So many “evangelicals” are trying to force the evolutionary ages of geology into the Genesis account of creation. Instead of defending our biblical Christian faith, they are trying to accommodate it to the unbelieving worldview of evolutionary naturalism.
Some will even refute Darwinism and do an excellent job of it. But then they still try to accommodate the evolutionary ages of the naturalists, which in turn requires rejecting the worldwide cataclysm of the Flood. They seem indifferent to the fact that this means accepting a billion years of a suffering, dying biosphere before Adam’s fall brought sin and death into the world.
It is even sadder when they feel that this compromising approach will convince the scientific establishment to accept Christ and the gospel.
The point is that no dilution of the creation/Flood record of God’s inspired Word, no matter how well-motivated and persuasively written, is going to budge the evolutionary establishment in science or education one iota. They hold their position for religious reasons, not scientific, and scientific arguments for “intelligent design” are rejected just as vigorously as arguments for recent creation or a global flood.
The American Scientific Affiliation has been advocating a compromise between evolution and creation for years. Their widely distributed book, Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy, was a collection of well-planned essays designed to encourage such a middle-of-the-road system for classroom teaching. The result was a series of bitter attacks by the evolutionists. The Science Teacher magazine, for example, published a series of essays by leading scientists repudiating it, entitled “Scientists Decry a Slick New Packaging of Creationism.”
1 One of the authors, Dr. Lynn Margulis, called it “treacherous,” a polemic designed “to coax us to believe in the ASA’s particular creation myth.”
The excellent book Of Pandas and People was written to present biology in terms of “intelligent design,” without any reference to God, the Bible, or creation, hoping that it could be adopted as a high school biology textbook. Again, nothing doing! It was merely a sneaky way of getting creationism into the schools, said its opponents, and they won.
Another very popular advocate of compromise says that teaching recent creation and worldwide Flood views will keep people from coming to Christ. “Because of the implausibility of such a position,” says Dr. Hugh Ross, “many reject the Bible out of hand without seriously investigating its message or even reading for themselves the relevant passages.”
2
Dr. Ross does not document this statement, and he is wrong. Many scientists do accept the biblical record at face value, and there are now thousands of scientists who have become young-earth creationists, not to mention multitudes of non-scientists.
What the compromise approach does, however, is not to bring the lost to Christ, but causes many who are already Christians to doubt their Faith as they go down the slippery path of compromise.
(excerpted from Henry M. Morris, Defending the Faith Acts & Facts April 2011, Institute for Creation Research)
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References (selected)
1. Bennetta, W. J., ed. Scientists Decry a Slick New Packaging of Creationism. The Science Teacher. May 1987, 36-43.
2. Ross, H. 1991. The Fingerprint of God. Orange, CA: Promise Publishing Co., 144.
