DescentBB

Sergeant Thorne wrote: Scientific discussion is all very well, but Evolution is not merely a scientific creation, it depends on the philosophy that there is no creator.

PhilVaz wrote:England's John Pye Smith (1774-1851), a divinity tutor in the dissenting Homerton College in London, lectures issued in 1840 under the title On the Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science, Smith argued that geological truth was compatible with biblical truth;

America's Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), student and friend of Benjamin Silliman, a Calvinistic Congregationalist theologian, president of Amherst College, founding member of the National Academy of Sciences, and expert on New England geology; Hitchcock saw it "as his task to assure the world, especially any skeptics of science, that every finding of geology could then be corroborated in revelation, so that there was never any contradiction between the two accounts of nature"; because Hitchcock wrote for theological and ecclesiastical journals, he had a major impact on the thought of theologians and pastors.

Scotland's Hugh Miller (1802-1856), a highly respected and devout Presbyterian who was gifted with an elegance, grace, wit, and clarity of written expression matched by few; editor of Witness, the voice of the evangelical wing of the Church of Scotland that ultimately formed the Free Church of Scotland during the Disruption of 1843, Miller gained a reputation as a zealous, eloquent, and trusted defender of Christian orthodoxy;

"Plain men who set themselves to deduce from Scripture the figure of the planet" had little doubt that the earth was flat "until corrected by the geographer"; "plain men who set themselves to acquire from Scripture some notion of the planetary motions" thought that the sun moved around an earth at rest "until corrected by the astronomer"; "plain men who have sought to determine from Scripture the age of the earth" were confident that the earth was about six thousand years old "until corrected by the geologist." (Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks [1857], p. 305-306)

Then there are the Protestant theologians like Charles Hodge (1797-1878) and B.B. Warfield (1851-1921):

"Hodge, Warfield, and most of their colleagues at Princeton shared a common attitude toward science in relation to theology. Their steady goal was to preserve the harmony of truth. Hodge and Warfield refused to countenance any permanent antagonism between the two realms of knowledge....The commitment of Warfield and Hodge to solid empirical science and to the concursus of divine and natural action gave them extraordinary balance in sifting the difficult questions of science and faith that beset their era. One of the reasons that many in subsequent decades have failed to retain their equipoise on this subject may be that they have abandoned one or both of these commitments." ("Hodge and Warfield on Science, the Bible, Evolution, and Darwinism," by Mark Noll / David Livingstone in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation edited by Keith Miller [2003], page 62, 71)