For those interested in the creation/evolution discussion, I found this speech by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, to be quite interesting. He articulates the view that a young earth creationist position is critical for the theological system of evangelicalism.

He is really right, in that the system as he knows it is threatened by evolution. He needs to stick to YEC in order to preserve what he views as orthodoxy.

Funny that he cites Waltke, who apparently chickened out – ” where he argued that, unless evangelical Christians come to terms with accepting the theory of evolution, we will be reduced to the status of a theological and intellectual cult.” He’s leading his followers off a cliff basically saying, “yes, let’s.”

Another evangelical says evolution is ‘unsupportable as a theory.’ But this view is suppressed by the establishment, which suffers from ‘the naturalism-supernaturalism issue at work in American science’ . ‘A theist who happens to be a creationist [cannot] become a respected, tenured research scientist unless he (publicly, at least) embraces evolution.’

It’s a great position, since it then becomes the establishment’s fault if the respected scientists who just happen to be creationists don’t exist and therefore no actual research supporting their position is done. They can rest assured that it would be done, or that it is being done (or will be done) by ID scientists.

Ken Miller

Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (P.S.)Apr 3, 2007
by Kenneth R. Miller

‘In the end Miller affirms the wisdom of resting one”s faith in a God who is the God of the stuff in between the gaps – whose handiwork is best seen in facts and qualities of the universe which are well known to science, rather than in those which are as yet undiscovered.

‘Although he strongly affirms evolution, natural law, and chance, he sees these as means which God used for accomplishing His creative intention and safeguarding the genuine freedom and independence of His Creation.’ (reader review of Finding Darwin”s God: A Scientist”s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller)

I like this approach better than the ID bit about ”irreducible complexity.” I partly came to this view after listening to the lecture portion of a UC Berkley course on Biology, which made me realize that any biological system is ”irreducibly complex.”

The position I am against is called ”God of the gaps.” That is where you find stuff that is amazing and hard to explain, and then you say, ”see this is so complicated that God must have done it.” As science gains knowledge, the need for God decreases and finally disappears. Intelligent Design embraces this approach as in the book ”Darwin”s Black Box” which was one of the early books popularizing Intelligent Design. The fundamental trouble with approach is the assumption that if we understand how it works, that means God didn”t do it.