>>>Long years ago -- about 1988... Egad!!! ASAers have the patience of
saints!!!>>
Not hardly.
It was in the early 80s (maybe the late 70s) that I started to look into
the origins question seriously. In the summer of 1988 I determined to let
ICR take its best shot at convincing me by attending one of their week
long seminars in Dallas, Texas. During that week I deliberately "turned
off my skeptic machinery" and tried hard to understand, and, yes, even
"believe" their positions. It was then I met Gish for the first time and
formed a friendship with him. At one point I hosted him, Henry Morris
and, I think, Ken Ham at lunch and participated in the discussions.
At one point during that lunch I asked Morris if a non-YEC could be a
Christian, as some of his remarks in print had indicated he had some
doubts. He answered quickly that the answer was "yes," but that he, for
one, could not figure out how a Christian could hold anything but a YEC
position if they had sincerely studied the issues. But he would not, he
said, presume to speak for God as to who might be in the kingdom.
I found Morris and Gish to be gentlemen, very friendly, not abrasive at
all, and genuinely puzzled as to why others did not accept their
arguments more readily. I did not form any particular impression of Ham;
I think he was there but after 14 years I'm no longer sure.
Alas, after the seminar I again turned on my brain as I evaluated their
arguments.
Subsequently, still trying to give them the benefit of a doubt, I
reviewed Gish's book CREATION SCIENTISTS ANSWER THEIR CRITICS. Jim
Lippard, an agnostic critic, with whom I had dialogued for a couple years
on Compuserve agreed to write a more critical review than mine and both
were published together in PERSPECTIVES in Sept 1994. (They were written
a year or two earlier for Compuserve). I am pretty sure both are still on
the ASA site somewhere, as well as my own. Gish and I have had email
contact since then -- he agreed that we were both, in some sense at
least, "creationists," and, while we would never agree, were still
friends. I have not heard from him, however, since about 1997, and his
previous email address is long dormant.
In March 1996 PERSPECTIVES published another review of mine on Henry
Morris's SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE; this one pretty well sums up my
perspectives on ICR. It, too, is on the ASA web site as well as my own.
Copies of that review have circulated on the internet in various places
ever since.
John Burgeson (Burgy)
http://www.burgy.50megs.com
(science/theology, quantum mechanics, baseball, ethics,
humor, cars, philosophy and much more)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 11 2002 - 10:43:31 EST