god yahweh’s likeness:

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground”(Genesis 1:26).

On the seventh day, he rested, which is why most Christians consider Sunday their holy day of the week.

All in all, Christians claim the earth is 6,000 year old.  How did they get this number, when we know radioactive dating has proved that the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old? Christians will point to this verse in Psalms 90:4:

“A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night”.

This of course clashes with what science holds: The earth is billions of years old and it is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that explains how the creatures of this earth have come to be.

And this is what they teach their children either in Christian schools or even in secular public schools where there are a majority of Christians.  I’m talking about the US, although they might teach this nonsense in their schools in India.  In some parts of the US, teaching evolution is not allowed.  In 1925, the US state of Tennessee passed a law making it illegal to teach the theory of evolution because it went against the bible.

To this day, many schools refuse to teach it, and as a result, American students do very poorly overall in science.  International students are the ones that are in research universities doing work, because many American students are dumbed down by Christian teachings. When presented with proof of the existence of dinosaurs, many Christians will say they were planted by Satan or claim that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.  They have an entire museum called the Creation Museum, which shows this.

Thankfully, Christians have not been that successful in censoring science that goes against the bible.  They could never fully stop men like Copernicus or Galileo.  Or Charles Darwin. Or Carl Sagan.  Who by the way, had this to say:

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”

Be confident in knowing Sanatan Dharma encourages seeking and finding the truth.  Science has yet to reach any sort of consensus about the nature of consciousness but with time it will catch up.  Overall, it is Sanatan Dharma that is more aligned with science than any other religions.  It is up to us to not forget that, especially when Christians try to browbeat Hindus into feeling dumb.

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