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'I don't take a position on that'

By jlynch on February 4, 2006.

There always has been tension between advocates of Young Earth Creationism (such as Ken Ham and Henry Morris) and the ID movement. While the former believe that ID supporters should actively support Biblical principles, the latter refuse to disassociate themselves from a young earth position as that would negate the "big tent" strategy perfected by Phil Johnson. Witness, for example, what Johnson says about YEC:

My approach with the young-earthers is to say, 'I'm not
asking you to give up your point of view.' In fact I'm not even saying
what my opinion is with it. I don't take any position on the age of the
earth or the cosmos. â¦

When I'm reported as agreeing that the earth is 4.6 billion years
old or whatever, I always correct that. We say, 'No, I don't take a
position on that. That's a separate issue and we should not discuss
that now. It's not an issue that's ripe to be discussed. We should
discuss that only after we've made the breakthrough on the Darwinian
mechanism.' And then, to my young-earth friends I say, 'We can have a
real good discussion or argument if you please on this subject. And
weâll have it in a much better frame of mind for having had the
experience of working together on the initial breakthrough. And of
course then the world will look different because if the scientific
leadership has been that wrong about the creation mechanism, it's
possible that they could be wrong about something else too.'

Let's be honest about this, there is no scientific evidence that the Earth is young - YECs such as Paul Nelson and Kurt Wise have admitted this. The only evidence is biblical. Johnson is willing to claim that there is a possible scientific controversy about the age of the Earth but unwilling to admit that it is really a biblical issue, for fear of appearing to be religiously inspired. Frankly, I'm with Ham and Morris on this one - Johnson should at least be honest on this. With that in mind, Answers In Genesis posted the following today, largely based on an interview with Georgia Purdom, AiG "researcher".

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Anti-evolution

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