Re: [asa] Best Way to Approach YECs?

Paul,

I think a lot about what I would do if I could teach a course like this,
but my actual experience is limited to a one-hour presentation on
various
interpretations of Genesis that I gave for a friend's Sunday School
class
at another church. I do have the advantage of having lived only in
college
towns, and so the church congregations are likely to have more
members who
have studied science than might be found in other cities.

I think it is important to focus on what the Scriptures say. Your
audience
is likely to understand them better than scientific arguments and to
weight them more heavily anyhow.

One advantage that I have over most people on this list is that I am
older, and I can speak from personal experience of a time when the
situation in evangelical churches was much different, i.e. before most
evangelicals had even heard of flood geology. Even though I don't accept
his gap theory, widespread use of the original version of the Scofield
Reference Bible showed that an old earth and animal death before the
Fall
were beliefs accepted as being consistent with a very conservative
view of
Scripture.

The 144-hour creation view has many internal problems that can be
pointed
out along with the fact that many of the early church fathers recognized
this. Attempts to defend YEC against science with apologetics such as
apparent age and flood geology have produced further conflicts with the
Bible, and I would be sure to point these out.

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Jul 30 23:49:53 2006