Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

I recently went to an Intelligent Design presentation from the Discovery Institute. They showed a documentary they had just made and had a group discussion with four authors/scientists.  The one I was familiar with was Michael Behe. I enjoyed his book: Darwin’s Black Box. It pretty much kicked off the Intelligent Design movement and coined the phrase ‘irreducible complexity’. I was raised in a culture of Young Earth Creationism.  This is peculiar to conservative evangelical -and mostly U.S.- Christianity.  (Through their missionary activity it also has taken hold in pockets around the world.)  The basic tenets are that the Bible is best read as literally as possible, therefore the universe was created in six 24-hour-days, and according to the various genealogies, we can estimate the earth to be only several thousand years old.  All scientific evidence to the contrary is generally chalked up to spiritually motivated scientists who want to make everyone atheists.   In the pa

Mini-epiphany time! (Macro-explanation time!) I think I just put my finger on why I’ve become more and more repelled by the concept of faith.  For years I’ve been thinking this was because of the strictly interior rational deconstruction of my own reasoning faculties.  I’ve said many times now that I believe my epistemology is broken.  Not in the sense that it must be wrong.  But in the sense that it puts me out of phase with society.  As a social animal, any anomalous behavior, beliefs, attractions, etc. are little ‘breaks’ from social cohesion and acceptance. So the fact that I can’t ‘sign on the dotted line’ for practically ANY belief structure makes me an outsider to everyone. (at least on some level) My failure to be able to put my stamp of belief-approval on anything is not from lack of trying.  Being raised a Christian and having very close ties in that institution, and nothing but positive experiences from it, meant that I naturally tried as hard as I could to keep believing a