Pretty good review ^^^^.
CMI’s review is titled Clash over worldviews. Among other things, it documents that leading evolutionists E.O. Wilson and the late Ernst Mayr agreed with a distinction between observational and historical science. It also deals with Nye’s ‘evidences’ that Ham had no chance to rebut in the short time available.
It was an unconscionable bait-and-switch for Nye to compare the number of kinds on the Ark, only vertebrate animals, with the number of so-called species today. The vast majority of those species are non-vertebrate, and no creationist believes that they evolved from the Ark vertebrates. See for example Refuting Noah’s ark critics.
The Ark landed in the mountains of Ararat, and it’s well known that mountains are good for rapidly producing new varieties and even speciation. That’s because they readily provide the geographic barriers needed for allopatric speciation. With the small populations off the Ark, it’s even easier because of genetic drift.
Actually, even before Darwin, creationists understood that a wide variety of animals descended from a relatively small number of kinds on the Ark. Thus they realized that there was a lot of post-Flood variation, and even what we would now call speciation. For example, Anglican Bishop John Wilkins (1614–1672), the founder of the metric system and the first secretary of the Royal Society; and German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), renowned in his day as “master of a hundred arts”.
Even now, we could call it a creationist prediction that rapid speciation would be more common than evolutionists expect.
http://blog.drwile.com/?p=12141&cpage=2#comment-83683
I wonder if rapid speciation is even necessary given YEC. I wonder why God couldn't have just created more species after the flood. An objection might be that it would make the Ark unnecessary. But not if the Ark had more than one purpose. From the perspective of redemptive history, the ultimate purpose was to be a prophetic type of the salvation found in Christ (i.e. the Ark) from the judgment of God (i.e. the flood).
ReplyDeleteAnother objection might be that the genetic data implies common ancestry. But why assume that we can infer anything actually true from genetic information. Isn't part of standard Christian theology (especially among the Reformed) that general revelation was never meant to be interpreted apart from special revelation? If God could created the past with an appearance of age, why couldn't God create species with apparent common ancestry? I don't think this is necessarily ad hoc.
FYI: Because of Steve's blogs on YEC I'm open to YEC, though I currently lean strongly toward OEC. I have to admit that many of the objections to YEC by both secularists, OEC, theistic evolutionists (et cetera) aren't very persuasive philosophically.
It's true that the ark isn't strictly necessary. The concrete symbolism is key, just as Solomon's temple or the sacrificial system isn't strictly necessary. They exist for the concrete symbolism.
DeleteThe reason is that God finished creation after Day 6. Of course God could have just caused the wicked people to vanish, or put a force field around Noah and the animals. The question is about what He revealed that He did.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, general revelation from this fallen world can be understood only in the light of the unfallen perfect Special Revelation in Scripture. You will never get an OEC from Scripture, only from trying to read uniformitarian "science" into Scripture.
God did not create with "appearance of age", simply because age has no appearance! People infer age from current features and processes that change over time, given certain assumptions. God did create with functional maturity. It's important to understand the difference. E.g. Genesis 1 reveals that God created trees already mature enough to bear fruit, and Adam and Eve as mature enough for reproduction. But it's most unlikely that the trees had growth rings or Adam and Eve had navels, since these are not necessary for mature function and instead reflect a history that the initial creations lacked.