It just so happens that at the end of next month David Mention of Answers in Genesis is going to be presenting a multi-day creation seminar in Bucks County, PA (which puts the event within driving range). I haven't decided whether I'm going to subject myself to Menton's rendition of crusty, old arguments that I've heard elsewhere, but I'm considering it just to see what goes on at such gatherings. As it happens, I was just perusing a list of quotes I had compiled in search of something else and came across this passage from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum which I felt was quite appropriate;
The corruption of philosophy by the mixing of it up with superstition and theology is of a much wider extent, and is most injurious to it, both as a whole and in parts. For the human understanding is no less exposed to the impressions of fancy, then to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and sophistic school entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school rather flatters it. There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, especially in Pythagoras, where, however, the superstition is coarse and overcharged, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his school. This evil is found also in some branches of other systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, final and first causes, omitting frequently the intermediate, and the like. Against it we must use the greatest caution; for the apotheosis of error is the greatest evil of all, and when folly is worshiped, it is, as it were, a plague-spot upon the understanding. Yet, some of the moderns have indulged this folly, with such consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavoured to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, the book of Job, and other parts of Scripture; seeking thus the dead amongst the living. And this folly is the more to be prevented and restrained, because not only fantastical philosophy but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of matters divine and human.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Chin up. Look forward to the Q&A period. Destroy the last point he makes to give the audience something to go home with. ;)
Posted by: Gene Goldring | February 13, 2008 9:33 PM
St Augustine is also useful:
Posted by: John McKay | February 13, 2008 9:56 PM
The sad part is that Menton used to be a real scientist with a tenured position at Washington University School of Medicine
Posted by: Tegumai Bopsulai, FCD | February 14, 2008 3:01 PM