Answering Answers in Genesis: What is Young Earth Evolution?
“as I will demonstrate, all young earth creationist scientists incorporate, and this is really important, modified evolutionary ideas, even if its ever so slight, into their creationist frameworks, and AiG is no exception.” - Ken Coulson
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This is the very serious problem that we have in this sphere where we try to take a very limited Christian Science pool to continue building models to try to explain Scripture. I have no clue as to why this desire or need exists. We don't do it for the Resurrection, so why are we compelled to do this from Creation. Evolutionary theory is going to change over time. That is what science does. The amount of money and people dedicated to studying this and who support evolution far outsizes anything that AiG can throw against this. We should preach the truth from the pulpit (i.e. the gospel), and leave science out of the pulpit.
The need arises from striving for a comprehensive worldview and also science education.
For example, if you’re a Bible-believing science teacher at elementary, secondary, college or post-grad level, how are you going to teach? You need a view of truth that “works” for both Genesis 1-2 and geology, biology, chemistry, astronomy, etc.
A third factor is the workplace. Christians working in the sciences as researchers, etc., also need a view of general revelation and science that coheres with our theology.
The resurrection, on the other hand, is a single historical event. There are similarities, because students of history should be able to integrate their view of historical reconstruction with their belief that the resurrection is a real event. But one event… so different from whole fields of study in so many ways.
It’s true that with the sciences, you get a good bit of mileage out of sort of compartmentalizing “processes as we observe them today” separate from “processes that worked long ago.” But you can only go so far with that without turning ancient history into pure theology and creating a kind of dualism between “Bible truth”/”religious truth” and all other truth.
But believing in God as the author of truth and also as the Creator means there aren’t different kinds of truth, and all truth ultimately coheres. So we can’t really be in favor of compartmentalizing too much.
= a long winded way of saying that these guys are just doing science, and I think it’s great. But yeah, they need to be up front about how theories will be tested and change over time. That’s what science is.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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