Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut – and now YEC

[Unknown Soldier]

“God said he did it in six days.”

I find this very sad. This is not someone who had no education or bad education; this is a man who was very intelligent and well educated. He had the luck to be one of the few people who actually walked on another world.

It seems like being in space inspires religiosity in some people.

And he wound up becoming a biblical literalist. I just can’t understand how someone with his life experience could come to that conclusion. There were many Christians among those who went to the moon (I remember watching the Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis on Christmas 1968, and I also read in later years about Buzz Aldrin taking communion on the moon) but none of them ever questioned the scientific consensus about the age of the universe until he did.

I never quite understood how anybody could be a "Bible believer" while concluding that much of the Bible's narratives are fiction and many of its claims are bogus. Is the Bible the basis of the Christian religion except the parts that are demonstrated by science to be wrong? Should Charlie Duke believe in a God who created the cosmos and who lied about how he did it? Does that make better sense then Duke's concluding that the Bible gets the origin of the universe correct?

If someone this intelligent can be convinced that a literal reading of the Bible is the truth, it is possible that anyone could be. That is a frightening thought to me.

I find it frightening that anybody could be convinced that any of the Bible's core dogmas are true. Being frightened, though, doesn't make anybody right.

Even though he does not take the stance that only those with his worldview are actually Christian – many YEC believers do. I suspect the majority of them consider it a defining characteristic of Christians given my experience with them.

I tend to think of Christians as those people who among other things believe that the God of the Bible is perfectly truthful and never confuses or misinforms anybody.

Do you find this as surprising as I do?

Not really. Although I don't find belief in any Gods to be logical, if I do assume that the Christian God exists, then it logically follows that the Bible is his word. If the Bible is his word, then it should be clearly truthful. If it has metaphors in it, that's fine as long as those metaphors are obviously metaphors. The creation stories in Genesis are far from being obviously metaphorical, and it then should follow that we need not be surprised if people interpret those stories literally.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Not really. Although I don't find belief in any Gods to be logical, if I do assume that the Christian God exists, then it logically follows that the Bible is his word. If the Bible is his word, then it should be clearly truthful. If it has metaphors in it, that's fine as long as those metaphors are obviously metaphors. The creation stories in Genesis are far from being obviously metaphorical, and it then should follow that we need not be surprised if people interpret those stories literally.

That really doesn't matter to Charlie Duke. It's good academic fodder but that's the farthest thing from his thinking right now. If the article is half right the guy had a stressful life and marriage, now opens a beer distributorship, in short he's struggling. His brain has changed just like a stroke patient's because of all that stress. This is clinical stuff. He's not the same person, even to the degree I doubt he really believes any of the stuff he is saying about YECism. His emotional faculties have taken over, natural selection at work.

Charlie Duke always had a predisposition toward this behavior and the environmental triggers sealed the deal eventually. He's highly educated, very intellectual, driven. I've experienced this behavior and change in my family personally. People go on endlessly with the whys and the arguments back and forth but it's a brain condition. Given the right environment a pretty healthy condition. Today? Maybe not so much with scientific knowledge so abundant and explanations for phenomenon so available. But it is still there and will likely be there forever.