Creationism - National Center for Science Education

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