Let the Fireworks Begin

Pat Robertson didn't exactly call Ken Ham an idiot, but he came close. And Ken Ham didn't exactly call Pat Robertson un-Christian, but he came close.  Christian News is reporting on a story in which Pat Robertson called young earth creationism ‘nonsense,’ and ‘embarrassing.’  On recent 700 Club airing, Robertson said the following:

“Well, the truth is the dinosaurs were extinct maybe … about 50 billion years ago [ed: Robertson misspoke here], and this planet has been [around] much longer than that,” Robertson asserted. “And there was a course that they were trying to hustle around called creation science that was just nonsense, and it was so embarrassing, so we wanted to make sure we told the truth.”

“You know, this universe that we live in is about 14 billion years old and there’s no question about it,” Robertson claimed. “And we have tremendous geological records and all the rest of it. And that 6,000-year stuff just doesn’t compute. But we, as Christians, we need to know the truth.”

Ham was quick to respond:

“It’s not those of us who take God at His word who are ’embarrassing’ — it’s the other way around!” he wrote on Friday. “Those like Pat Robertson who adopt man’s pagan religion, which includes elements like evolutionary geology based on naturalism (atheism), and add that to God’s word are destructive to the church. This compromise undermines the authority of the infallible word.”

Ham said that buying into the world’s Godless teaching is “a major reason why there’s been (and continues to be) an exodus from the church of the younger generations.”

I think that there are quite a few reasons why young people are falling away from the church. I, personally, think that the biggest reason is theodicy, which is an incredibly thorny issue.  It is hard to explain to kids why their prayers often go unanswered.  I am not remotely convinced that it is because people are being educated by “Godless teaching.”

Robertson is correct that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a universe that is almost 14 billion years old.  It is is also quite true that the people who reject this position do so for religious reasons.

Is it nonsense?

One of the characteristics of the home school curriculum that my youngest daughter has is that she uses Bob Jones University science textbooks.  You have to read these things to believe them.  Her most recent subject was glacier formation.  The information about that was pretty straightforward but then it delved into the differences between the standard geological column view and the creationist (referred to in the book as creationary) view.

In the geological column, there is evidence of at least twenty major glaciations dating back hundreds of millions of years, culminating in the cryogenean period of the Pre-Cambrian.  The creationary view wants to compress all of these into a single glaciation between 700 and 1300 A.D.

That's

Nonsense.

While it is quite true that there was a “mini” ice age around 1100 A.D., it is categorically nothing like that recorded in the geological record.  The last big glaciation, the Younger Dryas, is recorded as having happened some 13 thousand years ago and its cause is still unknown.

Reading the young-earth arguments, one gets the impression that the author is struggling to fit the known evidence into a model that is just untenable.  It is like reading The Genesis Flood by Morris and Whitcomb, with all of the “must have,” “could have,” and “probably” phrases.The notion that this model must be right because “the Bible says so” permeates the text.  Unless students go to conservative Christian colleges which teach the same thing, they are going to encounter standard geologic and astronomic information in their courses.  Telling people that “the Bible says so” when their eyeballs tell them otherwise is not a good strategy for winning the souls and minds of the millenial generation. 

Pat Robertson Reiterates His Disdain for Young Earth Creationism

Late last week, Pat Robertson took to the airwaves to, yet again, tell the world what he thinks of young earth creationism.  Here is what he had to say:




He gets very few of the details correct but his general gist is. He seems to be taking the view that Adam is a specially appointed person picked by God to be the first person to walk with God. As Davis Young points out, however, this effectively means that there were quite a few “pre-Adamites” walking around before this with uncertain spiritual identities.  Robertson is a master of understatement when he says that “...we haven't worked all the wrinkles out...”  Interestingly, the article then points this out:

Robertson may have to take this up with his own TV network, which promotes Young Earth Creationist material and publishes articles claiming that opposition to Young Earth Creationism is heretical.

The second article takes the point of view that death could not have occurred before Adam's sin or else Jesus’ atonement would be null and void and that this constitutes a “...direct attack on the foundation and message of the Cross.” There is then a hat tip to AIG and Ken Ham.  Throughout the article, there is absolutely no attempt made to grapple with any of the scientific data.  It is as if it simply is wrong, no matter what it yields.  This is a variant of the “Man's word versus God's word” argument that Ham is so fond of using.

Pat Robertson Blasts Ken Ham's View of Scripture

The Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate was watched by many, many people.  One of the them, it appears, was Pat Robertson, the head of CBN and host of the 700 Club.  As the Christian Post reports, on his show he took the time to say exactly what he thought of Ken Ham's theology:

Robertson said that Ham was using faulty data from Bishop Ussher, an Irish Christian, who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. To make his claims, Ussher calculated the date of creation, based on his knowledge of the Bible, the ancient Persian, Greek and Roman civilizations, astronomy, ancient calendars and chronology.

The televangelist said that science had since refuted Ussher's claims.

"The dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn't comport with anything that is found in science and you can't just totally deny the geological formations that are out there," said Robertson.

"Anyone who is in the oil business knows he's drilling down, 2 miles, 3 miles underground, you're coming into all these layers that were laid down by the dinosaurs," said Robertson. "And we have skeletons of dinosaurs that go back like 65 million years. And to say that it all came around 6 thousand years ago is nonsense."

This is not the first time that Robertson has taken a stab at Young earth creationism.  He did so in 2012 as well, in response to a question about how old he thought the earth was.  Interestingly, in that response, he gave no clues to his views on evolution.  In this particular response to the Ham/Nye debate, Robertson does actually endorse Evolutionary creationism. 

Here is the relevant video from the program.



Like so many of us who watched Ken Ham present his theology, Robertson replies: "There just ain't no way that's possible."  How many people Robertson will sway is not clear.  He has made some missteps in recent years and is not viewed with as much credibility as in the past.  Nonetheless, it will get attention. 

Well, That Didn't Take Long...

Answers in Genesis has a response to the recent comments by Pat Robertson exhorting Christians to accept modern science. Dr. Tommy Mitchell writes:

We know that Creation Week lasted six ordinary days because the Bible says so. A study of the use of the Hebrew word yom in Genesis 1 clearly indicates that God told us He created in six ordinary, twenty-four-hour days. So how do you put millions of years into the text where it plainly does not fit?

Further, Exodus 20:11 tell us, “"For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it."” So again we see that God created everything in six ordinary days. (There was no “before the time of the Bible,” as Robertson claims, in which dinosaurs or anything else could exist, as we will discuss further below.)

So with a six-day Creation Week as our starting point, we can use the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11, along with other information in Scripture such as people’s ages, dates of births, and dates of key events, to come to conclusions about the age of the earth. This is precisely what Ussher did. And we recognize and honor this great scholar for the work that he did. We also owe a debt to many other great men who have done similar work throughout the ages. A number of these scholars—independent of Ussher and relying solely on Scripture—have concluded the age of the earth was in the range of 6,000–7,000 years.

Mitchell does not cite which ones have concluded this.  He also extols the work of James Ussher, who had no scientific body of knowledge from which to work and had no familiarity with what was known at the time.  The problem of relying sola scriptura is that one loses the context of what has been written and when it was written down.  Joshua Moritz, on the other hand, has this to say:

Even more recently, such as at the time of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial (1925), the actual face of biblical literalism was quite different than one might expect—especially if one has in mind young earth creationism with its insistence upon a 10,000 year old recently-created earth and its focus on ‘‘flood geology’’. Around the time of the Scopes trial in the early twentieth century, there is no record of any biblical literalists within normative Christianity who interpreted the Bible as claiming a recent creation in six 24-hour days or that Noah’s flood had anything to do with how one should interpret the record of global stratigraphy. Indeed, literalists at that time saw Noah’s flood as a local phenomenon and ‘‘even the most literalistic Bible believers accepted the antiquity of life on Earth as revealed in the paleontological record.’’

This is similar to what Mark Noll has to say:

Despite widespread impressions to the contrary, [young-Earth] creationism was not a traditional belief of nineteenth-century conservative Protestants or even of early twentieth-century fundamentalists. The mentality of fundamentalism lives on in modern creation science, even if some of the early fundamentalists themselves were by no means as radical in their scientific conclusions as evangelicals have become in the last forty years. For instance, during the century before the 1930s, most conservative Protestants believed that the “days” of Genesis 1 stood for long ages of geological development or that a lengthy gap existed between the initial creation of the world (Gen. 1:1) and a series of more recent creative acts (Gen. 1:2ff) during which the fossils were deposited.¹

Most young earth creationists that I know do not know much of this.  They simply tow the party line because that is what they have been taught and, given their general lack of knowledge in the earth and biological sciences, have no reason to think otherwise.  The folks at AiG, on the other hand, claim to have studied the data and still come up with unsupportable scientific statements and vacuous attacks on the age of the earth and evolution.While Robertson is certainly no science scholar, he is correct about evolution and the age of the earth. 

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¹Noll, M. (1995) The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. New York: William B. Eerdmans

Pat Robertson Goes Rogue

In a response to a question on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson, head of CBN and Regent University in Virginia Beach, caused many jaws to drop when he remarked that the standard young earth creationism model is not all its cracked up to be. Dan Merica of CNN comments:

The statement was in response to a question Robertson fielded Tuesday from a viewer on his Christian Broadcasting Network show "The 700 Club.” In a submitted question, the viewer wrote that one of her biggest fears was that her children and husband would not go to heaven “because they question why the Bible could not explain the existence of dinosaurs.”

“You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” Robertson said. “They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible.”

Before answering the question, Robertson acknowledged the statement was controversial by saying, “I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this.”

“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was,” Robertson concluded.

This is, of course, exactly contrary to the teachings of Ken Ham, who argues that it is because we aren't teaching creationism that we are losing our children. Robertson's statement is also a paraphrased restatement of what Kenneth Miller once said: Never bet against science.

Interestingly, while the CNN author attempts to tie in the rest of the article with acceptance of evolution, Robertson doesn't say that. He says that he doesn't accept the recent earth model.

This will make waves in both camps and there will be much hand-wringing among young earth supporters.  Humorously, the The Daily Kos' headline reads: “A Sign of The End Times? Pat Robertson throws the Young Earthers under the bus.”

Whether this counts as a renunciation or simply a public statement of long-held beliefs, I am not sure. That this is big news, however, is unquestionable.