John C. Whitcomb & Henry M. Morris

Buchanan noemde de naam van Whitcomb. Buchanan zegt in een ander bericht: Today’s young earth creationism is based on “Flood geology”.  Flood geology, which teaches that most sedimentary rock layers were deposited in a single global Flood about 2500 B.C., was developed in its modern form in the early twentieth century by Seventh-day Adventist George M. Price to conform to visions of a six-day creation reported by Adventist prophetess Ellen White. Despite being advised by geologists that it was incorrect, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris took over Price’s Flood geology and repackaged it in The Genesis Flood (1961), which rapidly became dogma among conservative Protestants. Like White, Whitcomb and Morris assumed their interpretation of the Bible was infallible, which justified ignoring and distorting any scientific findings which did not agree with their Flood geology. Zelf ben ik bekend met de ideeën van Price zoals die door Rehwinkel te boek zijn gesteld. Rehwinkel verwijst niet naar Whitcomb, Whitcombs naam ontbrekt ook in de literatuurlijst.

Buchanan vertelt over Whitcomb en Morris: At length Whitcomb persuaded Henry M. Morris to sign on as co-author. Morris was at the time a professor of hydraulics at Virginia Tech, who had long been active in apologetics from a YE creationist perspective. It was Morris who had introduced Whitcomb to Flood geology at an ASA meeting in 1953.[…] Morris’s contribution eventually comprised more than two-thirds of the final book and defined the essence of young earth creationism from that time forward. 

Naar Morris heb ik twee keer eerder verwezen. Stefaan Blancke zei: In 1974 reeds schreef Henry Morris, één van de voornaamste auteurs van de moderne creation science, dat “een code om te groeien [DNA] een intelligente planner vereist”, “een intelligente codeerder”, “een programmeur”. Het gebruik van het ontwerpargument tegen de evolutietheorie is dus niet nieuw, integendeel. Voorstanders van ID hebben er enkel hun hoofdthema van gemaakt. Het is echter niet het enige argument dat ze hebben overgenomen van het creationisme. Zowat elk argument dat ID-aanhangers gebruiken om de evolutietheorie in twijfel te trekken, vind je terug in de creationistische literatuur uit de jaren zeventig en tachtig van de vorige eeuw.

Een andere verwijzing sluit daar direct op aan en laat zien op welke wijze de creationistische kritiek inspirerend was voor de Intelligent-Designbeweging. Dembski zegt daarover: During our lunch conversation, Ruse commented that for all his disagreements with the young earth creationists, and Henry Morris in particular, he did give them credit for, as he put it, “keeping this issue alive.” The “issue” here was the debate over biological evolution and, in particular, the possibility of design providing a viable alternative to existing materialistic accounts of evolution. My own experience has abundantly confirmed Ruse’s remark. In traveling outside the United States, I’ve found that evolutionary theory goes largely unchallenged. In the United States, by contrast, there remains widespread skepticism toward evolution. And even though intelligent design has emerged as the most visible banner under which evolution is now being challenged, the challenge would not exist without the efforts of Henry Morris and young earth creationists. I myself would not be a design theorist today without them. To be sure, I am not a young earth creationist nor do I support their efforts to harmonize science with a particular interpretation of Genesis. Nonetheless, it was their literature that first got me thinking about how improbable it is to generate biological complexity and how this problem might be approached scientifically.

Dembski vervolgt: In his book Darwin and Design (Harvard University Press, 2003), Michael Ruse makes clear that the key question in the debate over biological evolution is not whether evolution is progressive but rather how biological complexity originated. Creationists have always, and rightly, kept this question at the forefront. For these reasons, I regard Henry Morris as a great man.

Morris gaf commentaar op Dembski’s boek: Intelligent design and creationism diverge at some key points. Morris recently described how he sees the disagreement. This he did in reviewing my book The Design Revolution for the February 2005 issue of Back to Genesis (his review was titled “The Design Revelation”). I want here to respond to some of his charges and to give my own view on the divergence between intelligent design and creationism. Debski noemt de volgende kritiek door Morris: Morris regards intelligent design as not faithful to the full Christian revelation. For instance, he is concerned that “many Christians now seem to think that [the intelligent design movement] has freed them from having to confront the Genesis record of a young earth and global flood.” He sees intelligent design’s focus on an unspecified designer–indeed, a designer who need not even be a theistic creator God–as disingenuous and a matter of expedience, done simply “to build a very large tent, allowing anyone except pure materialists to take refuge there.” Moreover, he implies that intelligent design advocates are guilty of snobbery, stating that “ID advocates would be embarrassed” to be associated with young earth creationism’s “Biblical literalism.” In zijn antwoord op deze kritiek noemt Dembski Kant: There is no way, logically speaking, to infer from such objects to an infinite, personal creator God. Thomas Aquinas understood this. Kant understood this.

De tweede kritiek van Morris die Dembski noemt, is: Morris claims that intelligent design brings nothing new to the debate: “It is not really a new approach, using basically the same evidence and arguments used for years by scientific creationists but made to appear more sophisticated with complex nomenclature and argumentation.” Morris notes that the bacterial flagellum, the icon of intelligent design, was used by the late Dick Bliss. So too, my use of the term “specified complexity” as a criterion for detecting design has, according to Morris, “essentially the same meaning as ‘organized complexity,’ which is more meaningful and which I have often used myself.” And as for my universal probability bound of 10^-150, below which chance is precluded, Emile Borel proposed a less conservative one of 10^–50 and Morris himself proposed a bound of 10^–110.

Dembski antwoordt daarop onder meer dat ID kwantitatiever is: The problem with creationism’s approach to design detection and ruling out chance is that its relevant concepts (like “organized complexity”) were never developed beyond the intuitive, pretheoretic level (and this is true even of A. E. Wilder-Smith’s ideas about information). Morris confirms this charge near the close of his book review: “A school child can easily tell a rounded stone from a crafted arrowhead–one shaped by natural forces, the other by skilled human hands. Just so, the incredible organized complexity of even the simplest one-celled organism speaks clearly of intelligent design, and one should not need sophisticated rhetoric or math to recognize this.” […]Nonetheless, I found the probabilistic reasoning in the creationist literature incomplete and imprecise.[…] Instead of emphasizing and developing work pertinent to design, creationists have tended to focus on other issues, such as dating the earth or accounting for geology in terms of a global flood.

Dembski formuleert Morris’ derde kritiek als volgt: Finally, I want to take up Morris’s concern that ID is, as he puts it, “ineffective.” According to him, it is “no more convincing to evolutionists than is young-earth creationism.” Here he cites Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, and Howard Van Till as scientists who remain “unimpressed” by intelligent design. Laat ik daar zelf op antwoorden. (Jonge-aarde)creationisme heeft voor mij altijd iets onbetrouwbaars gehad en dat volgens mij samenhangt met de rol van de theologie. Buchanan heeft daarnaast ook gewezen op de niet integere wijze van citeren door Whitcomb & Morris. Als gereformeerde heb ik sowieso bedenkingen bij het evangelische denken vanuit de angelsaksische wereld. Het is ook daarom dat ik bij ID eerst dacht aan de zoveelste evolutiekritiek die ergens toch niet goed doordacht is. En in zekere zin is dat zo – maar er ligt nu wel zoveel op tafel dat ik het niet kan laten liggen. Ik zie er de uitdaging om het theoretisch gat te vullen dan wel aan te tonen dat het theoretisch gat niet gevuld kán worden.

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