Genesis Kinds

Description

Mission statement - coresci.org



Core Academy of Science encourages young Christian scholars to explore the hardest problems in creation. Engineers sometimes classify problems as easy, hard, and impossible. Easy problems are trivial because they can be solved merely by applying known principles. Impossible problems cannot be solved no matter how hard we try. Hard problems are the problems in between that require the most work but yield the greatest rewards. Sometimes hard problems are accumulations of many easy problems, and sometimes they turn out to be impossible. When a hard problem is solved, though, it is widely celebrated.



For Christians and especially young-age creationists, understanding creation has many "hard problems." Evidences of the great age of the universe and earth can be difficult to explain. Likewise with evidences of evolution. Creationists reject the conventional explanations that involve millions of years and humans evolving from animals, but alternative explanations that satisfy our scientific curiosity and our desire to remain true to the revealed Word of God are much rarer and not widely accepted. It is much easier to focus on the detection of error rather than the more difficult discovery of truth.



This focus on error rather than truth pervades evangelical Christianity, because it's relatively easy. We all like the easy and impossible. We teach our children to recite verses from the Bible and answers to our catechisms, but when they ask difficult questions, we say, "Only God knows." We might even scold them for being impertinent or irreverent.



Core Academy equips the next generation to tackle these great mysteries by first and most importantly helping young scholars to develop a bold, confident faith. All too often, scholars who face challenging puzzles become disillusioned and stray from the faith. Our first goal, then, must be enriching and nurturing strong faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Creator.

Subjects

• Books
• Savoirs
• Religions

Informations

• Published by: Wipf and Stock Publishers
• Published: 22 January 2009
• Reads: 0
• EAN13: 9781725244801
• Language: English
• Document size: 2 MB

Exrait

C E N T E R F O R O R I G I N S R E S E A R C H Issues I N C R E A T I O N

GeNesIs KINDs: CReàTIoNIsm àND THe ORIgIN of SpecIes

E ditEdby t Odd C harlES W OOdand P aul a. G arnEr

Center for Origins Research Issues in Creation Number 5 January 16, 2009

• W I P F&S T O C KE u g e n e , O r e g o n

GENESIS KINDS Copyright © 2009 Center for Origins Research Issues in Creation. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, th 199 W. 8 Avenue, Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. ISBN: 978-1-60608-490-8 www.wipfandstock.com

Abstract

A belief in creationism, even in young-age creationism, does not necessitate belief in the unique creation of each species. Instead, many creationists accept a secondary origin of species from ancestors originally created by God. In this view, groups of modern species constitute the “Genesis kinds” that God originally created and beyond which evolution cannot proceed (if it can even be called ‘evolution’). In this collection of papers, six scholars examine the species and the Genesis kinds. Topics covered include the history of creationist and Christian perspectives on the origin of species, an analysis of the Hebrew wordmîn(kind) from the perspective of biblical theology, a baseline of minimum speciation within kinds inferred from island endemics, a comprehensive list of proposed kinds from the mammalian fossil record, the occurrence of discontinuity between kinds, and the origin of new species by symbiosis.

CoNTeNTs

The Real Debate over Creationism and Species  Wood and Garner

1. Evolving Christian Views of Species  Garner

2. The Kind-ness of God: A Theological  ReLection ofMîn, “Kind”  Turner

3. Oceanic Islands and Their Plants as a Test  of Post-Flood Speciation  Sanders

4. Natura Facit Saltum: The Case for Discontinuity  Wood

5. Mammal Kinds: How Many Were on the Ark?  Wise

6. Symbiosis, Relationship and the Origin of Species  Francis

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tHe reàL deBàTe oveR CReàTIoNIsm àND SpecIes

t Odd C harlES W OOdand P aul a. G arnEr

th As we remember the 150 anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’sOrigin of Species, it is appropriate to ponder the intense controversies that his work initiated. Obviously, this volume deals with the particular controversy regarding the Christian response to Darwin’s understanding of the origin of species. We are not concerned here with just any Christian response, but with the conservative response signiïed by the label “creationist.” ThroughoutOrigin, Darwin used the doctrine of special creation repeatedly as a contrast for his own theory of adaptation and divergence of species by natural selection. Each time he mentioned it, Darwin emphasized the impotence of special creation in explaining biological phenomena. In this inuential book, Darwin established the dichotomy that still very much deïnes the propaganda of the creation/evolution wars: Species originate by evolution from other species or by special acts of divine intervention. To Darwin, there was no other choice. But as Wood (2008) has shown, there were other choices, even in Darwin’s day. The concept of limited evolution, that is, evolution within limited, taxonomic categories, had been discussed for at least 100 years prior to the publication ofOrigin. To be sure, these proposals were the minority opinion and little known, but they existed. Modern historians would see in them precursors to Darwin’s evolution, but only in the sense of the dichotomy that Darwin established inOrigin. The primary attitude towards creation in Darwin’s day was exempliïed by the doctrines of accommodation and natural theology. Under accommodation, popularized by Galileo’sLetter to the Grand Duchess Christina, the Bible was treated as a source of information about salvation and morality but not science. Since God wished to communicate the message of salvation to all people, He found it necessary to use certain ïgures of speech regarding the natural world, ïgures of speech that were not literally true. As a result of the accommodation of revelation to the ignorance of humanity, scientists could not rely on the Bible to reveal reliable information about the natural world. Natural religion or natural theology was an outgrowth of the doctrine of accommodation. Instead of using biblical revelation to enhance science,

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GeNesIs KINDs

the natural theologian used science to bolster religion. Paley’s version of natural theology, anticipated more than a century before by John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, emphasized what we now call the design argument: the evidence of God’s wisdom, power, and benevolence in the “admirable contrivance” of living things. Writing in the preface to hisWisdom of God, Ray (1717) claimed, “by the Works of the Creation, in the Title, I mean the Works created by God at ïrst, and by Him conserv’d to this Day in the same State and Condition in which they were at ïrst made.” Thus at the beginning of natural theology, we ïnd a strong emphasis on the ïxity of nature. Indeed, a brief reection reveals why this ïxity was necessary. One could not derive evidence of God’s design from the admirable contrivance of the woodpecker’s adaptation to retrieving insects from wood, as Ray did, if the woodpecker had developed naturally from some other species (or at the very least, it would require a radical re-imagining of the design argument, which the natural theologians were unwilling to do). Thus, by Darwin’s day, the special creation and ïxity of species was insisted upon primarily by the natural theologians, and it is to them that we should look for the identiïcation of Darwin’s doctrine of special creation. In our modern culture, the doctrine of special creation has evolved into something quite dierent. First and most importantly, the modern creationist (sensu1999) holds that the Bible does Numbers contain true and reliable information about science. In particular, the ïrst eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are held to be authoritative revelations of the earliest earth history. The special creationist holds to the reality of a week-long creation, a literal Adam and Eve, the onset of human and animal death as a direct consequence of sin, the global nature of the Flood, and the confusion of language at Babel, all within a 6000-year timescale for the age of the earth. In holding these beliefs, the modern creationist explicitly rejects the doctrine of accommodation popular in Darwin’s day and still among modern theistic evolutionists (or “evolutionary creationists,” as some of them prefer to be called). Modern creationists also agree with Darwin in rejecting the special creation of each individual species. Frank Lewis Marsh in particular had rather strong words for those who equate creationists with species ïxist

s: In our day the inaccurate portrayal of the position of creationists on this point which evolutionists give, is doubtless due to the opinion of Louis Agassiz. We have referred above to his strange belief that modern animals had been created and placed in the very ecological niches which we ïnd them today. Apparently considering that the whole of the theory of special creation was sealed up in Agassiz, evolutionists commonly teach that creationists are all of Agassiz’ opinion. As remarked