From: hamilton@hydra.cs.gmr.com (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Progressive Creationism Part 6
Date: 7 Oct 92 17:41:31 GMT
Reply-To: hamilton@hydra.UUCP (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50)
Distribution: world,local
Organization: GM Research Labs, Warren, MI

In article <6OCT199200091030@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu> lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) writes:
>In article <91243@rphroy.ph.gmr.com>, hamilton@gmr.com (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50) writes...
>>2.  The assertions found here and there about how evolution is ruled out:
>> 
>>Politics. The young-earth view is incredibly powerful in conservative 
>>Christianity. Even a person of Boice's stature could be damaged by
>>openly opposing it. It seems to me that once you allow progressive
>>creation or the day-age theory (which is Young's position), then you've
>>agreed that the geologists' time scale is correct, that different
>>sorts of creatures appeared at different times, and that later
>>creatures seem to have been developed using characteristics of earlier
>>creatures as as a starting point, 
>>possibly in response to changing environmental
>>conditions.  Now the question is just *how* did these changes occur, and
>
>I'm presently reading Ronald Numbers' _The Creationists_, and was quite
>surprised to find that things used to be quite the reverse, up until around
>the 1920's or later.  That is, old-earthers were quite dominant, except in
>the Seventh Day Adventist crowd, whose influence through George McCready
>Price led to today's creationism.  Several early U.S. creationist organizations
>were split over heated battles between Price-following flood geologists
>and day-age and gap theorists.

The following excerpt from "The Fundamentalist Origins of the American
Scientific Affiliation" by D. G. Hart in Perspectives on Science and
Christian Faith v43 no. 4, Dec 1991, pp 238-247 should be of interest.
The point this leads up to is that J. Gresham Machen, who was one
of the authors of "The Fundamentals" - a series of booklets published
in the 1920's, from which the term "Fandamentalism" was derived - 
did not see a conflict between evolution and Christianity. I include
some of the preceding material because it gives some background 
on Machen and makes some points about the nature of the fundamentalist/
modernist controversy in the 20's that may be surprising.


Mainstream biblical scholarship of the era [1920's]reinforced the separation of
religion and science by identifying Jesus' ethical instruction as the essence of
Christianity. According to sociologist Charles A. Ellwood, New Testament
scholars had through their patient and extensive labors established Jesus as a
"teacher of love." He agreed with Harry Emerson Fosdick, who assured readers
that critics had rediscovered "the historic Christ" and liberated the gospel
from dogma. Meanwhile, many scientists cited the findings of biblical scholars
to defend their own research by demonstrating that evolution did not contradict
Christianity because it did not dispute Jesus' teaching.

Implicit in this truce between religion and science was the distinction between
religion and theology, or between faith and dogma. Many explained the conflict
over evolution as the result of a misunderstanding. Fundamentalists had mistaken
their own doctrines(biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and
the atonement, for example)for the essence of Christianity. But the controversy
all but disappeared once Christianity was understood apart from formal theology.
The Bible, accordingly, was not a book of doctrinal teaching, as fundamentalists
maintained, but a collection of inspirational writings. Furthermore, genuine
Christian faith did not depend upon intellectual assent to theological
propositions. Instead, it consisted of vital religious experience. Nurtured by
the non-confessional character of American Protestantism and philosophical
developments in the late nineteenth-century, this distinction between theology
and religion was best summarized by Shailer Mathews, dean of the Divinity School
at University of Chicago, when he wrote, "Christianity is not a hard and fast
system of philosophy or orthodoxy" but "the attempt of men to rely upon
Christian principles in meeting the needs of their actual life-situations."

Ironically, by drawing the lines so sharply between religious experience and
theological expression, liberal Protestants were in effect ceding concern for
the intellectual implications of Christianity to fundamentalists. To be sure,
liberals were far more involved and established in academic circles than
fundamentalists and could make a good case that their recasting of Christianity
was accomplished with the assistance of modern scholarship. Yet, fundamentalist
attention to the theological ramifications of science was no less intellectually
serious than liberal efforts to adapt Christianity to modern thought. Until
recently, the fundamentalist concern for intellectual coherence was rarely noted
by American historians who focused on the movement's anti-intellectualism. But
some fundamentalists of the period were quick to turn the epithet of
anti-intellectualism back upon the proponents of Protestant modernism.!

None of the fundamentalists made more of liberal Protestantism's tacit
anti-intellectualism than J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament at
Princeton and Westminster seminaries, and controversialist extraordinaire in the
Northern Presbyterian Church. Machen himself had the kind of academic background
that gave his charges credibility. He did his undergraduate work and a year of
graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, finished a masters in philosophy
at Princeton University while completing the course of instruction at Princeton
Seminary, and rounded out his studies with a year of advanced work in New
Testament criticism at Marburg and Goettingen universities. Of course, as a
defender of the New Testament's historicity, Machen's chief gripe against
liberalism was theological. Liberal conceptions of God, Christ, human nature and
salvation, for starters, departed to such a degree from historic Christianity
that they deserved to be called by another name.

Yet Machen also argued that these departures from orthodoxy, though rooted in
the desire to square Christianity with modern scientific conceptions, were
fundamentally un-scientific and anti-intellectual. The science that Machen had
in mind was not biology, geology, or physics. Rather, the latest findings from
New Testament studies, Machen said, showed that the liberal conception of Jesus
as "a mild-mannered exponent of indiscriminating love" was not at all compatible
with modern research that showed the authors of the Gospels portraying Jesus as
a supernatural person, fully aware of his sinlessness and messianic role. To be
truly scientific, then, modern Protestants would have to come to terms with
biblical scholarship. Such a task would force a choice between the Jesus of
liberal Protestant fancies or the historic Christ of the Bible.

Furthermore, liberal Protestantism was anti-intellectual, according to Machen,
because it consigned Christianity to the realm of ideals and experience, a realm
entirely separate from scientific investigation. By reducing Christianity to its
experiential and ethical aspects and by stripping it of its theological and
historical content, liberals could perhaps dodge the grasp of science for a
while, but eventually psychologists and philosophers would subject even the
affective and moral dimensions of Christianity to criticism. Thus, the process
of modifying Christianity to accommodate science showed a lack of intellectual
resolve. Machen's charge of anti-intellectualism infuriated liberals, but made
sufficient sense to be repeated by H. L. Mencken, the irreverent and skeptical
journalist from Machen's home town, Baltimore. According to Mencken, "it is one
thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another thing to try to save it
by pumping out of it all its essential substance ... reducing it] to a series of
sweet attitudes possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony."

[OK. Here's the punch line]

Part of Machen's appeal to Mencken, however, was his avoidance of the
evolutionary controversy. Although Machen avoided the subject in public, in his
correspondence he espoused a view of human origins not unlike his mentor at
Princeton, Benjamin B. Warfield, who argued that God superintended the
evolutionary process and intervened to create the human soul. Of course, this
position was unusual among fundamentalists. But Machen's larger point(that the
compartmentalization of science and religion was in effect an admission that
Christianity did not correspond to scientific descriptions of reality)was one
upon which most fundamentalists agreed. Indeed, one of the central
fundamentalist arguments about science was that because all truth was God's
truth, something could not be true in one sphere and false in the other.
Fundamentalists were deeply committed to intellectual consistency and scorned
liberals for abandoning the enterprise. Machen's way of achieving coherence was
to defend the historicity of the New Testament. Because, at the very minimum,
Christianity was bound up with a man who lived and died in first-century
Palestine, he said, it could not be sequestered from the world of learning.
Fundamentalist objections to evolution followed a similar logic. Because Genesis
made particular claims about the origins of the universe and humankind,
scientific findings on those matters could not be ignored.

Bill Hamilton
GM Research and Environment Staff
Newsgroups: talk.origins