Thoughts in a Haystack

In the category of "What a Surprise," Wild Bill Dembski admits to being a creationist.

Josh Rosenau has the details at Thoughts From Kansas. A retired Baptist minister reviewed Dembski's latest book, The End of Christianity, at a blog called Our Sovereign Joy and thought that he was advocating "theistic evolution." As is common knowledge, creationists hate theistic evolutionists even more than secular or atheistic supporters of evolution, so Dembski raced to "clear" his "good name":

Johnny T. Helms' concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God. I am not, as he claims, a theistic evolutionist. Within the Southern Baptist seminaries, both old-earth and young-earth creationism are accepted positions. True, young-earth creationism remains the majority view in the SBC, but it is not a litmus test for Christian orthodoxy within the SBC. I'm an old-earth creationist and the two SBC seminaries at which I've taught (Southern in Louisville and Southwestern in Ft. Worth) both were fully apprised of my views here in hiring me.

Not all creationists are buying "the big tent," however. A commenter had this to say:

As an Old Earth Creationist, Dr. Dembski clearly disagrees with the Biblical timeline. This is an insult to God.

As an intelligent design creationist, Dr. Dembski insults God. The creators of intelligent design creationism deliberately left God out of the picture in their effort to get around the US Supreme Court's 1987 decision prohibiting the teaching of "creation science" in public schools - because it is obviously religion.

The intelligent design creationists took all mention of God and Adam and Eve and Noah and all the good parts out of the creation story, and proposed an anonymous invisible supernatural "intelligent designer," publicly denying for years that it was the Creator God of Genesis.

They created another creator - another God! A Vatican theologian has stated that this is technically heresy. How any serious creationist could support intelligent design creationism is a mystery.

What is perhaps even stranger than Dembski's aversion to theistic evolution is his theodicy:

My book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is about theodicy, namely, how a good God can coexist with an evil world. Essential to Christian theodicy has been the doctrine of the Fall, which, in my book, I argue is real. Within old-earth creationism, however, the Fall comes after the appearance of natural evil (e.g., animal sickness and suffering). What I argue in THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is that just as the salvation purchased by Christ on the Cross saves not only forwards but also backwards in time (Old Testament saints were saved through Christ and His Cross), so the effects of the Fall operate forwards and backwards in time (thus animal suffering is a result of the sin of Adam even though, temporally, it comes before). Basically, what I'm trying to do is preserve Christian orthodoxy within an old-earth perspective.

So, God subjected animals to death and disease because he knew Adam and Eve would sin even before he specially created them? But he went ahead and created them anyway, knowing they'd sin and everything in the universe would suffer? And that helps with the problem of evil, how?

And why try to preserve Christian orthodoxy within an old-earth perspective? If you're in for a penny denying the scientific evidence for evolution, why not in for a pound and deny the scientific evidence for an old Earth? How does Dembski decide what parts of science are reliable and what parts aren't?
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