Darwinism on the Ropes

A Lesson In What Not to Do

We have argued that the text of the creation account in Genesis 1-3 is pretty straightforward and clear.  But it suddenly became complex and murky when, in the nineteenth century, Christians tried to reconcile the theorising of evolutionists with the plain text of Scripture.  Darwinists claimed to have hard, solid, irrefutable scientific evidence of the world existing for over 150 million years before man appeared here.  What some Christians then attempted was a reconciliation between the text of Genesis and the "evidence" and conjectures of evolutionists.  

The first great attempt at reconciling the two authorities (science and Scripture) was called the Gap Theory.  It posited a vast gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  Douglas Kelly summarises the theory:

In The Beginning

The Slippery Dance Floor 

Historical debates over beginnings and origins have proved fascinating.  Since the nineteenth century it is safe to say that the overwhelming consensus of scholarship and opinion has been to favour the naturalistic (materialistic) world view.  This has led to a cosmology wherein dwells time, space, matter, and energy alone.  Nothing else.

With these assumptions, the world and the cosmos, had to come into being naturally.  In other words, there is no creator.  A prevailing characteristic of this world view is the need of vast amounts of time in order for "natural processes" to produce the breathtaking complexity and size of the cosmos--namely, billions and billions and billions of years.  What is the latest count?  Sixty-five billion years?  [At this point, we make a confident prediction: within ten years from now the "settled" naturalistic scientific consensus will be engaged in a febrifacient re-dating the cosmos to be a hundred billion years or more.  What's a few billion years amongst friends, eh?]

A curiosity amidst the surging rise of naturalism has been the way so many Christians--both Christian institutions and individual believers--have rushed to accept the prevailing, emergent world view of naturalism and the pseudo-science which attends it.  They have sought to re-interpret the scriptures to "fit in with" the brazen, allegedly undisputed facts of the naturalistic paradigm.

One expects that the reason for this curiosity is the widespread, uncritical acceptance amongst Christians of the prevailing theory of fact--namely, the idea that scientific knowledge is objective, proven, and indisputable.