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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CH010:

Creationism, because it is based on the Bible, is moral. The denial of creationism is a denial of the Bible and is therefore immoral.

Response:

  1. Many evils in the past have been justified by claiming biblical support. Claiming a biblical basis has no bearing whatsoever on whether something is good or not.

  2. Creationism is not based on the Bible. Most people who accept the Bible do not accept creationism. Biblical creationism (we will not deal here with creationism based on the Qur'an or Vedas) is based on one particular interpretation of the Bible. It is a form of religious bigotry; it declares that a particular religious interpretation applies not just to people of that religion, but to everybody everywhere, and that the religion of anyone who believes otherwise is wrong. This bigotry is overt from many creationists (Tparents n.d.). In fact, creationism claims to apply an individual's religious opinion to the whole universe. That is not merely bigotry; it is also hubris. Since bigotry and hubris are immoral, creationism is immoral at its very foundation.

  3. Creationism is as much a political movement as a religious one. For example, the "wedge" strategy of Phillip Johnson and the Discovery Institute is funded by Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. and his wife Roberta. (Johnson dedicated one of his books to them.) Ahmanson supports Christian Reconstructionism, which seeks to replace American democracy with a fundamentalist theocracy. In the society he favors, the death penalty would be required for "offenders" such as witches, homosexuals, incorrigible children, and people who disagree with the state religion (Benen 2000; Forrest and Gross 2004, 22-23,265-267).

  4. Morals are properly judged on the basis of deeds, not claims. There are several indications that creationist deeds are below average morally:


    The examples above are not indicative of all creationists. Most creationists, like most people of any category, are good people on the whole. But creationists, unlike evolutionists or most other people, have a strong ideological commitment. Strong commitments such as theirs can, and judging by the examples above probably do, lead people into questionable morality if they think it will support what they consider a higher cause. Objective study is still necessary to determine definitively whether creationists are any less moral than average, but theory and what evidence there is suggests that that is the case.

  5. The Bible is not a consistent guide to morality; it describes several actions that would generally be considered immoral if not downright repugnant: See Robinson (2000) for more examples.

Links:

Vickers, Brett, 1998. Some questionable creationist credentials, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/credentials.html

References:

  1. Benen, Steve. 2000. Fat-cat theocrat funds creationism crusade. Church & State (Jul/Aug).
  2. Elsberry, Wesley R. and Mark Perakh. 2004. How Intelligent Design advocates turn the sordid lessons from Soviet and Nazi history upside down. http://www.talkreason.org/articles/eandp.cfm
  3. Forrest, Barbara and Paul R. Gross. 2004. Creationism's Trojan Horse, New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  4. Robinson, B. A. 2000. Bible passages that are immoral by today's standards. http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm
  5. Tparents. n.d. Dr. Jonathan Wells returns to UTS. http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/publications/cornerst/cs970506/cst_dr-jonathan.html
  6. Vickers, B. 1998. (see above)

Further Reading:

Drange, Theodore M. 1998. Why be moral? http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theodore_drange/whymoral.html

Carrier, Richard. 1998. Does the Christian theism advocated by J. P. Moreland provide a better reason to be moral than secular humanism? http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/moreland.html

Grünbaum, Adolf. 1995. The poverty of theistic morality. In: Science, Mind and Art, K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M. W. Wartofsky, eds., Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 203-242. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/adolf_grunbaum/poverty.html

Sagi, Avi and Daniel Statman. 1995. Religion and Morality. Trans. Batya Stein, Atlanta: Rodopi, pp. 107-112.
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created 2003-6-5, modified 2004-4-21