Unexpectedly, I found free wifi in the airport, and I'm taking advantage of it to chime in on this one.
To answer Cameron's question: no, I didn't know what the YEC view was while growing up, in the home of a PCUSA minister. My dad never talked about science--he didn't know the first thing about it, and he knew that. Nor did I get it anywhere else. The first time I can remember hearing about YEC was in the mid-1970s. Shortly after that I took a teaching position at a fundamentalist school, where I heard a lot more about it. I didn't agree with it, taught alternatives, and was permitted to do so.
John: the Scofield Bible was absolutely an OEC Bible. The gap view is an OEC view. One of its leading 19th C advocates, Edward Hitchcock, realized that he needed to address the issue of death before the fall, and did so in a section of what was the first geology textbook to be authored by an American. To see what he said, go to http://home.messiah.edu/~tdavis/texts.htm and do some reading.
The gap view put all the fossils to the original creation--i.e., the one preceding our own biological world. Neither Hitchcock nor most other gap advocates did not see the flood as the cause of the fossiliferous rocks. That is, they rejected what is now called "flood geology," in Hitchcock's case decisively so: it's just flat stupid, he basically said. Incidentally, Hitchcock was taught the day-age view by Silliman at Yale, and he allowed for that view in the selections on my web site, but he preferred the gap view as more literal, in his opinion. I think that general perception is the reason why so many of the early "fundamentalists" (as in the 1920s) liked it so much, and why Scofield taught it.
Ted
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Received on Wed Nov 18 19:57:08 2009
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