Benedict XVI on Genesis 1:1

A redated post.

Who is apparently not a young earth creationist.

Catholic Answers on Creation and Genesis

The "literal" interpretation of Genesis 1 insisted on by Young Earth Creationists was NOT a test for orthodoxy in the early centuries of the Church.

The position nobody takes

In the creation-evolution controversy, there are many positions available. One I never hear goes like this:

The Bible teaches that God created the world in six literal days, about 6000 years ago. Science teaches the theory of evolution. Scientists are using the scientific method as best they can, but for this, science is just wrong. The Bible is God's word, and therefore science is in error.

The closest I have ever seen to this has been Gosse's theory that God created the world with fossils already in the ground, to fool the scientists into believing that evolution is true.

"He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness." I Cor 3:19.

The impossible voyage of Noah's Ark

Some problems for literalism about the Flood story.

Were the early "fundamentalists" creationists? Babinski on the history of evangelical responses to evolution

We are inclined to identify fundamentalism with opposition to evolution in all its guises, but as this article by Ed Babinski suggests, evangelicals and even the authors of "The Fundamentals" have not always been anti-evolutionists.

Even when the twelve-volume paperback series, The Fundamentals, was published between 1910 and 1915 (an interdenominational work that launched this century's "fundamentalist" movement), it contained cautiously pro-evolution stances of conservative Christian theologians like George Frederick Wright, James Orr, and R. A. Torrey. It was only in the eighth collection of Fundamentals papers that this cautious advocacy of evolution was matched by two decisively and aggressively anti-Darwin statements, one by someone who remained anonymous and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior evangelicals already mentioned.

Did the Devil Make the Astronomers Do It?

One source of difficulty with YEC (Young earth creationism) is the fact that, even without evolution, there is a problem with astronomy. I haven't heard anyone arguing that we should teach alternative doctrines of astronomy in public schools, but if "the heavens and the earth" were created in six literal days, and the age of not only the earth but the universe can be counted up through the genealogies, you get not just an earth but a universe that is approximately 6000 years old. What this means is that anything that is further out in space than 6000 years should not be visible, because the light from those stars would have to travel more than 6000 light years to get here, which would break the intergalactic speed limit. Nevertheless, we do see stars millions of light years away, according to astronomy.

I am linking to a site from Answers in Creation, which raises this issue for YEC.




Is modern astronomy an attack on the God of the Bible? Why are conservative Christians upset by evolution, but never upset by simple astronomy? Why do Christians sometimes think the Devil made Darwin do it, but they never worry about whether the Devil made the astronomers do it. Yet astronomy strikes me as being as big a problem for lead-footed literalism as evolution.

Warfield on Evolution

Apparently this Calvinist theologian and defender of inerrancy rejected what would now be regarded as young earth creationism.

Some exegetical concerns about young earth creationism

A presentation I did on the 150th Anniversary of Darwin at Glendale Community College

I was supposed to do a presentation on the religious implications of evolution.

Evolution and Religion


Is there a conflict?

An Early Memory

I grew up in a United Methodist church in Phoenix. In the early 1960s, a local fundamentalist pastor was gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would have prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.

This is something of a contrast with “equal time” laws that were developed subsequently, according to which school had to teach creationism alongside evolution. No, he wanted to re-enact something like the law Scopes violated in Tennessee.

Our pastor’s response

Was to publicly criticize this effort. Dr. Long thought that a battle with the theory of evolution was ill-advised, and said so from the pulpit. The Huntley-Brinkley report, then the big competitor with Walter Cronkite on CBS, picked up the story, and an excerpt from Dr. Long’s sermon was on the national news.

Do you believe in evolution?

That is not as straightforward a question as it appears. There are a diverse set of claims which are bundled under the umbrella of “evolution.” Philosopher Alvin Plantinga mentions five, which I call the five points of Darwinism:

Plantinga’s Five Points of Darwinism

Five points of evolutionism

1. The earth is ancient, millions of years old.

2. Species appeared gradually over time.

3. All life on earth comes from a common, single-celled creature.

4. The process of speciation occurred naturalistically, that is, without intelligent direction. Random variation and natural selection were sufficient to produce all life forms.

5. The origin of life also occurred without intelligent direction.

Five points of creationism

1. The earth is young, only thousands of years old.

2. Species appeared in the space of six literal days.

3. Life on earth did not come from a common ancestor. Rather, acts of special creation brought many species into existence.

4. The process of speciation occurred largely as a result of intelligent design on the part of an intelligent agent (God), not in any blind manner.

5. The origin of life was also the product of direct divine activity.

It’s not a package deal

Many people who have doubts about other aspects of evolution think we have good evidence for the first two points of Darwinism, including conservative Christian philosophers J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. These are people who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, but don’t think it requires believing in a young earth.

Young Earth Creationism

Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, holds that biblical chronologies are to be taken literally, and that not only the earth, but also the “heavens,” that is, the universe, came into existence relatively recently. The traditional date of creation according to Archbishop Ussher, places the creation of the entire universe at 4004 B. C. Still advocated by the Institute for Creation Research and by Answers in Genesis.

Scientific problems for YEC

YEC appears to fly in the face of science long before you get to Darwin. If you remember your basic astronomy, the standard measure of astronomic distance is the light year. That is the length of time light travels in a year. (186,000 miles per second isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.) So if there are galaxies in space millions of light years away, as astronomy tells us, that means we shouldn’t be able to see them with our telescopes, since the universe has been only in existence for 6000 years, and therefore light can have only traveled 6000 light years since the beginning of the universe.

Hyper-literalism and Copernicus

Historically, hyper-literalism has had other battles with science, such as the contention, of both the Catholic Church and Luther, that the Copernican theory cannot be accepted because it conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Joshua, in which the sun is said to have stood still for Joshua. This implies, of course that it is ordinarily moving. However, no one objects to Copernican astronomy these days.

Must a five-point evolutionist be an atheist?

No. One can believe that the evolutionary process on earth was as the evolutionists say, and still believe that the basic structure of the universe, as it came into being at, say, the Big Bang, required intelligent design, or in fact included intelligent design.

Some Recent Developments

1) The evolution-based atheism movement.

2) The intelligent design movement.

The evolution-based atheism movement

Major figure: Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has attempted to explain evolution to the general public, and has done so in such a way as to put a case for atheism on the back of evolutionary biology. Many scientists have insisted on the relative religious neutrality of evolution, Dawkins and those like him have said no, science has proven fully naturalistic evolution to be true, and that it leaves us with no room for God. Many scientists are in fact atheists, but Dawkins wants to use evolutionary biology to push for atheism. Other supporters of evolution are not happy with this. Dawkins’ most famous book: The God Delusion.

The Intelligent Design Movement

The intelligent design movement doesn’t necessarily buy in on all 5 points of creationism, but does think that our best science will show that you can’t exclude design from an account of how life developed. Thus, claims on behalf of a designer can and should be explicitly made by science, and children in public schools should be made aware of the fact that some people in the scientific community think this way. Many scientists are Christians (such as Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, and Kenneth Miller), but ID people want an intelligent designer, (which need not necessarily be God) to be brought into scientific discourse. Recent book on Intelligent Design: The Signature In the Cell.

Controversies

Both of these movements, I think, are attempts to undermine the religious neutrality of evolutionary biology. One group wants to bring religion into biological science, the other wants to use science aggressively to get rid of God. However, I think both of these viewpoints are in the minority within the scientific community.

A blog dedicated to working on the age of the earth controversy

Defends the day-age interpretation of Genesis.

Davis Young on Bible-based geology

A leading Christian geologist thinks that you can’t get detailed geological science out of the Bible, and when you do, you get the wrong answer.

A paper delineating different positions on creation and evolution

HT: Alan Rhoda.

Answers In Creation versus Answers In Genesis on Carbon Dating

AIG and AIC are opposed to one another on this issue. AIG is the creationist organization, not the bloated insurance company that had to be bailed out because it was too big to fail.

Is opposition to literalism about the Genesis chronology a defensive reaction to Darwinian evoluton?

This is from a Catholic source.

A lot of people would like you to believe that, but the fact is that the Fathers of the Church did not insist on 6 24 hour periods around 4004 B. C. Augustine, as orthodox a Christian as ever walked this earth, opposed the hyper-literal reading.

I wish skeptics would learn to be more skeptical.

Answers in Genesis on the Dinosaurs

Why am I less than fully satisfied? By the way, Sarfati is a master-strength chessplayer!

A problem for Young Earth Creationists

Some passages of Scripture, at least taken in accordance with their traditional/literal meanings, seem to be flatly contradicted by what we know in science. For example, if you add up the genealogies in Genesis, you get an age of the earth that is maybe 6000 years. The traditional figure is 4004 BC, calculated by Archbishop Ussher in the 17th Century. That conflicts with Darwin's theory of evolution, which is still questioned today. But it also conflicts with ordinary astronomy, according to which we can see stars in the heavens millions of light years away. Now a light year is the distance light travels in a year, so the only way light from a star can get here if the star is a million light years away is for it that light to travel for a million years. But if the "heavens and the earth" came into being 6000 years ago, we've got a problem.