Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Jackson is a Church of Christ minister in Stockton, California. The Churches of Christ
are “a-millennial”: they believe the Millennium is to be interpreted symbolically rather
than literally; that it is a spiritual condition initiated by Christ in this age, and does not
refer to an earthly reign. The fallacy in Morris’s pre-millennial scheme is its “failure to
recognize the symbolic nature of the book of Revelation.” Jackson complains that
creationism may be wrongly criticized or discredited by being so linked to premillennialism.
“Again, we must absolutely stress that there is positively nothing in pure,
biblical creationism which links it with premillennialism” (1985:4). But the traditional
association remains strong.
PROTESTANT SCHOLASTICISM
Another component of fundamentalism and creationism is the Protestant
scholasticism developed by the great Princeton theologians in the nineteenth century.
This “Princeton theology,” strongly linked with Scottish Realism or Common Sense
philosophy (most of the Princeton theologians were Scottish, or Scotch-Irish,
Presbyterians), stressed an intellectual rather than emotional approach to religion. The
Bible was a set of factual propositions. Like the facts of nature, the facts of the Bible
could be proved true, and laws could be derived from biblical facts in the same manner as
laws of nature were derived from scientific facts. Princeton theology insisted on
scriptura sola (the Bible as the sole, and sufficient, source of revelation regarding
religious faith and practice); this in turn assumed the “perspicuity” of Scripture (that the
facts and truths of the Bible were plainly stated and directly accessible to all readers),
which the Princeton theologians also emphasized. Facts, whether biblical or natural,
were objective, discoverable, solid and unchanging entities, as were the laws derived
from them. This view rested squarely on Baconian assumptions and the Scottish
Common Sense tradition. As Marsden says (1980:111-112):
Such eternal truth, whether revealed in Scripture or in nature, was best refined by the scientific method.
Baconianism appeared everywhere in the writings of the Princetonians, just as it did among American
scientists of the era. The Princeton theologians saw themselves as champions of “impartiality” in the
careful examination of facts, as opposed to “metaphysical and philosophical speculations” such as those of
German Biblical critics. Following the precepts of Baconianism, the Princetonians described the proper
function of science as “taxonomical,” or the gathering and classifying of facts. While dispensationalists
used this method to classify the historical data in Scripture [“rightly dividing the Word of Truth”: e.g.
Scofield 1896], Princeton theologians applied it more traditionally to the task of arranging theological
statements. They often drew an analogy between theology and the hard sciences.
Barr, in his analysis of fundamentalism, made the same point:
It is a reasonable comment, therefore, to say that the fundamentalist conception of truth is dominated by a
materialistic view, derived from a scientific age. This stress on the accuracy of the Bible in its materialphysical
reporting separates modern fundamentalism entirely from that older theology, such as the theology
of Luther and Calvin, which it ill-informedly claims as its own forebear. It is possible to argue further that
the chief doctrinal stream accepted in fundamentalism, the Princeton theology of the Hodges and Warfield,
took its method expressly from the analogy of natural science, and that natural science as seen in a
traditional Newtonian mould. This would suggest that fundamentalism, in its relations to science, might
properly be criticized for attachment to an obsolete scientific model, perpetuated not through science itself
but through its effect on the philosophical basis of doctrine as accepted by fundamentalists. [1981:93-94]