Some say 20% of faculty are leaving.
Students and faculty at Bryan are upset at a move last month by the school’s board of trustees to “clarify” that the college believes Adam and Eve were historical figures created directly by God. The board says the clarification does not change the school’s historical position on origins. But some at Bryan believe the board’s action was intended to force out professors who may be sympathetic to evolution, and think it was unfair to do so at a time when faculty contracts are due for renewal. …
An English professor at the school, Whit Jones, said the timing of the clarification had been a “puzzle” to many on faculty, but might have been sparked by recent writings from two of his colleagues: Kenneth Turner, a Bible professor, and Brian Eisenback, an associate professor of biology who graduated from Bryan College in 2002. Together, Turner and Eisenback are writing science education materials under a grant from The BioLogos Foundation, an organization in Grand Rapids, Mich., that promotes theistic evolution.
Theistic evolution, also called “evolutionary creation,” posits God used evolution to create biological life, including humans. Bryan’s original belief statement would seem to preclude theistic evolution for humans because it says mankind’s sin “incurred physical … death”—death being a necessary component for evolution.
Though some proponents of creationism or intelligent design would argue the case for evolution is flimsy, Turner and Eisenback wrote otherwise in a two-part article that appeared on the BioLogos website in December: “Macroevolution is robust and has multiple lines of evidence in support of it, including the fossil record and molecular biology. … The reality is that evolution is not a theory teetering on the edge of collapse. More.
The obvious problem, for a person who has been following the news stream, is that the fossil record and molecular biology so often do not agree. And “evolution” is not so much “a theory teetering on the edge of collapse” as a theory that doesn’t explain anything. That is, we say “evolved to do” when we really mean “does.”
Darwin’s followers, including BioLogians, get marks for their Darwinian piety, talking this way.
But Laszlo Bencze comments:
Apparently some former graduates of Bryan College are writing a science curriculum that will cover the full spectrum of views from hard core evolution to hard core creation. As best I can tell, the authors favor “theistic evolution” although they prefer the term “evolutionary creationism” which is the same thing. Here’s a definition from the article: “Theistic evolution, also called ‘evolutionary creation,’ posits God used evolution to create biological life, including humans.”
Let’s translate that into straightforward English. “God used a process which works perfectly without any intelligent agent to create biological life.” Another way of saying it is “God used a completely self-contained process which is not accessible to any agent to create life.”
We start to see the problem with these statements. The problem is God. The statements work so much better if we simply eliminate God, whose role seems limited to creating a contradiction.
“A process which works perfectly without any intelligent agency created life.” There. Now there’s no contradiction and the statement makes sense.
Or, if you prefer, “God, an agent of unlimited intelligence and act, created life.” That statement, too, is shorn of contradiction and makes sense.
But there’s no way to combine these two statements into a coherent and logical proposition.
Like a figure which is both a circle and a square at the same time in the same way, theistic evolution is a flat out contradiction and makes no sense.
Maybe that’s what makes it somehow feel so right to so many people these days. 😉
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