Furthering the Dialogue on Creation: Some Thoughts on Doug Wilson’s Piece

Categories: Creation Issues · Science41 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about creation/science issues lately, so I read Doug Wilson’s recent piece on the interpretation of Genesis 1 with great interest. I wasn’t planning on writing anything more in this area, but you know how it goes when you start thinking about something, and then you start jotting down your thoughts, and then before you realize it you’re ready to hit “publish.” This is not a thorough response, just a couple of particular thoughts generated by Wilson’s piece, and here or there they may be more informed by the larger discussion than Wilson directly. These are…

Does Old-Earth Creationism Undermine the Gospel? A Response to Kevin Bauder

Categories: Creation Issues · Science13 Comments

Kevin Bauder recently wrote an article criticizing Tim Keller’s views on creation. Bauder suggests that Keller can only affirm biblical inerrancy as Richard Nixon could affirm that he did not commit a crime, since he is “determined to torture the Genesis narratives on the rack of evolution.” Moreover, because he allows for death before the human fall, Bauder thinks that “Keller is undermining the gospel itself.” Bauder concludes by asserting that Keller’s creation views therefore compromise the mission of The Gospel Coalition: Tim Keller is one of the founders of The Gospel Coalition. If nothing else, The Gospel Coalition needs…

Some Thoughts on Noah

Categories: Creation Issues · Science · Scripture1 Comment

I know I’m a bit late, and Christians have already reviewed the recent film Noah to death, but I can’t help but share a few thoughts of my own after watching it last night. In no particular order: 1) I was surprised at how much the flood story was set in the larger context of creation-fall-new creation. I expected the movie to disconnect the Noah story from the larger biblical narrative, but there were frequent references back to events narrated in Genesis 1-5, especially the fall of Adam and Eve. In fact, the film opened against this backdrop, and throughout…

Thoughts on Adam and Eve

Categories: Creation Issues · Science2 Comments

I just read and very much enjoyed Jack Collins’ recent book on Adam and Eve.  One of the things the book did for me is help me reflect more upon attempts to uphold the historicity of Adam and Eve and some form of human evolution.  I used to think about this issue basically in terms of two options: (1) Adam and Eve are de novo creations of God, without any prior ancestry; and (2) human being evolved from primates.  The first of these options is broken down into the young-earth and old-earth subdivision camps, and the second is quite diverse,…

Humans and Chimps: Some Tentative Thoughts

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I’ve been reading through Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008), which has an appendix dealing with theistic evolutionist Francis Collins’ arguments for common ancestry between humans and chimps in his The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).  It raised several questions/thoughts: 1) You often hear people say that humans and chimps have 96-98% similar genetic structure, and it can initially seem like a strong argument for common ancestry.  But all living things share a great deal of genetic similarity, and the greater the morphological similarity…

Ban Darwin?

Categories: Creation Issues · Science2 Comments

Many people in our society believe that all books which affirm intelligent design should be disallowed from biology classrooms in public schools. Should we therefore ban Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species? Whatever later changes his thought underwent, in this book Darwin affirms intelligent design several times. For example, the last sentence of the book reads thus: “There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity,…

Why the Framework View of Genesis 1?

Categories: Creation Issues10 Comments

Here is a brief synopsis of why I think the Framework interpretation of Genesis 1 is superior to other varieties of old-earth creationism which read the days as temporally sequential: 1) Seeing the days as sequential leads to numerous textual difficulties. First, you have the age-old problem of the appearance of light in day 1 prior to the creation of the luminaries in day four, which is what led Augustine to posit his famous doctrine of instantaneous creation. In my opinion, attempts to relieve this difficulty by finding significance in the usage of haya rather than bara in 1:14 pay…

Lewis on the Satanic Fall and Corruption of Nature (again)

Categories: C.S. Lewis · Creation IssuesLeave a comment

In my previous series of posts arguing that the Satanic fall may be the explanation for the fallenness of nature, I quoted C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, chapter 9, “On Animal Pain.” While listening to his Miracles the other day I discovered that he put forward the same view in chapter 14 of this book, “The Grand Miracle.” He writes: “according to the Christians (Nature’s depravity) is all due to sin: the sin both of men and of powerful, non-human beings, super-natural but created…. Beings in a different, and higher ‘Nature’ which is partially interlocked with ours have, like…

Biblical Inerrancy and Young Earth Creationism

Categories: Creation Issues2 Comments

Something I have noticed lately is that many people in our culture, especially non-Christian or nominally Christian people, seem to have gotten the idea that biblical inerrancy and young earth creationism are the same thing. People often say, “do you believe the bible is literally true, [i.e.] that the universe was created in six 24 hour periods?” In other words, “literally true” and “six 24 hour periods” get lumped in together and define each other. In addition to being, in my opinion, biblically unwarranted, this association is also very historically strange. From Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, p. 262:…