WHY?

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Because there is a powerful temptation ...
"... to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in the favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them.. We receive as friendly that which agrees with [us], we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense." [ 1 ]

A credulous mind ... find most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him;   but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such. [ 2 ]

Because I refuse to believe in 'literalism' with regards to the Bible, as it leads to logical inconsistencies.  For example, consider the following:
  1. God created the Universe, the Earth, every living thing, and Man during a 6 day period 6 to 12 thousand years ago.
  2. God's revealed and inspired words are contained in the Bible which contains a literal and inerrant account of the Creation.
  3. God created Man with the intellect and motivation to investigate His universe.
  4. There are unreconcilable contradictions between the observable Universe and a literalist interpretation of the Bible.
  5. Therefore, either God is lying to us in the Bible, or he created a deceptive and misleading Universe which requires explanations like 'Anchient light' or 'catastrophic flood geology' to explain the facts of the Universe.
Because I reject the notion that God is lying to me. See the Omphalos page for more on this...

Because a literalist interpretation of the Bible is not internally consistent within the Bible.  For example, which of the following five creation accounts are we to believe?

  1. Gen 1:1-2:4a;  This is the traditional account of the Creation.
  2. Gen 2:4b-2:25;  This account differs from the first one in so many ways that it is impossible to reconcile them by claiming that it is a different arrangement (the first being chronological the second being... what,  topical?  categorized?), or logged differently, etc.
  3. Pr 8:22-31;  In this account, God creats a separate being called 'Wisdom', who is identified as female, and the creation of whom preceeds the creation of "the depths" (Pr 8:24), "the mountains" (Pr 8:25), "the earth" (Pr 8:26), etc.  Literalists would like it to seem that Wisdom is not a separate entitiy, but rather a personification of God.  However, Wisdom is portrayed as God's first creation, distinct from Him, and active in creation, working on God's behalf.
  4. Variously in Job 26:12-13, Ps 74:13-14, Ps 89:10-11, Is 51:9-10;  This is the 'Leviathan' or 'Rahab' account, the gist of which is that our world is the product of, or at least associated with, a battle between God and a great dragon-like sea-monster. [ 3 ]
  5. 2 Peter 3:5-13;  This is the 'two worlds' account.  Some theologians assert that this is consistent with the account beginning with Gen 1:1.  However, elsewhere in the Bible the earth is assumed to have recovered from the flood, but here the meaning of the Greek work apoleto is annihilation, not mere destruction.  So according to this account, the ante-deluvian world is simply gone!
Because none of these stories are scientific in any sense of the word.  None of them are based on open-minded, systematic, critical observation.  None of them include empirically testable theories.   None specify what evidence, if any, would support a given story of origins and none indicates what data, if any wouuld undercut it.  None has proved fruitful in leading to futher lines of scientific inquiry.  None can be expressed mathematically as Einstein, for example, expressed the relationship of energy to mass in his famous equation,  e = mc^2.    The "Scientific Creationists" are able to press their case that "Creation Science" is really scientific (in more than name) only because the average American is either too poorly informed to know any better, or wants to believe too much to care about what is and what is not science.  The scientific, and well-informed American, on the other hand, tends to dismiss  "Creation Science" as something that nobody would believe anyway... with dangerous results. [ 4 ]

Because above all else, "Scientific Creationists" wish to rewrite history, claim that there is no seperation of church and state, and mandate the teaching of theology in our public schools under the guise of "Creation Science".


Notes:

[1] A quotation of British physicist  Michael Faraday
[2] Samuel Butler, Characters, 1667-1669
[3]  See E. O. James, The Anchient Gods, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960), chap. 7, esp. pp. 215-24.
[4] Most of this paragraph is a rewording of a similar paragraph in Delos. B. McKown's book The Mythmaker's Magic.