Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Those “scientific creationists” who wrote and defended the Louj.siana bill may have been mistaken in
thinking that such a de-Biblicized law would be upheld by the federal judiciary, but they knew that no other
approach stood any chance at all. [1987:1]
He chastised Robbins for claiming that creationism, and the Bible, must be believed by
“blind credulity,” since the real facts of science support it (1987). It is ironic that Morris
is accused of neglecting the Bible in his promotion of scientific creationism; this charge
must be particularly galling to such a staunch fundamentalist, and explains why Morris
pushes his biblicism so relentlessly when he can to audiences of the faithful where he can
safely promote “biblical” creationism. After asserting that “scientific creationism is
perfectly compatible with Biblical creation” in his response to Robbins, Morris adds that
biblical creation, “of course, is of higher priority to the true Christian” (1987:4). In a
later book, Morris states that “true biblical creationism is the answer to all human needs
and problems” (1988b:129).
The rejection by Robbins and Rushdoony of “evidentialist” apologetics is a
significant departure from the traditional fundamentalist view of science: the Baconian-
Newtonian ideal of pure inductivism and its attendant horror of speculative hypotheses;
the Common Sense philosophy of the Princeton theologians, which assumed that nature,
like the Bible, was utterly perspicuous and accessible to ordinary reasoning, by
observation and arrangement of facts. The Princeton theologians, who developed the
doctrine of biblical inerrancy, in effect denied presuppositional apologetics by claiming
that Christianity could stand solely by its appeal to reasoning from facts—facts, and
reason, available to believer and non-believer both. Marsden says that Benjamin
Warfield was “mystified” by the Calvinist approach, which presumed that, by starting
from different presuppositions, non-Christians could never reason their way to the same
conclusions as Christians, and quotes him as saying that Christianity, the “Apologetic
religion,” will “reason its way to its dominion” (1980:115).
Hodge had, as Barr notes, “unbounded” confidence in reason. Hodge rejected
rationality which was not based on scriptural revelation, but declared that “Reason must
judge of the Evidences of a Revelation”: reason was necessary and sufficient for
acceptance of biblical truth. He maintained that “reason must judge of the evidence by
which a revelation is supported” (Hodge 1883:53). It is “clearly a prerogative of reason”
to judge the truthfulness of Scripture: the Bible “never demanded faith except on the
ground of adequate evidence.”
It will be noted that the ostensibly non-religious “scientific” creationist approach
criticized by Rushdoony is in large part derived from Hodge’s Princeton Theology, and
that both Rushdoony (via Van Til and Kuyper) and the Princeton theologians laid claim
to the Calvinist tradition. Rushdoony’s Orthodox Presbyterianism, and the Dutch
Reformed theology of the Cosmonomic Movement (a direct descendant from Kuyper via
Dooyeweerd), seem to lie more squarely within the original spirit of Calvinism, however,
than does Hodge’s appeal to reason alone.
POST-MILLENNIALISM AND CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTIONISM
Presuppositional apologetics is one of the key doctrines of the Christian
Reconstruction movement; others are post-millennial eschatology, and a radical form of
theonomy (“God’s law”). Christian Reconstructionists reject the dispensational pre-