Saturday, January 10, 2009

Year of Darwin: A Creation Perspective:Part III

The third article, Do Species Change by Paul Garner, is a puzzler. It begins by contradicting cherished dogma of the ICR that species do not vary outside of their "kinds." He states:

To his credit, Darwin corrected a popular misunderstanding. Species do change. Since Darwin’s day, many observations have confirmed this. In fact, new species have even been shown to arise within a single human lifetime. For example, one study gave evidence that sockeye salmon introduced into Lake Washington, USA, between 1937 and 1945 had split into two reproductively isolated populations (i.e., two separate species) in fewer than 13 generations (a maximum of 56 years).

Okay, when's the other shoe going to drop? Ah, here it comes:

The church’s compromise on Scripture’s authority had dire results. While Darwin was right to argue that species change, he went too far. He should have gone back to Scripture to see what it really said. Instead, he ignored the biblical data and assumed that all creatures descended from a single common ancestor over millions of years.

Although he never comes back to address this point, he does go on to say some pretty negative things about his fellow creationists, concluding:

Modern creationists need to challenge both the unbiblical essentialist ideas that underlie species fixity and the naturalistic ideas that underpin evolution from a common ancestor. The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes: yes, species change, but variation has clear limits (see “The Discontinuity of Life,” p. 88). In the twenty-first century, we face the exciting challenge of re-thinking the history of life from a truly biblical perspective.

Not dead sure what means but he has gone further than other creationist has dared to go. For that he should be commended.

4 comments:

  1. "Biblical data"? There's an oxymoron.

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  2. Not as far as AIG and the ICR are concerned. Those creation accounts are hard, concrete data to them.

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  3. But the data isn't coming from the Bible. You're not going to fin it there.

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  4. Yup. Tell them that.

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