Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
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Plymouth.Rock Foundation of New Hampshire, Pat Robertson’s Freedom Council, John<br />
Whitehead’s Ruther<strong>for</strong>d Institute, and several others.<br />
Gary North, editor of the premiere J. Christian Reconstruction which was devoted<br />
to creationism, is Rushdoony’s son-in-law (though they have had a rift over doctrinal<br />
matters). North insists, in Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism (1986),<br />
that humanism, which includes evolution, is based on irrationalism as much as on<br />
rationalism, and is fundamentally the same as occultism and Satanism. “Thus, as the<br />
West has become increasingly atheistic and Darwinian, it has become vulnerable to antirational<br />
social philosophies and practices.” Not that North disputes the reality of the<br />
occult: on the contrary, he presents massively documented chapters asserting the reality<br />
of the paranormal and the occult, including the most sensational reports, but he attributes<br />
them to the powers of Satan and his demons.<br />
In Is the World Running Down? (1988), North vigorously promotes biblical<br />
creationism. Scientific creationists are wrong, he says, in appealing to the entropy<br />
argument. Appealing himself to post-millennialist eschatology and biblical<br />
presuppositionalism, he declares that the world is not running down. He accuses the<br />
“scientific creationists” of paying too much attention to the Fall (entropy), and not<br />
enough to the Resurrection, and of relying on evidentialist apologetics. “What I present<br />
in this book is a Bible-based case against the prevailing apologetic approach of most<br />
scientifically trained six-day creationists” (1988:x). North praises creation-scientists <strong>for</strong><br />
attacking evolution, but says they have not gone far enough.<br />
What I want to do in this book is strengthen the case <strong>for</strong> six-day creationism. I have become convinced that<br />
the Scientific Creationists have been much too soft and academically gracious in their dealings with Godhating<br />
Darwinian scientists. These defenders of the faith have not “gone <strong>for</strong> the jugular” of their<br />
opponents, <strong>for</strong> they have accepted too many of their opponents’ illegitimate ground rules in the debate.<br />
This insight regarding the proper starting point in all debate has been <strong>for</strong>cefully argued by Cornelius Van<br />
and the unwillingness of the Creation <strong>Science</strong> movement to understand his point and adopt his apologetic<br />
method has crippled their own ef<strong>for</strong>ts as surely as their debate points have crippled their Darwinist<br />
opponents. [1988:xii]<br />
North accuses Scientific Creationists of supposing, like evolutionists, that man’s<br />
autonomous mind can judge God’s Truth, instead of realizing they must “go to the Bible<br />
<strong>for</strong> their source of scientific knowledge.”<br />
Half a dozen of the most <strong>for</strong>ensically skilled of the Scientific Creationists have been tactically successful in<br />
many brief public debates with Darwinists, but only because of the weak scientific case <strong>for</strong> Darwinism and<br />
the weak debaters who foolishly agreed to show up. [N]evertheless, Scientific Creationists-.have not yet<br />
begun to offer a systematic, comprehensive alternative worldview to the dominant Darwinian paradigm.<br />
They have failed to recognize clearly that the heart of Darwinism’s hold on the thinking of the modern<br />
world is not the evolutionists’ scientific case, which has been remarkably weak from the beginning, but<br />
rather the very worldview of Darwinism, <strong>for</strong> it con<strong>for</strong>ms to the primary long-term goal of autonomous man:<br />
to escape from God’s judgements, historical and final.<br />
By narrowing the focus of their chosen intellectual battleground, Scientific Creationists have not yet<br />
successfully attacked the soft underbelly of Darwinism: historical despair. Scientific Creationists, by<br />
proclaiming the sovereignty of the entropy process, have also immersed their own worldview in historical<br />
despair. They can offer Darwinists and their followers only an escape from history: Jesus’ second coming.<br />
Historical escape is exactly what New Age mystics offer them, but without asking them to give up the<br />
fundamental principle of their Darwinian religion: an escape from God’s judgments. Which, if either, of<br />
these escapist religious appeals should we expect to win the hearts of Darwinian humanists, New Age