Re: [asa] Park Street church

Thanks TED, There was a shift in the USA from 1880 onwards but it does not
seem to be paralleled in Britain, where most evangelicals took TE for
granted until about 1980, though there was a bit of OEC argument by people
like Merson Davies and Douglas Dewar and Fleming of the diode which gave
rise to the Evol Protest movement in the 1930s.

This can be seen in the early days of Christians in Science (founded in 1944
as Research scientists Christian Fellowship) which was strongly TE in
contrast to the ASA of the 40s which at a simplification was OEC/YEC and
breaking out of a fundamentalist mode. (I have a very high regard for the
founders of the ASA who did an excellent work, though nitpickers would say
that they were anti-evolutionist, which in many ways was true)

The $64000 question is why was there this change from 1880 to 1920

My suggestions are that it was for several reasons ;

· the rise of Dispensationalism encouraging biblical literalism,

· reaction to Modernism and Biblical Criticism,

· The conflict thesis of science and religion being regarded as
"actuality" by both sides

· influence of McCready Price on flood geology creating doubt but not
rejection,

· The perception that German militarism was Darwinian,

· Rise of Eugenics, giving a moral reason to reject evolution

· Radiometric age dating precluding a short time-scale
(10-20,000years) for humans

Michael

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>; "gordon brown" <gbrown@Colorado.EDU>; "Michael
Roberts" <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] Park Street church

>I intersperse my comments among Michael's below.
>
> Ted
>
>>>> "Michael Roberts" <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> 12/17/2007 2:36 AM
>>>>
> Thanks Randy.
>
> I thought you had given me another Anglican clergy who was YEC in about
> 1910
> to add to my tally of one - Griffith Thomas. I have searched for years for
>
> YEC Anglicans and had only found one from 1855 to 1970.
>
> Hague adopts a very literalistic sounding view of Genesis but implicitly
> accepts geology as his last paragraph shows ;
>
> The attempt of modernism to save the supernatural in the second part of
> the
>
> Bible by mythicalizing the supernatural in the first part, is as unwise as
>
> it is fatal. Instead of lowering the dominant of faith amidst the chorus
> of
>
> doubt, and admitting that a chapter is doubtful because some doctrinaire
> has
> questioned it, or a doctrine is less authentic because somebody has
> floated
>
> an unverifiable hypothesis, it would be better to take our stand with such
>
> men as Romanes, Lord Kelvin, Virchow, and Liebig, in their ideas of a
> Creative Power, and to side with Cuvier, the eminent French scientist, who
>
> said that Moses, while brought up in all the science of Egypt, was
> superior
>
> to his age, and has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which verifies
> itself every day in a reasonable manner; with Sir William Dawson, the
> eminent Canadian scientist, who declared that Scripture in all its details
>
> contradicts no received result of science, but anticipates many of its
> discoveries; with Professor Dana, the eminent American scientist, who
> said,
>
> after examining the first chapters of Genesis as a geologist, "I find it
> to
>
> be in perfect accord with known science"; or, best of all, with Him who
> said, "Had you believed Moses, you would have believed Me, for he wrote of
>
> Me. But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe My words?"
> (John 5:45,46).
>
> TED: I was pretty sure that Dana would be on this list. The more I see
> OEC
> comments (which I think this is, agreeing with Michael) from the early
> 20th
> century, the more I keep hearing the echo of Dana. Sometimes it's
> explicit,
> as here, but not always. Dana's "sound bites" are usually of the type
> above: he was fully committed to a concordist reading of the "two books of
> God," and that approach continued to make sense to American evangelicals
> *and fundamentalists* until it was tossed out by the YECs in the 1960s (an
> excellent example would be John C. Whitcomb's booklet, "The Origin of the
> Solar System" (1963).
>
> All those mentioned were NOT YEC. Dana actually accepted evolution. Dawson
>
> was a geologist etc.
>
> TED: Dana accepted pretty much all of evolution--Except human evolution,
> where even in the last edition of his Manual of Geology (1890s) he
> affirmed
> that humans have a separate origin. He liked to paraphrase Genesis on
> this,
> to leave his readers with a clear implication of special creation without
> exactly using that term. And Dawson was also a special creationist,
> probably more so than Dana. Neither obviously was a YE creationist.
>
> Was Hague writing to the gallery for the Fundamentals?
>
> TED: No, not in my opinion. Somewhere between 1880 and 1920--the period
> in
> which the movement later called "fundamentalism" emerged--evangelical
> scientists and clergy became disillusioned with theistic evolution, I
> think
> (though I am not sure) mostly for theological reasons; and they became
> more
> and more wary of atheistic evolution, which they equated with any version
> of
> evolution in which God did not play an explicit active role, such as
> creating humans ex nihilo, or at least by guiding evolution in a
> scientifically evident manner, through a created internal principle of
> order
> that would ensure the progressive nature of the unfolding creation. A
> nice
> example of this is George Frederick Wright, a leading advocate of
> evolution
> in the 1870s and 1880s who, in the years before World War One, wrote an
> anti-evolutionary essay for The Fundamentals. The problem was, in his
> opinion, that evolution had become the basis of a philosophy to exclude
> design/purpose from the universe; therefore it needed to be opposed. If
> all
> of this is starting to sound familiar, it's b/c these issues just haven't
> gone away. Phil Johnson would be right at home with Dana, and with
> Wright's
> essay in The Fundamentals--but not (I suspect) with Wright's essays from a
> few decades earlier.
>
> Ted
>
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Received on Mon Dec 17 15:05:56 2007