Science and the Bible Lecture
There are a number of issues and questions that have actually become problems confronting our society today. An interesting fact is that for several of the major issues (which we are not going into today – but, for example, birth control, abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage, sex education, divorce and remarriage, evolution versus creation science) that there is a solution to all of these problems and it, interestingly enough, is to be found in Hebrew.
We are going to focus briefly just on the latter and suffice to say that a revolution is taking place today in the halls of anthropology. Recent archaeological, anthropological, scientific studies and researches have changed the way we think about human origins.
Before modern times, the Bible was considered to be the inspired and infallible word of God and the final authority on most any subject. But, in the 17-19 centuries in Europe, we had a rise of rationalism with improved educational procedures and expeditional and laboratory methods of research that brought everything into question. It became fashionable to investigate and speculate on almost everything, including the Bible. With the journeys and postulations of Charles Darwin and others, many of their postulations flew in the face of fundamental Christian theology. Christians just took the Bible, read it and believed what it said because they considered it the final authority.
Many of the hypotheses, especially those proposed by Darwin, flew in the face of Christian theology and conservative Christian theologians were forced to develop their own theories in response to those they considered challenging to the Biblical text.
Darwinism was popularly known as evolution, although that is a misnomer. Evolution simply means change. If you don’t believe in change, take a good look in the mirror the first thing when you get up in the morning.
What Darwin proposed was actually transformism. That assumes an evolutionary development from a lower form of life to a higher form of life crossing order lines. As you know, everything is divided into seven major levels or categories: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. One can have a change or mutation within family, genus and species, but that is simply a mutation. It is only when one crosses order lines that you have the development from a lower form of life to a higher one. With transformism, we were taught that man was the end product of a long line of development from Ramipithicus, Dryopithicus, Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Australopithecus, Pithecanthropus, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and finally Homosapien sapien. This long line of evolutionary development was resultant from beneficial mutations.
In reaction, Christian fundamentalists developed their own pseudo scientific theory, the principle one being Creationism or Creation Science. It appeared in two forms.
The first is known as the Gap Theory which assumed prior creation and a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 focusing on the word became – and the earth became without form and void. Then, God began a long process of creation anew.
The next theory was known as Spontaneous Creation. The principal advocate was the noted ornithologist Dr. Douglass Dewar who wrote a well-known book on the subject entitled The Transformist Illusion. In his book, he categorized every known fossil in paleontology, the number of fossils in each category and attempted to demonstrate that from the paleontological record, there was no evidence of an evolutionary development from a lower form of life to a higher form of life moving across order lines. He proposed a theory known as Spontaneous Creation. His hypothesis included the various geological ages but then he added that at such a time as the climactic conditions were conducive to the sustenance of certain life forms, they just spontaneously appeared.
Another principal theory was called Deistic evolution, which is about as close to true intelligent design as you can get. This hypothesis was proposed by one of my good friends and colleagues, Dr. C.C. Crawford who was for a number of years the Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. His hypothesis included all of the geological ages but ascribed causation to God.
The following file is from a dissertation by Dr. Roy Blizzard for an M.A. degree from Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico.
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