I have been really shaken by the way so many brothers in ministry have embraced Creationism.
It seems they feel justified in rejecting virtually all Geology, Astronomy and much of Biology on “presuppositional” grounds. Since they believe science is ruled by atheistic (i.e. naturalistic) assumptions they feel no shame in teaching a simple and wooden Bible literalism which over-rides all these others ways of finding truth.
They have a radical doctrine of the fall of man which concludes that all human effort to understand our environment is so sinful that it is bound to be guilty and wrong. Natural philosophy (science) and speculative philosophy are denounced as projects of “autonomous man” – that hopelessly wicked brute who will concoct and embrace any lie which enables him to contradict the literal meaning of Bible texts.
This arrogance does not befit the Christian. Did not John Calvin (and the ancient fathers before him) teach us about divine “accommodation”. That if God did not stoop to our level in the scriptures we could understand nothing of him? That we only see through a glass darkly.
It is true that when Calvin said God “lisps” he was referring to anthropomorphic Bible language about the Divine Being (Link Here). But since God also understood the immensity of creation through Time and Space and the complexity of its structure is it not clear that He used similar “Baby Talk” when teaching of creation? When scripture says “He also made the stars” it gives no clue that there are hundreds of thousands of galaxies each of which contains a million stars (typically) around which orbit an unknown and unknowable number of worlds.
The separation of earth and sea depends on plate techtonics working over time spans we cannot conceive without which this globe would be under a mile of water. But God has left it to us to work out the details.
In the same way, the making of Adam from earth (the same earth from which the animals sprang a day earlier) tells us that we share an earthy nature with them but that unlike them the breath of God has been given to us in a special way – Genesis 2:7. Modern Biology may have related us so closely to the animals that it makes some Christians uncomfortable but it seems God’s word has given us the main gist in an amazing brevity.
How could scripture have given a summary of what we now know through Science without becoming a tortuously complicated set of documents? The great message of redemption through Christ would have been buried in a vast divinely inspired encyclopaedia! Copying by hand would have taken a longer time than cathedral-building. And since, to this day, scientists are very aware how little we still know I guess a scientifically accurate Bible would need to be bigger still.
Actually, Creationism is characterised by a guilty “autonomy”. The third law of thermodynamics and all sorts of sample data are twisted. Only men who “know” they are right are capable of the special pleading and selective reporting of these people. Check out the patient work of talkorigins.org or Christians in Science who try to call people back to their senses and away from idealistic philosophy pretending to be either Bible Study or Science.
I fear so much of this patient work is wasted. Creationists are post-moderns. Like all the other sects they interpret the universe from their own vantage point. They deny that unbelievers are capable of finding or recognising truth. They inhabit an island of knowledge cut off from a mainland of sinful pseudo-knowledge which the rest of us inhabit.
Christians like myself who claim both to trust scripture and believe in an Old Earth, big bang cosmology and biological evolution are anomalies who are best seen as closet unbelievers or dupes of the system.
I note that many 19th c. calvinists had no great problem with Old Earth geology and early evolutionism because they had a world-view which included a strong providence, a real but limited natural theology and the doctrine of scriptural accommodation. Why are we abandoning that wisdom now?
