Re: A reaction to ID

George,

It has to be a rare situation, when an historian gets to correct a
theologian about the theological details of a particular view on
science/religion, but in this case I actually get to do that! (I have no
doubt that you will be able to find the occasional *historical* error in my
comments, if the truth be told.)

My comments are inserted below, the error is in point 2 of George's post.

*****

Ted -
    I see your point & was perhaps too hasty in my earlier post. However -

1) Yes, YECs can't accept death before the fall. But that isn't the
question - which is, how important in itself is the Y of YEC? Is there any
reason to insist on it if an ancient earth doesn't entail death before the
fall - & specifically, death which scripture rules out?

Ted: An ancient earth does not entail (animal) death before the fall, only
if there was no animal life upon that earth long before the appearance of
humans. This is not widely known, but George McCready Price actually did
allow this possibility. But *life* on earth had to be "recent," ie,
essentially as old as humans, so that no animals would have suffered and
died prior to human sin. The key scripture here seems to be Romans
5:12--despite the fact that a literal reading of that verse expressly
defines the scope of post-fall death as extending to "all men," not other
creatures. This misinterpretation is just further evidence of my point
about the *theology* of death before the fall (as vs the actual biblical
text) being the driving force here.

2) As you point out, there are ways of having an old earth without pre-fall

death - gap theory e.g. For that matter, I don't think it would take much
exegetical trickery to have days before #4 be billions of year periods since

there was no sun to mark time. Thus one could have an old universe & earth
without the problem of animal death before the fall. (How to work out plant

death between days 3 & 4 is left as an exercise for the student :))

Ted: George, the gap view *requires* animal death before the fall, since all
the fossils (dead animals and plants) are relegated to the original creation
that precedes the six days, stuffed into the "gap" of verse 2. Hitchcock
(serious scientist in mid-19th century) and Rimmer (creationist of early and
mid 20th century) both preferred the gap view to the day-age view b/c they
felt it was more "literal," ie they believed the days ought to be literal
days but that the peculiarities of Hebrew words in verse 2 allowed them to
stuff most of earth history into the space of one verse. Hitchcock takes
serioiusly the issue of death before the fall, explaining it within a
Calvinist framework: God foreknew the fall and planned accordingly, setting
out nature already with death in it from the start. I don't recall Rimmer
really thinking about this one (not a surprise, he didn't think about lots
of such things).

3) There is nothing in scripture that explicitly makes the deaths of
non-human animals a result of human sin. (Admittedly Wisdom 1:13-14 might
be cited but virtually no YECs consider that canonical.) In fact, in the
eastern church there are suggestions that even humans would have been
subject to death as a purely biological phenomeonon if they had not sinned.

Ted:
We agree here, George. See my comments above.

4) I think that one reason some people insist so strongly on a young earth
is that it makes significant evolution impossible. If the earth is only ~
10^4 yr old then there just wasn't time for evolution to occur & any
putative evidence for evolution must be spurious.

Ted:
Well, sure, this is true at the popular level. But look again at the
"thinkers" in the YEC movement, and look at what Hitchcock was writing in
the 1840s--his comments had to be directed at someone--and Hitchcock was
absolutely dead against evolution (in its pre-Darwinian form of the Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation). Above all, take a look at what Henry
and John Morris say about this in their Modern Creation Trilogy. A real
eye-opener, that one.

ted
Received on Tue Mar 1 20:35:59 2005