I think Gen­e­sis is impor­tant too. My phras­ing was poor. I don’t think your inter­pre­ta­tion of the first two chap­ters of Gen­e­sis is impor­tant. I would not start a min­istry called “Answers in Gen­e­sis” that looked at any­thing except the prob­lem of sin and an argu­ment for a creator.

In my opin­ion, and this is my opin­ion only, they have a pretty nar­row scope and largely con­duct pseudo sci­ence that to me sug­gests they’re ask­ing the wrong ques­tions of Gen­e­sis. They’re sin­gle issue vot­ers on the wrong issue.

I don’t dis­agree with their sen­ti­ment. I dis­agree with their sci­ence. I think it’s dumb.

Of course sci­ence points to a cre­ator. If you’re a Chris­t­ian that’s a pretty fun­da­men­tal belief. But Gen­e­sis is not a sci­ence text book. Treat­ing it as though it is, even though it pre­dates the sci­en­tific method just seems silly.

I don’t care how old the earth is, or how old you think it is. I care if you brand your­self by a non core, non gospel issue and tell Chris­tians who dis­agree with your point of view on the mat­ter that it’s an essen­tial issue.

I think they’re guilty of this.

I don’t know. I’m more and more con­vinced that we should worry about con­vinc­ing peo­ple about Jesus first.

Any other assump­tions about the world should be made from that point.

I don’t think the Cre­ation v Evo­lu­tion issue is the issue we make it out to be. All the good Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists I know say that both cre­ation sci­ence and the cur­rent iter­a­tion of the the­ory of evo­lu­tion have some issues. Intel­li­gent Design is pretty dumb too.

I think as Chris­tians we should believe that God cre­ated the world. That there is order. That peo­ple are spe­cial and set apart. And that we’re inher­ently sin­ful in our pur­suit of auton­omy. That’s what Gen­e­sis teaches.

Any attempt to add sci­ence to that frame­work is likely to be pretty messy. I’m pre­pared to let the sci­en­tists try to fig­ure out how God did things while believ­ing that he did them.

The rest of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity accuse them of pseudo-science.

They do the same thing athe­ists do. Start with a philo­soph­i­cal premise and then find “sci­ence” to sup­port it.

Hav­ing sci­ence degrees does not make you a sci­en­tist. It makes you a uni­ver­sity graduate.

I have a jour­nal­ism degree but I’m not a jour­nal­ist — I am quite the reverse. I use jour­nal­ists as a vehi­cle to spread my com­pa­nies ideas.

“I also think AIG tack­les an impor­tant issue. It’s not nor­mally salvation-important, but some­times it is. There have been mul­ti­ple times that an evolution-believing athe­ist has been con­verted because they came to realise a) evo­lu­tion is not as def­i­nite as they thought and b) per­haps a God-created world is viable after all.”

There have been just as many, if not more, “Chris­tians” who decon­vert because they’re con­vinced the world is more than 6,000 years old. The fact that we make this a doc­tri­nal stick­ing point is stu­pid. I’m quite com­fort­able with the idea that the world is very old. This says noth­ing about the truth of Jesus Christ.

I also feel AIG is gen­er­ally aimed at Chris­tians, so the idea that we should be focus­ing on con­vinc­ing peo­ple of Jesus first is com­pat­i­ble with AIG’s aims. I don’t think they would sug­gest Cre­ation is the most impor­tant aspect of the bible.

I don’t think they’re pri­mar­ily for Chris­tians. Their motto is “Believ­ing it. Defend­ing it. Pro­claim­ing it.” Two thirds of that motto is out­sider focused.

Their mis­sion state­ment, sim­i­larly, has a con­fused focus…

* We take the absolute truth and author­ity of the Bible to the world.
* We teach the rel­e­vance of a lit­eral Gen­e­sis to the mis­sion fields of the world.
* We obey God’s call for global evan­ge­lism for all eth­nic groups in the world.

Where is Jesus here? I know he’s implied in the first and the third — but if I were run­ning a gospel min­istry I’d want it to be explicit.

I did a search for the word “Jesus” on their home page and it came up “phrase not found”…

“You might think “sci­ence points to a cre­ator” is a pretty fun­da­men­tal belief, but it’s amaz­ing how many “Chris­tians” out there don’t think so.”

I’ve never met a Chris­t­ian who dis­agrees. We might dis­agree on the mech­a­nism of creation.

Since we call our­selves “Chris­tians” and not Godians.

With­out Christ there is no Chris­tian­ity. I’d go so far as to say that with­out Christ I wouldn’t believe in God (apply­ing my own logic to the dis­cus­sion and ignor­ing for a moment the doc­trine of election).

By ‘mech­a­nism’ of cre­ation, are you sug­gest­ing evo­lu­tion is one?

I don’t think evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory as it cur­rently sits dis­proves the notion of the God of the Bible.

I think we have prob­lems when we assume Gen­e­sis 1–2 is an eye­wit­ness, jour­nal­is­tic, sci­en­tific account of the mech­a­nism of cre­ation rather than a the­o­log­i­cal account of creation.

God did it. It was good. It was for us (as humans) to rule over. Human­ity stuffed up. We need saving.

To me that’s all Gen­e­sis 1–3 tells us. If I was going to talk about Answers in Gen­e­sis I’d talk about how Jesus is the answer to Genesis.

And another lit­tle com­ment that again high­lights the prob­lem, from an arti­cle crit­i­cis­ing two Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists for sug­gest­ing that Chris­tian­ity and Evo­lu­tion are compatible…

“Still, we are thank­ful for the con­tin­ued atten­tion on the Cre­ation Museum, which con­tin­ues to be the best chance many have for begin­ning to under­stand the creationist’s perspective—and for meet­ing the Creator.”

Huh? The best chance for meet­ing the Cre­ator is at a museum where chil­dren can ride dinosaur statues?

I should point out that I actu­ally don’t think it mat­ters which way you read Gen­e­sis. This is the entirety of my argu­ment. I’m not try­ing to con­vince you either way is cor­rect. I’m just sug­gest­ing that set­ting up an evan­ge­lis­tic min­istry that argues from a posi­tion of a young earth, rather than from a posi­tion of the res­ur­rec­tion of the Lord Jesus, has got things a lit­tle bit messed up.

And there’s a pretty poor slip­pery slope from the point of hold­ing that one idea must be cor­rect — you end up like these guys here.