Add Chris Jones to the list of pro athletes that think the earth is flat

[smootness]

I mean, there's a certain amount of rational thought you have to suspend to believe in any religion. In order to believe creationism, you have to completely reject science. I honestly never knew creationists existed until I went to graduate school and met some. Of course, you also have to completely reject science and twist your mind into a pretzel to believe in God, so most people are irrational about something. Just don't become an anti-vaxxer because they are public nuisances.

I think thoughts along this line are disheartening, to be honest. There is no need to reject science to believe in God, and I think this line of thinking has led to unnecessary conflict because people on both sides have bought into it.

Let's assume a purely materialistic worldview and look at the origin of all things. Everything that you see resulted from a single cell, or at the very least all living things resulted from a common ancestor, common descent, all that. I understand that belief, because things do adapt, microevolution is observable in nature, closer looks at DNA and all these things can point to that. That is totally fine. So you wind everything back to its beginning through purely rational, scientific thought. Still, at the end of that (or the beginning), you have the question of, how? How did something come from nothing? What is life, and how is it here? Where did thought come from? How did the whole process begin?

And at the end of that, you either say, 'It just is' or you say 'Something outside our plane of existence started it.' And I would argue that neither of those is an intellectual, scientific thought. Both of those are beliefs based not in evidence but in a belief. There is no evidence that there is nothing beyond our plane of existence, just as there is no evidence that there is. Both require faith. The other option is to say, 'I don't know, I don't believe anything that is not proven by science,' but I would argue that is the laziest, most morally bankrupt of the three options.