Re: Nancy P is not perfect

I don't recall that anyone (myself included) asked James if Pearcy footnoted her reference. I don't recall that James gave a reference from Pearcy's account. Did she provide a written source for her assertion that Stalin read Darwin in seminary and afterwards became an atheist? If she gave a reference, then one could check it out and assess the soundness of the source. If she did not, then I wonder about the quality of her scholarship. How about it, James?

Bob

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: glennmorton@entouch.net
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 6:22 PM
  Subject: Re: Nancy P is not perfect

  Glenn, Bob, George, James, ...

>In general I loathe the fallacious connections between Darwin and the evils of the world as much as anyone. However, I
>think that it's fair to say that if an individual, after reflecting on his/her own intellectual development attributes to some
>author some impact on his/ her own thinking, we ought to recognize that. If Stalin says that he was moved to atheism or
>Marxism or genocide or whatever because of his reading of Darwin, isn't that a legitimate connection to note? Stalin is
>responsible for his own intellectual development and the consequences of his thought. (By the way, even a Calvinist and
>a presuppositionalist can say that--whatever Jack's comment was supposed to mean.) Darwin is not. I haven't seen the
>Nancy P. work in detail, nor the basis of it in Stalin's biographers. Tracking a thinker's intellectual development is a
>worthwhile historical exercise. I think we ought to be reticent to give knee-jerk reactions to these sorts of things. We
>don't like when people do it to us, let's not do it back.

  I don't see it that way. I see the choice of Stalin. Why not study the intellectual development of H. G. Wells, for which there is ample and clear evidence that Darwinism directed his position from Christianity to atheism? He wrote:

  "If all the animals and man have been evolved in this ascendant
  manner, then there would have been no first parents, no Eden,
  and no Fall. And if there had been no Fall, the entire
  historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin
  and the reason for an atonement, upon which current teaching
  bases Christian emotion and morality, collapses like a house of
  cards."~H. G. Wells, The Outline of History, (Garden City:
  Doubleday, 1961), p. 776-777

  And he was an intellectual. Was Stalin?

  Why not study the influence of Lyell on Ruskin, of whom it is written:

  John Ruskin 1819-1900
   "His early passion for mineralogy meant that he was forced
  to confront the disturbing theological implications of Lyell's
  Geology. 'You speak of the flimsiness of your own faith,' he
  confided in his undergraduate contemporary and lifelong friend,
  the medic Henry Acland in 1851-when they were just past thirty.
  'Mine, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold
  leaf, and fluters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms;
  but the only letters it can hold by at all are the old Evangelical
  formulae. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do
  very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them
  at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.' " John Ruskin
  cited by A. N. Wilson, God's Funeral,(New York: Ballantine Books,
  1999), p.266

  I too, hear the clink of those hammers at the end of every Bible verse. It is why I left YEC.

  No, the choice of Stalin and people like that rather than the hundreds of others who could be chosen is for political impact. Sorry, Terry, I simply disagree that the choice was meant to illustrate the intellectual development of an individual. BTW, who ever thought of Stalin as an intellectual? I certainly don't read books with the title, The Collected Philosophical Works of J. Stalin.
Received on Tue Jul 26 20:36:38 2005