License

I have written an e-book, Does the Bible Really Say That?, which is free to anyone. To download that book, in several formats, go here.
Creative Commons License
The posts in this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can copy and use this material, as long as you aren't making money from it. If you give me credit, thanks. If not, OK.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

A Young-earth creationist on the debate (among Christians) about origins

Todd Wood is a good scientist, and a young-earth creationist. He is a young-earth creationist not because he thinks science supports that view, but because he thinks the Bible should be interpreted in that way. Others, of course disagree. He (along with a so-called evolutionary creationist) was recently profiled in a Christianity Today article.

Wood has posted his reaction to the article. The most important, and unfortunate, thing that he said was this: "A lot of folks may be too far gone to participate in fruitful discussion." In other words, a lot of Christians haven't been acting, or thinking, like Christians should, whatever their views on origins, and have become bitter toward those with other views, and close-minded about their own.

I'm afraid he's right, and I hope I'm not one of those "folks." I don't think Wood is.

Thanks for reading. Read Wood.

2 comments:

atlibertytosay said...

I agree …

It may not just apply to creationsm, but ID and Creationism certainly does seem like an either/or rather than a maybe both/and more argument.

The well founded argument that scientific method cannot be properly applied to anything beyond recorded human history I think is the biggest argument in favor of creationism.

However, I watching a PBS series called "Fabric Of The Cosmos" … I do think science has "the how" of creation right. I'm just not a fan of "the timeframe".

One theory posited in "The Fabric Of The Cosmos" is that our universe, maybe even just our section of it - has time as a dimension. Time may not exist in other dimensions though. It is also posited that our dimension (or dimensions) that we live in may have once not had time and that we may have collided with a dimension or universe that does - therefore giving us the dimension of time.

A lot of creationism and ID is dumbed down because of attention spans and interests. Unfortunately, the attention spans and the interest in the origins of creation get in the way of desire to even discuss this topic.

Dumbed down topics tend to lead toward bias because most people would rather just understand the basics and become bias.

Then you have the extreme areligious crowd who'll have none of your argument if God is part of the equation ~ eventhough it seems that the final answer at the end of the end of the last amount of research seems to point to a "who or why" rather than a "it just happened randomly".

Martin LaBar said...

"Dumbed down topics tend to lead toward bias because most people would rather just understand the basics and become [biased]."

Indeed.

What Wood said about not having fruitful discussion also applies to politics, unfortunately.

Intelligent Design, as originally proposed and taught, was explicitly compatible with an old earth (although it did not require one). Some of the ID leaders have changed their mind on that score, and are now young-earth creationists.

I disagree that scientific methods can't be properly applied to anything beyond recorded human history. Astronomy comes to mind as a refutation of that limitation.

Thanks for your comment.