Thoughts in a Haystack

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, doesn't like "intellectual elites." Presumably, he prefers to be among the "unintellectual inferiors."

To him, evolutionary theory is "is the creation myth of the secular elites."

But, mostly, he doesn't like "theistic evolutionists."

Rather strangely, he agrees with the Gnu Atheists that science is a "worlview" that is "filled only with naturalistic precepts" and that anyone who argues that the Bible tells the story of the who and the why of creation, but not the how, or who supports Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" are "intellectually dishonest."

But stranger still, Mohler, after recognizing that some of the "honored and orthodox 'Princeton Theologians,'" who helped found Fundamentalism, held that "there was no necessary conflict between Genesis and Darwin," he goes on to say:

What these theologians did not recognize was the naturalistic bent of modern science. The framers of modern evolutionary theory did not move toward an acknowledgment of divine causality. To the contrary, Darwin's central defenders today oppose even the idea known as "Intelligent Design."

However, as Mohler himself describes it, theistic evolutionists hold that "the evolutionary process is guided by God in order to accomplish His divine purposes." In short, they "acknowledge" divine causality, accept lower-case "intelligent design" and eschew the idea that science is a worldview.

So what's his problem with them? He claims (perhaps in a case of projection) that those Princeton Theologians "were absolutely sure that the progress of science would eventually prove the truthfulness of the Bible." Theistic evolutionists, however, don't pretend that science supports Genesis and, therefore, engage in "the public rejection of biblical inerrancy." It's worth pausing for a moment to consider the fact that, since upper-case Intelligent Design is acceptable to Mohler, he must deem it to support the public acceptance of biblical inerrancy ... one judgment of Mohler's that I'd credit, if, for no other reason, than he probably knows his own.

The bottom line, however, is that Mohler, disappointed that the Genesis creation stories have been disproven time and time again, by many more scientific fields than just biology, has chosen to reject science altogether in the only way he knows how ... by pretending it is a religion and, therefore, no more believable than his own myths.

Talk about intellectual dishonesty!
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