Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design
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Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design presents the current "state of the conversation" about origins among evangelicals representing four key positions:
Young Earth Creationism - Ken Ham (Answers in Genesis) Old Earth (Progressive) Creationism - Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe) Evolutionary Creation - Deborah B. Haarsma (BioLogos) Intelligent Design - Stephen C. Meyer (The Discovery Institute)
The contributors offer their best defense of their position addressing questions such as: What is your position on origins - understood broadly to include the physical universe, life, and human beings in particular? What do you take to be the most persuasive arguments in defense of your position? How do you demarcate and correlate evidence about origins from current science and from divine revelation? What hinges on answering these questions correctly?
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4 released booksCounterpoints is a 4-book series first released in 1996 with contributions by Wayne Grudem, Richard B. Gaffin Jr., and 9 others.
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First time reading something like this. It is sort of a debate book but with footnotes and without the proponents interrupting each other, and I actually liked the format. It would be nice to find something similar but not only focusing on religious proponents.
About the book itself, Ken Ham's is the guy which most conservative Christians will relate the most as it is basically Christian religion as taught in schools (or were) . I find his essay the weakest of all four, also the guy is quite annoying sometimes as he believes whatever he says is the true because “That is the true”, I later saw him on YouTube and he is even worst. Even the editor of the book had some trouble dealing with him that it made me laugh. Citing the editor:
“The most obvious discrepancy that remains is in the initial essays, where Ham's is noticeable longer than the others. He was unwilling to cut anything further, believing it only fair that he should be given more space than the others since he was the only one defending the young age of the earth and the authority of Scripture vs the authority of the scientific majority”. Quite a guy eh?.
Hugh Ross is an interesting case, as an Astrophysics he believes in like 99% about all the scientific consensus related to cosmic stuff, but he differ in the evolution and origins of life. Researching through his footnotes I see he has an interesting views that few non-religious people also consider, specially that about Fine-tuning of the universe. His weakest point I would say that is that he is actually making the bible to concord with everything Astrophysics find and that is why many people say that he tends to much to Concordism.
Haarsma is a proponent of almost everything that non-religious scientist believe, so most of those people will find her point of view the most compelling of all, but she add God into the equation. So she believes in the Evolution, Origins of life, the LUCA, etc as the scientific consensus says but also that God guided everything in any way. Her weakest point is actually the obvious one, what God has anything to do in all this if all this looked as He was unnecessary. Though Her reply to this opposition is quite interesting. She works for that organization (BioLogos) that is actually run by geneticist Francis Collins which it happens that he is the guy in charge of the NIH in the US and who led the Human Genome Project.
The last guy, Meyer, only based his essay on Intelligent Design so nothing to add to this as even though he has his own position on the age of the universe and origins of life most of his essay is basically explaining everything about ID including why it is not Pseudo-science.
Finally, the editor finish the book saying: “It takes enormous effort, then, on our part to listen to others and consider their critiques of our own positions. But if we're serious about pursuing the truth in the matters, it is important.”
