Echoes in Eternity

Christianity Today has a useful little piece on the Intelligent Design versus Evolution debate.

Asking what advocates of intelligent design must do to gain credibility in the academy is a bit like asking a man when he stopped beating his wife. Such a question makes a prejudicial assumption.

When queried about his history of spousal abuse, an innocent man should say, "I don't concede the premise of your question." Similarly, I would suggest that behind the Village Green question lurk some false assumptions. Indeed, the question seems to presuppose three things: the scientific community is uniformly opposed to the theory of intelligent design; the theory needs majority support in the academy to be credible; and there is good reason—such as lack of supporting evidence—for hostility toward the theory within academia.

[HT: JT]

Doug Wilson has a followup post to his previous one on the difficulties of discerning the difference between false teachers and false dichotomies.

One of the first things to distinguish is someone who wants to go the same place you do, but has a different view about how best to do it, from someone who wants to go somewhere completely different, but wants to use the same methods you are using. Distinguish principles and methods -- where you are going is more important than how you get there. This is not to say that how you get there is unimportant; it is simply less important.

So if one man wants to drive to the East Coast in a Ford, he has more in common with a man who wants to do the same thing in a Chevvy than he does with another man driving to the West Coast in a Ford. Couple this with the fact that it is possible to pass someone on the road who is going the opposite direction, and at the precise moment when you do that, you are in exactly the same spot. Further, somebody else who is going to the same place you are might be a hundred miles behind you.

And sometimes it is hard to tell, when you are in the same spot, if you actually are headed in opposite directions. The whole thing can be quite confusing.
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Now in this context, what statement is being made when you team up with somebody? A lot depends on the nature of the yoke. If you are bringing someone on to the local session, you ought to be saying that you believe there is a fundamental like-mindedness. If you invite someone to your conference, it means at the least that you want to be friends and that you believe his ministry is going more good than harm. Or maybe it is doing more harm than good, but not by much, and you want to play the role of Priscilla and Aquila to his Apollos (Acts 18:26) simply because the trajectory is promising.
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In order to sort all this out, you have to have a sharp and clear distinction between the fundamentals and the secondaries, and you have to have the right kind of suspicious mind concerning your own rascal heart. Rascal hearts find just the wrong thing to do at just the wrong time, just like raccoons can find the garbage cans.
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Now, with this said, what issues are fundamental in our day? This is key -- one of the common mistakes is that of thinking that the decisive point in the 16th century has to be the decisive point today. This is yet another failure to read the narrative right. Principles are constant, but plot points aren't. But, lest this point be mistaken, as it always is, our Protestant fathers in the 16th century were right to take the stand they did, and the pope and his Council were wrong.
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Where is the battle now? What are the issues that threaten the purity of the gospel now? Where are the compromises now?

The real rot that we must contend with begins with Darwin, not Bonaventure, and any and all accommodations with Darwin. Darwin gave modernity the mechanism it needed to throw off the authority of God's Word, and the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. Darwin is foundational to the secularist modernity project, but there is more. He is also foundational to the postmodern goo cauldron that is our culture today, and every form of what I have called pomosexuality. It is striking that postmodernists never want to be post-Darwinian.

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.

[Evolution] appeals to the same innocent and permanent needs in us which welcome Jack the Giant Killer. It gives us almost everything the imagination craves – irony, heroism, vastness, unity in multiplicity, and a tragic close. It appeals to every part of me except my reason. That is why those of us who feel that [evolution] is already dead for us must not make the mistake of trying to 'debunk' it in the wrong way. We must not fancy that we are securing the modern world from something grim and dry, something that starves the soul. The contrary is the truth. It is our painful duty to wake the world from an enchantment. … [W]e must treat [evolution] with respect. It was all (on a certain level) nonsense: but a man would be a dull dog if he could not feel the thrill and the charm of it.

- C.S. Lewis

A great piece by Pat Buchanan this week summed up the hoax of global warming.

What we learned in a year's time: Polar bears are not vanishing. Sea levels are not rising at anything like the 20-foot surge this century was to bring. Cities are not sinking. Beaches are not disappearing. Temperatures have not been rising since the late 1990s. And, in historic terms, our global warming is not at all unprecedented.
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Today's global warming hysteria is the hoax of the 21st century. H.L. Mencken had it right: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Here is an interesting assortment of evolution/intelligent design links for anyone interested.

Here is an interesting link that I saw on a friend's blog. It flips the evolution/creation debate on its head and shows Creationism in a scientific light while depicting evolutionary theory with very religious overtones. Very cool idea!