Re: SBC seminary

I'd be very surprised if Bill Dembski didn't actively seek something like
the position that's been endowed (I think) for him at SBC. He was not able
to continue at Baylor, where the president himself has only narrowly escaped
a vote of no confidence by the university trustees--a very unfortunate
situation all around. (Baylor has been trying deliberately to become more
serious about faith-directed scholarship in the past few years, quite apart
from the messy situation that Dembski was involved in, and I applaud them
for this. If only more of the many formerly religious colleges and
universities would make serious efforts to get serious about religion again.
 And I mean to include most Roman Catholic schools in this comment.)

Given the very conservative views of the SBC on these issues--many SBC
people are YECs--their hiring of Dembski can be seen more positively than my
good friend George Murphy sees it. Dembski is quite obviously not a YEC,
and he does know a great deal about many of the relevant subjects for
directing a program on religion and science. He obviously doesn't call the
shots the way George or I would call them (realizing that George and I
wouldn't always call them the same way between us, but more often than not
we would), but he's far more qualified IMO to lead such a center than most
other American scholars I could name, and I can't for the life of me think
if anyone presently in the SBD who's better qualified. His full acceptance
of large parts of modern science and the fact that Ken Ham and other leading
YECs denounce ID might even "liberalize" some of his new friends in the SBC.
 At least one could hope for this.

Frankly, I was a bit surprised that Bill did this, that he would consider
moving to a place that is so far removed from mainstream academic discourse.
 He certainly could have gone to one of the better Christian colleges,
including perhaps Messiah, and he probably could have found financial
backing to start his own independent think tank in a prominent location. On
the other hand, it isn't as though Bill were not already known
internationally, so he really doesn't need an institution to help him be
heard. Mainly, I suspect he wanted to go where he was clearly wanted, and
SBC clearly wanted him. They could have done a lot worse.

Having said all this, let me close with an anecdote. In the early 1980s,
when I was a doctoral student in Bloomington, IN, I went to another church
(ie., not mine) one Sunday evening to hear a lecture by Eric Rust. I'm not
sure he's still living, at the time he had recently retired from teaching
science and religion at the SBC in Louisville. Bernard Ramm had
respectfully criticized Rust in The Christian View of Science and
Scripture--quite respectfully, and Ramm was very important to me at that
time, so I went to hear him. Like Ramm, I found Rust a bit too liberal for
my liking (he was too neo-orthodox in tone for my Reformed evangelical
self), but like Ramm I respected his scholarship. I've moved somewhat in 25
years--half of my lifetime--so that Rust is now more appealing to me than he
was then, although I have lost none of my enthusiasm for Ramm. Rust
represents the "old" SBC, which George and I both probably prefer to the
"new" SBC. We might say that the evolution from Rust to Dembski does
evidence some intelligent design, with the political overtones as well. But
Ramm would have appreciated Dembski, I suspect, for the same reasons he
appreciated Rust; indeed, he would probably have *liked* Dembski's stuff as
well, since in earlier times Bill would probably have embraced Ramm's own
label of "progressive creation" as a good description of his own position.

Ted
Received on Thu Feb 3 09:14:23 2005