From Rob Dillon, president of South Carolinians for Science Education:
Creationism is a doctrine to which I, like most Christians, do not subscribe. It springs from a wrong understanding of the Word of God. And anybody who thinks he or she is going to impose his own personal narrow, vain, idolatrous doctrine on the children of this state as they sit helpless in their tenth grade Biology classrooms will have a fight on his hands. Again.
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Abby, do yourself a favor and disabuse yourself of the notion that creation and creationism are the same thing. Creation is the belief that God created the world. Creationism is the belief that God is a sociopathic liar about how He created the world.
I and my fellow Christians who accept Creation but reject Creationism are being far more true to Christianity then you. After all…we’re not the ones rejected the evidence of how God created the world so we can believe an heretical interpretation of what is a human written book.
If God created the world, Abby, then God did so in the manner that the world indicates…and one of the means is evolution.
The Bible doesn’t say how He did it..it only says that He did it. And the Bible was not written by God but written by humans long after the events took place.
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And without reference to any of the other creation stories in the Bible, we note that Genesis 1:1 neither contradicts evolution theory, nor is contradicted by evolution theory.
Whatever made you think it does? Certainly nothing in scripture.
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“Creationism is a doctrine to which I, like most Christians, do not subscribe. It springs from a wrong understanding of the Word of God.”
What?!
Most Christians DO NOT subscribe to creationism? I beg to differ. He is obviously the one with a “wrong understanding of the word of God.”
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God CREATED the heavens and the earth.”
There it is. In black and white.
There is nothing unclear about that, and yet he has the audacity to say that he is the one with a correct view of God’s word.
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It’s this sort of distortion that almost always convinces me of the bias against Darwin. Darwin’s task aboard H.M.S. Beagle was to find the evidence that would, once and for all, demonstrate the scientific accuracy of Genesis. To call his research misguided for the opposite reason merely indicates an ignorance of what Darwin’s research was, what motivated it, or why it was so painstakingly accurate. I also think you would do well to revisit the last paragraph of his book. You’re assuming a bias that there is little evidence he held. Darwin’s research was not skewed by the biases of his father and grandfather because Darwin did not share those biases. His research was heavily biased toward accuracy, and toward conservative statements based solely on observation, not wild-blue-yonder speculation.
Darwin didn’t “lump man into the animal kingdom.” He relied on Linneaus’s categorization. That categorization had no effect on man’s eternal nature, which Darwin and almost all other Christians of the day assumed to be the soul, not the physical body. And of course, that had zero effect on Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution, most especially since Origin of Species makes no mention of human evolution.
Darwin was not so limited in his knowledge as you claim.
Am I correct in assuming you’ve never actually read Darwin? You should visit what he said — I actually recommend a modern updating, the one done by Stephen Jones called Darwin’s Ghost. I think you’ll be surprised.
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First, Mr. Dillon is inaccurate to his claim that most Christians ascribe to his claims and that inclusive argument has no basis. I am sure he did not take a poll of all Christians to make his assertion. Second, it he is a Christian who claims to be able to discriminate from the truth and the falsity of certain passages of the Bible he has set himself above our Holy God. The denomination I adhere to makes a claim for inerrancy of the Bible. All who adhere to this denomination would not agree with Mr. Dillon.
Darwin was misguided in most of his research because of the biases of his father and grandfather. He did not understand God’s principle of individuality and mistook the principle of variation for some sort of progressivism as it related to the Animal Kingdom.
Third and most important, he lumped man into the animal kingdom, merely because he is a mammal. The Word of God says we, unlike most creatures have an eternal nature, and even though we are mammal in our physical nature we are also created in the image of God.
Fourth, Darwin had only a rudimentary understanding of Natural Philosophy. That is to say he only looked at the hardware he could see. Give a Ninteenth Century Natural Philosopher a present day laptop computer with no software and what would he make of it? Our tools today inform us that life has hardware and software that govern us and that both the hardware and software are irreducibly complex.
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What evidence do you claim has not been examined?
What example of circular reasoning can you cite from evolution theory (that is, not from creationist propaganda)?
Where is there an ad hominem argument in Mr. Dillon’s statement — especially any false ad hominem?
What about the magni-multitudes of Christians in science who understand that scripture says nothing against evolution? (There is only a handful of scientists who hold to creationism, a small subset of scientists with faith.)
Either God was the creator of the heavens and Earth, and they bear testament to the creation, or creationism is right, and God plays second fiddle. In your orchestra, if God is not the conductor, who is, Dr. Healan?
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There is not a more “personal narrow, vain, idolatrous doctrine” than that of Darwinian evolution. Its adherents repeatedly use circular reasoning and refuse to examine all the evidence with equanimity. Its adherents constantly resort to ad hominem diatribes like that of Rob Dillon simply because their arguments do not stand against the position of multitudes of Christian scientists who embrace what the Bible so clearly states: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” How else is the Word of God to be understood? Either that statement is true or it isn’t. –Michael Healan, Ed.D.
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We could use more people like him on school boards today, John. Thanks for dropping by.
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My father (a Deacon in the local church, who in the last few months of his life had only a Bible in the room in the nursing home) would have agreed, but perhaps more pithily:
“God didn’t give us brains for us to be stupid.”
Of course, he was also President/VP for 20 years of the local school system, and it always had good science classes, not accidentally.
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