Ken Ham's Exclusionist Theology: Can you reject a literal six-day creation and still be orthodox?

I have propounded my own theory of human development on this blog many times. I believe, as I have said, that the evidence suggests that human beings are evolving into creationists. There are many indications that creationism is on the rise, and that Darwinists are headed for extinction, the victim of their own theory that it is only the fit that survive. I have called their fitness into question on the basis of a disorder known as "Darwinian Intolerance" (DI), a malady which I attribute to close intellectual inbreeding and whose acronym, I am amused to note, is the same as that of the Discovery Institute.

But a monkey wrench, so to speak, has been thrown into the legitimacy of my theory by a prominent creationist, who appears to have contracted a bad case of a related malady. Ken Ham, the proprietor of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, a facility whose right to exist I have defended on a number of occasions against the Darwin Police who have sought to shut the place down, appears to have descended to the same level of intellectual intolerance to which he himself has been subjected by his Darwinist detractors. He has gone after a fellow speaker at a home school convention for not being sufficiently close-minded about the issue of creation.

Jay Wile, who I had the great pleasure of having dinner with a couple times last week at the Southwest Home School Convention, is a science teacher and the author of a set of widely used science textbooks--and a creationist. He blogged about this at Proslogion, defending Peter Enns, a well-regarded Biblical scholar against Ham's charge that, because he does not believe in a literal account of creation, Enns is a "compromiser" and a theological "liberal."

One of the things you find out pretty quickly from talking with Wile is that he is a practitioner of the arts of critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion, things which the New Atheists and other militant Darwinists officially oppose. And he had the temerity to actually apply them to statements which didn't really deserve them.

And to top it off, Wile's defense of Enns itself was attacked by the Hamites, as evidenced by the now 141 comments on this post.

One of the points Wile makes is that, if you are going to categorize everyone who does not believe in a literal 6-day creation as a compromiser and theological liberal, then you're going to have to deal with the consequences, which consist of calling people theological liberals who clearly are not.

Here's the argument:

• All people who reject a literal 6-day creation are compromisers and theological liberals
• C. S. Lewis (and Norman Geisler, and Gleason Archer, and William Lane Craig, [provide your own name from the list of prominent orthodox thinkers throughout the history of the Church] rejects a literal 6-day creation
• Therefore, C. S. Lewis (etc.) is a compromiser and a theological liberal

The major premise here, which is clearly the one on which the Hamites are operating, leads to obvious absurdity. It's enough to cause a retrograde kink in my theory of the linear evolutionary ascent of creationists over time.

I have a quick and easy way to determine whether someone is orthodox: Go over each point in the Nicene Creed. If they affirm them all (with the possible exception of the "filioque" clause, which was added after the Council and which, on that plausible ground, the Eastern Orthodox reject), then they're orthodox. That was the Church's way of doing it. Might as well get used to it.

[And we note that a literal six-day creation was not one of the things the early Church chose to make a criterion of orthodoxy]

And I have an equally quick way of determining whether they really believe in a literal reading of the Bible: Offer them a bottle of fine French wine. If they refuse on Biblical grounds (despite all those pesky positive portrayals of "wine" that cannot be explained away by tortuous cultural, moral, sociological, and theological reasoning), then they really don't believe in the literal interpretation they profess.

Is there something complicated about all this?

Evolutionist response to new Gallup poll further evidence that humans are evolving into creationists

A new Gallup poll has sent the cultural elite into paroxysms of superciliousness. And if you don't know what that means, then you must not be one of them, but, instead, an unfortunate member of some lower order of thinker. Quite possibly, a Republican. Or even, God help you, a creationist.

A majority of Republicans, according to Gallup, "do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life." This new survey result also shows that, even among non-Republicans, there is a significant minority who do not believe the theory of evolution. In fact, 40 percent of Democrats take a basically creationist position.

The new survey, when considered in light of past surveys showing increasing popular support for creationism in recent years, gives added credence to my theory that human beings are evolving into creationists. People who believe in the survival of the fittest, as it turns out, are less fit for survival. Those who believe in natural selection are losing out in Nature's selection process.

In short, when the final character in the Hall of Man has been added, he will be a guy in a short sleeve dress shirt with horn-rimmed glasses and a pocket protector who believes the earth is 6,000 years old.

I am still waiting for the recognition and celebrity that is my due for thinking up this revolutionary new addendum to Darwin's theory, but I may have to wait until all the Darwinists have become extinct--until, that is, Nature has finished playing her ultimate practical joke.

Darwinists have completely misinterpreted these survey results (and if this is not evidence of their diminishing status in the gene pool, I don't know what is), seeing in them further evidence of how much smarter they are than all those religious rubes, and how much higher their branch is on the evolutionary tree. But this does nothing more than add to the increasingly formidable body of data suggesting the deterioration of their ability to reason properly and to see the plain truth in front of them--important survivability traits in humans. Their branch on the tree is rotting from the inside, and, if they are not careful, they will only succeed in landing themselves alongside the Tasmanian Wolf, the Great Auk, and the Wooly Mammoth on Nature's scrapheap.

These new poll results, they seem to think, should be considered evidence of the ignorance of religious people in general, and Republicans in particular. They prove, once and for all they think, the tendency of conservative religious people to ignore reason and evidence in favor of faith and reliance on authority. This, of course, assumes that people who believe in Darwinism are all independent-minded people who have come to their views by having gone through some kind of advanced scientific reasoning process, which, of course, is nonsense.

Most people who believe in Darwinism believe in it for the same reason religious people believe in creationism: on the basis of faith and authority. Instead of placing faith in religion, their authority is Science. Creationists have the Bible; evolutionists have the Origin of the Species. In both cases, the majority of the adherents believe unquestioningly in what their holy books say. At least religious people have the excuse that that is what they are supposed to do.

Most people who believe in evolution have no clue why they believe it, other than that's what they are told is believed by Science, that exalted body of knowledge overseen by those higher beings in white laboratory smocks. They can't tell a helium molecule from a hole in the ozone, but they do know this: Science hath spoken.

The idea that most people believe in evolution for any other reason is just wishful--and quite sloppy--thinking, which, if Darwinists didn't have their noses so high up in the air, they would realize. This increasing tendency on the part of Darwinists toward careless reasoning and self-congratulatory rhetoric is a sure sign of a species in decline.

"Pride goeth before the fall"--or, as my theory states it: "Arrogance precedes extinction." Evolutionists are losing their evolutionary edge. The dominance of Darwinism is diminishing.

When the chapter in the book of evolutionary history on the theory of evolution is finally written, there will be little doubt why they went the way of the Dodo.