Re: [asa] An open letter to Bill Dembski and Denyse O'Leary

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007, Ted Davis wrote:

> As for scientific materialism (here you picked up on Jack's words, where you apparently ignored them above), you need to understand two highly relevant points. First, ASA was founded at Moody Bible Institute by five men, a mix of OECs and at least one YEC (the late Harold Hartzler). Their concern was similar to that of leading anti-evolutionist Harry Rimmer at the time: to use what they took for genuine science to help uphold the faith of the youth. An excellent purpose then, and I still think so now. To the extent that you try to accomplish the same goal, I applaud. The problem was that their view of genuine science was far too Baconian, what I call the "Dragnet" view of science: "Just the facts, ma'am." The powerful coherence found in larger "theories" did not qualify in their minds as legitimate science, even though this has been a key part of scientific reasoning since the early 17th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, as people like Bernard Ramm, Elving Anderson, Ri!
> chard Bube, and many others moved into the ASA, and as a much larger number of professional scientists joined, the Baconian view no longer dominated the ASA. Most of us do not view H-D science, including the historical sciences, as inherently suspect; we don't identify them pure and simple with "materialism." This is what Jack was probably referring to. This context is vital to understand the point. If the ASA moved, it wasn’t recently, it was at some point in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s no accident that Henry Morris and some others left the ASA in the early 1960s to form the Creation Research Society. Whatever may be said about the ASA as we find it today, it is not possible to say that it is a “creationist” organization in the usual (popular) sense of that term. It isn’t clear that it really ever was such, but it was friendlier to creationism in that first decade. It is also true that, especially since the 1970s, many in the ASA have primary interests in ar!
> eas other than “origins,” although there is no lack of interes!
> t in tha
> t topic even today. I myself would say that is a primary area of interest, but many of my friends are much more interested in stewardship, bioethics, genetics, HPS (which is obviously my number one interest), or even theology. We’re very interdisciplinary and more widely ranging than we were a few decades ago.

I am interested in knowing what you know about Harold Hartzler's views
during the early days of the ASA. After he retired from Mankato State, he
offered to give lectures around the country. I arranged for him to give a
talk at my church. I know that he held membership in both the ASA and the
Creation Research Society and even attended the annual meetings of the CRS
since he related to a gathering of ASA members in this area that a
geocentrist gave a paper at the CRS meeting. In the question and answer
session following the talk at my church, the question of the age of the
earth came up, and he said that he thought that the earth was millions,
but not billions, of years old. That struck me as being a little bit
strange since if you take the scientific evidence against a young earth,
that evidence should lead you to decide that the earth is a few billion
(American billion) years old.

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

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Received on Sun Apr 29 19:57:26 2007