When I first began to investigate the reasons behind my perspective as a Biblical creationist, it never occurred to me that I’d ever be anything else. But somewhere along the way, I lost the fear of adding some new tags to my personal profile.
Like a vegan getting over their paralyzing fear of beef bullion, I became less freaked out by the ramifications of an origins story that made room for Darwin’s idea. Eventually “less freaked out” evolved into “entirely fascinated” and I found myself caught up in a creation story that danced with new plot twists. Deep time, natural selection, and even a collection of new characters – neighbours of Adam and Eve hinted at in those early chapters of Genesis – made the story so much richer and, dare I say it, more believable than those six cartoonish 24 hour days I had learned about in Sunday School since I was a scrawny preachers kid.
And then one day it hit me: I am not a creationist anymore. It wasn’t that I had simply added a secret potion of scientific coherence to my creationist soup. It wasn’t because I had turned my back on Scripture. And it definitely wasn’t because i ceased believing in God or his plan to redeem a broken planet by invading it in human form. I had simply stopped believing in an interpretation of Genesis that refused to take into account everything we now know about cosmology, the human genome, geology, the fossil record, human and animal dispersion patterns across the globe and on and on and on.
Now I know what some of you may be thinking. And I forgive you.
I know firsthand what it feels like to hear a fellow believer endorse an evolutionary worldview. You may have asked yourself why I even pretend to be a Christian anymore. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the panic in the faces of fellow Christians. I recognize those wild eyes. I’ve seen them in my own mirror. I used to think C.S. Lewis was a fabulous example of an edgy, deep thinking Christ follower until I landed on the page where he gushed about the wonders of evolution. I spent the next three weeks speculating on the details of his secret drug habit. What exactly was he putting in that pipe of his? At that point in my journey I had no room for faith in the Biblical record AND the evolutionary framework.
Some of my friends have taken my about face on origins as a sign that I have dropped my faith for a more media friendly “Orthodox-ish” (tastes great – less filling) variation on true Christian belief. Others are quite convinced that I have “caved” to the pressures of those left wing secularists who are trying to steal our kids out from under our 6,000 year old noses.
However just because I’m not a creationist anymore doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped believing in the Creator. That would be like saying that because I’m allergic to peanut butter I am also obligated to refute the existence of peanuts!
It’s taken me some time to get comfortable in these new theological duds, but i can finally say with full confidence that I am SBNC – Spiritual But Not Creationist. Yes, I am a spiritual person, and a christian, more convinced than ever before that God is in control of this entire crazy 14 billion year old ride. Along the way, I simply lost the ability to believe that everything we see before us was created in six twenty-four days less about 6,000 years ago. What I gained was a brand spanking new, hyper-sized sense of wonder in a God that chooses to live with us, in us, in spite of the fact it took several hundred million years before we were mature enough to even recognize him.
Hello. My name is Calvin Wray and I’m a recovering creationist.