Re: Cobb County--George Murphy and heresy, related matters

Ted.

I think there is a fourth "T"!

AuthoriTy!

lol

I think another thing that is driving YEC against TE
especially, is a mistaken view that if you use evidence
from science to interpret scripture, than you are putting
scripture secondary to science.

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:44:27 -0500
  "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>>>> "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 12:13:35 2005