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Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Doug Wilson rightly calls Bruce Waltke, a renowned Old Testament scholar, to account for his poor reasoning that Christians should support evolution as the explanation of how everything came to be (see at the bottom of this post for the video of what Waltke said).
There are (at least) five confusions here.

First, he wants to say that if we believe that the Lord is the Giver and Creator of all life, and we do so in a way that is not approved by our secularist betters, then that means we have embraced death. To simply accept "what God says" is actually cultic. There is something counterintuitive in there somewhere.

Second, Waltke confounds "what the data requires" with "what secularists stubbornly say that the data requires." All truth is indeed God's truth, but it does not follow from this that all lies are God's truth. Suppose the data don't constitute overwhelming evidence for evolution? Suppose Christians surrender on Darwin unnecessarily? What are we embracing then?

Third, as mentioned above, he says that refusal to believe in evolution is to embrace spiritual death. But the evolutionary account of our world points to a record of death. What is the fossil record but a massive column of dead bodies? If God created by evolutionary means, then nature red in tooth and claw is "very good," and God doesn't have the problem with death that we thought He did. So maybe it might be a good thing to embrace spiritual death. Or did I miss something?

Fourth, there is a difference between "staying in the discussion" with unbelievers and sitting down and believing what you are told by unbelievers to believe. Paul was in a real dialogue with the philosophers on Mars Hill, and it did not consist of him getting into a high chair and having them cut his meat for him.

Fifth, this displays, as few other things could, the utter irrelevance of the lust for relevance.

2 comments:

Luke C. said...

http://biologos.org/blog/why-must-the-church-come-to-accept-evolution-an-update/

http://www.rts.edu/newsevents/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=1371

Darius said...

Thanks Luke for the links. I had neglected to add them earlier. Waltke was hired by Knox Theological Seminary almost immediately after stepping down at RTS.

It doesn't appear that he has repented of his statement that people can't be faithful Christians and not believe in evolution.

He's just another example in a long list of specialists who look really foolish and dumb when they get outside of their specialty. Over-specialization is a big problem these days.

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The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel The Main Thing
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
Overcoming Sin and Temptation
According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible
Disciplines of a Godly Man
Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem
When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Ourselves
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Respectable Sins
The Kite Runner
Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
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Show Them No Mercy
The Lord of the Rings
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an Age of Deception
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
The Chronicles of Narnia
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