SAN DIEGO (ABP) — A Christian biologist who advocates dialogue between faith and science admits it will be difficult to sway theologians who subscribe to young-Earth creationism for doctrinaire rather than scientific reasons.
Darrel Falk
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Reviewing gains in the past year for the BioLogos Foundation, Darrel Falk, president of the multidisciplinary group of evangelical scholars, recalled public arguments with a Southern Baptist leader who claimed evolution and Christianity are incompatible and argued for the "exegetical and theological necessity" of affirming the universe is no more than several thousand years old and was created in six 24-hour days as recorded in Genesis.
Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, said he has not been able to identify any secular scientist who agrees with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler's views of creation. He said the challenge ahead is to convince followers of theologians like Mohler that "Christian theology doesn't stand or fall on how we understand Genesis 1 or the question of whether Adam and Eve were the sole genetic progenitors of the human race."
Mohler responded in a blog Jan. 5 calling Falk's argument "nothing less than a manifesto for scientism."
Al Mohler
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"Science, as a form of knowledge, is here granted a status that can only be described as infallible," Mohler said. "I am willing to accept the authority of science on any number of issues. I am fundamentally agnostic about a host of other scientific concerns — but not where the fundamental truth of the gospel and the clear teachings of the Bible are at stake."
Mohler said he agrees that the world "looks old," and that relying solely on naturalistic assumptions he would find evolutionary arguments more persuasive, but "the entire enterprise of Christianity is based on supernaturalistic, rather than merely naturalistic, assumptions."
"There is absolutely no reason that a Christian theologian should accept the uniformitarian assumptions of evolution," Mohler argued. "In fact, given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition. The Bible itself offers a very different understanding of natural phenomena, with explanations that should be compelling to believers. In sum, there is every reason for Christians to believe that the cosmos appears just as it does as graphic evidence of the ravages of sin and the catastrophic nature of God's judgment upon sin."
Falk, author of Coming to Peace With Science by InterVarsity Press, also criticized William Dembski, a leading proponent of a theory called intelligent design, for not responding to fellow scientists who claim there are errors in his work.
Dembki, research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, accepts evidence that the universe is billions rather than merely thousands of years old but argues that the complexity of life suggests evolution is not the result of natural selection but the action of a creator.
William Dembski
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In 2009 Dembski published The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World, which attempted to reconcile his position with the young-Earth creationist view that death came into the world only after Adam and Eve sinned and therefore could not have been going on for millions of years before they were created.
After a negative review of the book appeared in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Southwestern President Paige Patterson met with Dembski to clarify statements in the book including that while presented as a global event, Noah's Flood in Genesis is probably best understood as a local deluge limited to the Middle East.
Patterson told the Florida Baptist Witness in October that he disagrees with Dembski about the age of the Earth but that the professor is within bounds of the seminary's governing document, the Baptist Faith and Message.
"Had I had any inkling that Dr. Dembski was actually denying the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, then that would have, of course, ended his relationship with the school," Patterson said.
Dembski later recanted his statement about the universality of the Genesis Flood, saying it was made "without adequate study or reflection on my part."
"Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical and theological work to do," Dembski wrote.
Dembski affirmed "the full verbal inspiration of the Bible" and belief that Adam and Eve were real people "specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors."
BioLogos teaches that the Bible is the inspired Word of God but that, properly understood, evolution best describes God’s work of creation. The view differs from intelligent design in that it believes faith and science can be integrated, but neither proves nor disproves the other.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Previous ABP stories:
Mohler's rejection of evolution criticized for harming witness (11/9/2010)
Seminary president says evolution 'incompatible' with Christian faith (8/25/2010)