From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Sat Sep 20 2003 - 16:06:19 EDT
I copying the gentlemen on the list so they can see the damage that claims
like they make do.
Burgy wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of John W Burgeson
>Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003 12:58 PM
>I have asked these gentlemen to argue their case on this LISTSERV; so far
>I think they have not shown up (I am about 50 messages behind). This
>post, and subsequent ones, may incent them otherwise.
I hope they do have the courage to present their case here.
>
>Joe had emailed me privately that he personally thought a person such as
>myself, distinctly scornful of YECism, might still be a Christian. I had
>asked him to make that point, as appropriate, in his talk. In that talk,
>he specifically said that non-YEC people were calling Jesus a liar. That
>all other interpretations than YEC "do great harm to the cause of
>Christ." That so-called "Christian" scientists doing radiometric dating
>deliberately falsify their findings. That TEs do not worship "the God of
>the Bible." At each of these places I listened carefully to see if he
>would give the slightest caveat; he did not.
The God of the Bible (Genesis 1:11,20,24) ordered the LAND to bring forth
living creatures. According to the Hebrew, it was the LAND (eretz) which
brought forth the animals. He also ordered the water to bring forth life.
That is exactly what evolution and the scientific evidence says happened.
The water and the land did bring forth life, a confirmation of the Biblical
account. The problem with antievolutionism is that it leads to people not
reading the Scriptural account very carefully.
And it is often claimed that the biblical 'after their kind' says something
about the reproductive capacity of the animals on earth. Nowhere in
scripture does it say "animals give rise to animals after their kind', or
'animals reproduce animals after their kind'. The land was told to bring
forth animals after their kind. Since the word 'land' is the subject of the
sentence, are we to presume land is an animal (in order to reproduce after
its kind) or to assume land engages in sexual reproduction?
The only reasonable reading of Genesis, in my opinion, is this way.
Otherwise one puts things into the Genesis account which clearly arent
there.And that is a claim anti-evolutionists often level against theistic
evolutionists like me.
>
>To his credit, he did say, in an unrelated discussion of evidences, that
>TEs and PCs "might" be Christians, "although in so doing they cannot be
>consistent with either science or scripture." But this came 10 minutes or
>so after he had said the things in the paragraph above.
This is clearly violating Paul's charge to us to not teach a different
gospel (Gal. 1:8,9). Jesus said, "...whosoever believeth in him shall not
perish but have eternal life." But the above adds to Jesus' words making
them say:
"...whosoever believeth in him AND NOT EVOLUTION shall not perish but have
eternal life."
Where is that in the Gospel account? Clearly it is teaching something Paul
didn't teach the Galatians and it is a case of making up the Bible as one
goes along.
>Joe, Roger, and Mike. This post is to an Internet LISTSERV. It will be
>"public" for some years, and will be accessed within a few days by
>perhaps 200 people, almost all of whom are both Christians and trained in
>the sciences. Most of these guys are a lot more conservative than I am,
>BTW.
I certainly am! :-)
>This much more I will say, Joe. If I really believed the Bible taught
>what you think it teaches, I could not in any way take it seriously.
The problem is that they don't really believe what the Bible actually says.
(I know G. Murphy will only say this is a possible interp), but it is pretty
clear to me that the Bible says that God used land and water to produce
life.
The problem their view presents is that it sets a Christian up to reject
Christianity. I know lots of atheists who were once young-earthers. They
looked at the scientific data and ended up rejecting it all. Indeed, I think
the fastest way to atheism is through YEC.
see
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/whocares.htm for some really sad stories
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/brayton.htm
For two who remaind Christians:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/robertso.htm
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gstory.htm
Your theology drives people to atheism.
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