IMO, Mortenson's webpage is likely to convince his primary audience--home
schoolers, members of fundamentalist churches, and many Christian school
teachers and administrators--that anything other than a YEC position is
simply unacceptable biblically, *and* wrong scientifically as well. The
scriptural geologists were largely irrelevant after about 1830, but their
ideas didn't really disappear entirely. As many have noted, the emerging
professional geologists of that period, many of whom were Christian
believers with a high view of biblical authority, simply could not accept a
young earth position, and came increasingly after 1830 also to reject the
view that Noah's flood had significantly altered the surface of the earth.
Some of the arguments used by two leading American evangelicals, Benjamin
Silliman of Yale (the greatest science teacher of the century) and Edward
Hitchcock of Amherst (the leading American geologist prior to the Civil
War), are found in writings I have made available at the following URL:
http://www.messiah.edu/HPAGES/FACSTAFF/TDAVIS/texts.htm
The main reason I began to develop this URL a couple of years ago (the
progress is slow, I could use help) is, that I hope to make available many
similar texts, as a way of witnessing to the church today about the kind of
conversation, involving very deep and careful thinking about the biblical
and scientific issues, that has taken place in the past. In other words, to
help recover the "noble tradition" of science and faith of the 19th century,
whose passing was lamented nearly 50 years ago by the late Bernard Ramm.
Like Mortenson, I believe that history is too important to be left to the
historians; unlike Mortenson, I hold (with Calvin, Augustine, Silliman, and
Hitchcock) that the Bible is not a scientific text: as Calvin said
concerning Genesis, let him who would learn astronomy and other recondite
arts, go elsewhere. Also unlike Mortenson--or at least like many of those
with similar ideas--I am not in the business of demonizing those whose views
on this are different from mine.
Ted Davis
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