Well, just looked over the face page of AIG, Christ’s name is used once, Ken Ham 4 times today. AIG does have some good content off and on, but seems pretty internally focused.
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Unfortunately no.
If you would like to interact with BioLogos or those in the BioLogos network, I encourage you to attend next year the American Scientific Affiliation conference. It will be in Boston in 2018 and includes a wide range of views. Usually you will see RTB there too. Also BioLogos about once a year puts on a conference that is open to the public. You would be a welcome participant.
For the ASA meeting you can even submit a abstract and give a talk if you are so inclined. Hope to see you there soon!
@Swamidass
Sounds like fun (with legion opportunities to learn, and teach too)!
Maybe in a few years…
One idea I have been tossing around lately is trying to organize a debate (an ONLINE debate) between someone from BioLogos, and someone from AIG, ICR, CMI etc…Let me know if you have someone from BioLogos that you think would be interested!
Have you seen the Castle Diagram? Let me draw your attention to several things…
https://cdn-assets.answersingenesis.org/img/articles/am/v5/n1/castle-2010.gif
- Christians are encouraged to use the ways of the world against others.
- God’s revelation and is losing the war against human reasoning.
- The Cross has a crack through it.
This is nothing like the view of the world we come to through Jesus. In him, we find one who has nothing to fear from human reason and a Cross that cannot be cracked. We conspired to end him, but He rose from the dead. We have won any wars that rage on, and have the freedom to lay down the ways of the world and follow him.
I want to emphasize that this is AiG’s mission statement in an image, and it is nothing like what I see in Scripture. They are clear about this and Ken Ham has made this more clear, to remove any doubt…
If you can’t trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can’t trust the rest of the Bible. After all, every single doctrine of biblical theology is founded in the history of Genesis 1-11…if Adam wasn’t created from dust, and that if he didn’t fall into sin as Genesis states, then the gospel message of the New Testament can’t be true either.
Ham, K. & Ham, S. (2008), Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy, New Leaf Publishing Group
and on the website…
More and more, [our] emphasis is on the foundational issue: compromise of Genesis ultimately undermines the gospel itself
Maturing the Message | Answers in Genesis
The whole premise of AiG is that the Gospel is undermined by evolution and that creation science is the solution. This is the entire premise of the organization. I cannot disagree more with that theology. Jesus is not threatened here at all. Any version of Jesus threatened by evolution is not the One who rose from the dead and reigns over all things.
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At BioLogos we do not usually participate in debates. I also do not think that online debates are helpful here at all.
As a counter offer, I would be willing to dialogue with them in person about evolution and creationism. It can be videotaped too. Interactions like the can have a lot of value.
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I think it tends to flow the other way. They point to their interpretation of Genesis to claim that Jesus is threatened by any other view but theirs. So yes, they’ll share the gospel, but that is not the ultimate purpose of their existence. They share it with the full understanding, especially of those like me who were raised on their cartoon propaganda, that the gospel stands or falls based on whether the days of creation were literal 24-hour days 6,000 years ago or not. Hence why many of us who were raised on AIG are/were terrified of losing our faith if we had anything to do with evolution, even, in my case, taking a biology class in college and having to answer questions about evolution.
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@Swamidass
That was pretty much what I had in mind. Could it be over the internet in a format vaguely similar to this?
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I do not think so. My aim is to pursue reconciliation. My goal is to embrace the “other side” as family. I do not know how to do that in internet debates about science. I am very interested in dialogue, but with AiG at this time, I would want it to be face-to-face.
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… or one could say … everywhere! Check for any big science museum in the big city nearest you. Okay, not really; I’m being facetious, but only partly so. It would be kind of strange if Biologos did have any sort of [scientifically oriented] museum, as if they had some different flavor of science they were trying to do distinctly from everybody else. If they did have something distinct to offer it would be a critical self-examination of our philosophies and practice of science and the ways they have been shaped and developed by our religious and cultural backgrounds.
So I can see a sort of “history of science” museum. You could walk through scenes in which a life-sized wax Cardinal Bellarmine glowers menacingly at an obstinate Galileo. Over in the corner would be an arcade version where you in the role of a church authority get to play “Whack a theory” with your heretic hammer. [Sorry, I shouldn’t be having fun with popular misperceptions! My “inspirations” here would definitely not be in any Biologos museum, though they might be found in others!]
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That might work. I could be up for that, but it cannot be framed as a debate. Honestly, I do not know if they would be interested.
Still, face-to-face has so much more value. Why not pick a location and invite two or three people to give a videotaped talk somewhere. You could even a gather a crowd in your city to participate, or come to STL and organize it here. We would get to meet you too. On tense topics like this face-to-face can smooth over so many things missed otherwise.
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@Swamidass
That is so, so, so, so true. Most of the time, my comments sound far more brusque in writing than I would ever mean them to. What would you like it to be framed as (assuming I could get someone from AIG etc. to participate?)
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If I am to participate, you can point them to my blog. http://peacefulscience.org, so they can see what I am doing. Most recently (soon to hit the web) I did a dialogue with John Sanford, who is one of their YEC friends. My hope would be to seek common ground.
Knowing that we will probably still disagree about science, I would hope to dignify their position and to embrace them as family without shame. I would probably explain why I am convinced by evolutionary science and how I see it in Scripture, but my biggest concerns with AiG are in their theology of a threatened Jesus, not science.
I want to learn about why they teach that Jesus is threatened by evolution. Perhaps some versions of theistic evolution do not fit their theology, but I affirm a historical Adam, Inerrancy, a historical Fall, and all the key doctrine they are convinced is incompatible with evolution. In fact, I would call myself a “six-day-no-death-before-Adam-revelationist-creationist”, to borrow the term from Ken Ham. Perhaps they have problems with some theistic evolutionists, but what exactly does that have to do with evolution?
If you find someone there who is interested in honest conversation, I might have some funds to use to make this happen. It really depends, however, on there willingness to have a non-combative conversation with a peacemaker on the “other side”.
If you want to go with someone else, I’d encourage you to email Deb Haarsma or David Buller at BioLogos for some suggestions. I know @JohnWalton has visited AiG offices to discuss his book, and @Joel_Duff and @davidson have both visited the AiG ark and written about them extensively. So I am certainly not the only option. I may be the one most focused on seeking peace.
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And that was exactly what I thought, that nearly every museum would qualify. It is not the purpose of Biologos to present a different view of science unique to Biologos, but rather to help integrate Chistian faith into the lives of those with an interest in science. It is not reasonable to expect a relatively small organization to do things outside of its scope.
That last response was a bit too meandering to clearly answer your question. It would be best framed as:
A Dialogue
to Understand and be Understood
to Find Common Ground
I’m open to adjustments, but that is where the general thrust needs to go for me to be interested.
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No, but the founder of BioLogos, Dr. Francis Collins, recorded a video for the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan where he explains that he is a scientist who believes in God. He also explains that when god-of-the-gaps arguments fall apart they can do great damage to a person’s faith. The video is shown in the Hall of Human Origins, if you are interested.
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"If you can’t trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can’t trust the rest of the Bible. After all, every single doctrine of biblical theology is founded in the history of Genesis 1-11…"
from Ham, K. & Ham, S. (2008), Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy
And yet we have millions of Christians who happily consider most of Genesis to be myth or legend…and yet still place their faith in Jesus and the Resurrection.
Observant readers noticed long ago that the Old Testament is surprisingly silent on the general resurrection… and that if anything, the O.T.'s silence is much more of a problem to Christianity than how we treat Genesis!
I guess I see this another way.
I do trust Genesis as reliable history because of the Gospel of Jesus and that he rose from the dead. I hasten to add, of course, that ancient Hebrews wrote history down differently than us, but this in no way means it is ahistorical, falsehood or symbolic. It is history.