>>> "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com> 1/21/2005 11:06:56 AM >>>writes:
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this report on the Cleveland
conferences is that the 3 speakers who get zapped most heavily, Kenneth
Miller, Keith Miller & myself, are the 3 who most clearly identified
themselves & their presentations as Christian. I think the people that AiG
& other anti-evolutionists dislike the most are not "atheistic
evolutionists" but those who present a coherent theological case for
acceptance of - or at least openness too - evolution. They probably sense
that once one admits even the possibility that a Christian can hold an
evolutionary view, all their claims about scientific support for their
notions will be seen to be smoke & mirrors.
Ted agrees!
For several years I've had my students read a lengthy stump speech that
Bryan gave in the early 1920s, called "The Menace of Darwinism," where of
course "Darwinism" has all the rotten overtones that it does for Philip
Johnson and Henry Morris--"Darwinism" isn't simply a scientific claim about
natural history, but a fundamentally (im)moral claim about ourselves and the
nature of ultimate reality. Bryan had even more bad things to say about
theistic evolution(ists) than he did about secular evolutionists. At one
point he wrote, (quote or real close paraphrase), "theistic evolution is the
anesthetic that dulls the pain while the faith is removed." TEs for Bryan
were wolves in sheeps clothing.
If anything, Henry Morris is even more over the top on this point. As he
and his son John argue in their Modern Creation Trilogy, "evolutionism" has
been around since the fall of Satan, and it embraces *everything* that Satan
does. Nimrod built a Satanic temple at Babel, and through him "the lie" (as
Ken Ham so judiciously calls it) spread to all of humankind. TEs have sold
their birthright; "they loved the praise of men more than the praise of
God"; we're compared evenly to robbers, liars, and adulterers.
What drives all this?
The more I read about YEC (and here I note that Bryan wasn't in this
category), now and in the past, the more I am convinced that there are three
overriding forces driving all this. (1) Biblical literalism, meaning that
if we can't trust a straightforward "literal" reading of the creation week
then we can't trust anything else in the Bible, and God the Father and God
the Son are both liars. (2) The belief that animal death/suffering prior to
the Fall is an abomination, a blot on the character of God so profound that
it is literally unthinkable that God would have even created carnivores
before we sinned, let alone that God would have used the "wasteful, cruel"
process of evolution to create anything God that God cared for. (3) The
belief that if humans and "lower animals" are linked by common ancestors,
then we absolutely can't bear the image of God, with whatever the imago dei
means for the person making this claim.
In other words, it comes down to the "three Ts": trust, theodicy, and The
image of God.
This summer, I'm supposed to speak on Creationist hermeneutics at a
conference in Ontario. Here's the details.
http://cs.redeemer.on.ca/pascal/
I haven't written anything about this yet, but I've been thinking hard
about it and would be happy to have people help me out with any
comments/suggestions they have.
It should be a real good conference, if my paper doesn't ruin it. Some of
the world's best scholars of the history of religion/science will be
presenting, including a couple of the younger generation of Newton scholars
who know his theological papers inside out. I hope to see some ASAers
there.
ted
Received on Fri Jan 21 11:45:22 2005
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