Re: [asa] Question from Nick Matzke

>>> "Rich Blinne" <rich.blinne@gmail.com> 03/01/07 2:57 PM >>>invites me to
comment, and I will. See below. Here is Rich's statement (part of it):

Another misunderstanding is that Creation Science and ID are not at their
root evangelical. (Ted and Terry should be able to comment on this in more
detail.) My limited understanding is that Creation Science came out of
Seven
Day Adventism and ID is heavily dominated by Roman Catholics. The only
major
leader of ID that could be stretched into being labelled as evangelical is
Philip Johnson. This may explain why ID is more common in that
neo-evangelicalism because there is less anti-catholicism in that portion
of
the evangelical spectrum.

Ted comments:
Rich is partly correct. The YEC movement was driven to a significant
degree by Whitcomb & Morris' "The Genesis Flood," (1961), which got an
appropriately chilly reception in the ASA--so much so, that Morris resigned
his membership and started the CRS. That book in turn was based heavily on
a doctoral dissertation that Whitcomb wrote expressely in order to respond
to Bernard Ramm's book, "The Christian View of Science and Scripture"
(1954), which had endorsed progressive creationism, and to defend the views
of SDA flood geologist George McCready Price. The published version does
its best to downplay the SDA roots of Whitcomb's ideas.

As for ID being "heavily dominated by Roman Catholics," I don't know where
Rich gets this particular idea. One Roman Catholic, Michael Behe, is
prominent as a member of what I call the "First Triumverate" of ID. The
other two members of this group are Phil Johnson, an evangelical
Presbyterian (I think that is his denominational affliation and invite
correction) and Bill Dembski, who is a Southern Baptist although he was
briefly in the Orthodox tradition. The "Second Triumverate," as I see it,
includes Jon Wells (a disciple of the Rev Moon), Steve Meyer (another
evangelical), and perhaps (I could see several other possible names
here)Paul Nelson (a YEC and fundamentalist Lutheran). Maybe you would put
Cornelius Hunter here, but he's not a Catholic either. I note the important
role of Roman Catholic writer Ben Wiker in promoting ID, and I'm aware of
controversy about ID in the Roman church recently, but I'm not at the moment
thinking of another Roman Catholic with such a prominent role in the
movement. Denyse O'Leary is recent convert to Catholicism, and the
Catholic-well, sort of magazine "First Things" does incline toward ID at
times.

But to see the movement as dominated by Catholics is a stretch, I would
say.

Ted

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Received on Thu Mar 1 16:09:17 2007