Most people alive today think the following things about the cosmos.
It’s insanely, crazily, unfathomably old
It’s similarly large, perhaps infinitely so.
It came about by an accidental explosion.
The earth floats in an infinite expanse of nothing for no particular reason.
Life arose by happenstance. Probably lightning hitting some ancient sludge, nobody’s really sure.
The creatures of earth, including people, have evolved over billions of years, again, largely by accident.
Our planet is in no way overly special, and neither is our sun.
Okay, well, that’s a problem.
If, that is, you’re a person of faith, at least any sort of faith that’s more ancient than whatever religion was cooked up at Woodstock.
The simple fact of the matter is that all ancient religions, including Christianity, were founded on a radically different cosmology and, to but blunt, do not fit with the modern understand of the cosmos. They just don’t.
Over the past century, enough ink to fill the Nile has been poured in writing trying to square this circle. “Theistic Evolution”, so called, is perhaps the most egregious of this attempt, but everything designed to square the Biblical (also Judaic and Quranic) story of a relatively young earth designed by an intelligent creator who placed his work at the center of the cosmos with the modern notion outlined in the above seven points is equally fallacious. None of it washes. It’s all stupid.
Further, people know it’s stupid. If you can’t even cling to a literal Adam and Eve who literally caused the fall of the universe, then the entire underpinnings of the Christian story fall away. Christ’s incarnation, his sacrifice, his resurrection, all of them cease to have meaning. Ascended monkeys that exist by accident can’t cause the downfall of the universe through disobedience and a man’s sacrifice to set the universe right again is similarly unseated. The modern world and all its sins, divorce, abortion, usury, totalitarianism, war, homosexuality, greed, lust, unbounded narcissism, alienation and a general sense of meaninglessness. All of these are the only rational conclusion to the modern cosmology most people hold in their heads. If you believe the seven points at the start of this article, all morality is simply social convention. Something somebody cooked up at some point for some purpose that only made sense in the time and place it was cooked up. There’s no such thing as transcendent truth. Or objective, eternal right and wrong. How could there be? The whole thing started by accident for no reason, you can’t then shoehorn meaning onto that. You may as well throw paint at a wall and call it a masterpiece. Oh, wait, people do do that. Right. Because that’s the logical conclusion of art under such a cosmology. Paint splatters are just as valid and beautiful as the human eyeball because they were both created by the same force: Random Chance.
Everything Christians rail against in the modern world is the LOGICAL CONCLUSION of the cosmology those Christians nonetheless accept. Leftists and social justice warriors aren’t deranged. You are. You’re the one trying to force the meaning derived from an ancient cosmology onto an empty uncaring cosmos of nothing for no reason.
Think about that.
Really think about it.
If the cosmos is as described above in the beginning of this article, or relatively close to it, you must abandon Christianity right now (or Islam, or Judaism, or frankly, even Buddhism). It’s the only logical thing to do. Christ was working within a frame work of a cosmos with a literal Adam who literally fell and a literal Noah who literally built a boat to survive a literal world flood. He says so explicitly. 100% of the apostles were, by today’s standards, “flat-earthers”. How do you square this? How do you throw away the cosmology of your religion’s founders and retain your faith?
You can’t.
You can have something with vaguely similar outward dress, symbols, and appearance, but you can’t have anything solid. Nothing that lasts. Nothing that people will live for, much less die for.
You ask why the faith has died? Don’t look in a mirror. Look at a globe. It’s a real problem. How do you fix it? Can you?
I don’t think so.
Believe me, I’ve tried. I ran down every avenue to square “Science” with faith and found all of them lacking. But… maybe there’s another way. I said in one of my articles I have nothing to give anybody, but that’s not true. I have a new worldview to give you which sidesteps the need for such squaring altogether. That’s why this blog and our podcast (mapsoc.org) exists. To give you that, a new worldview. Maybe you could use it, I don’t know, that’s up to you.
Love this one brother! Echoing my thoughts. Something is in the air.....