Friday, March 30, 2012

Congratulations to Bill Dembski!

Bill Dembski has a new job as the "Phillip E. Johnson Research Professor of Science and Culture" at the Southern Evangelical Seminary. I know all readers of this blog will join me in congratulating Prof. Dembski in obtaining this position, for which he is most suited.

Southern Evangelical Seminary's doctrinal statement says "We believe in the special creation of the entire space-time universe and of every basic form of life in the six historic days of the Genesis creation record. We also believe in the historicity of the biblical record, including the special creation of Adam and Eve as the literal progenitors of all people, the literal fall and resultant divine curse on the creation, the worldwide flood, and the origin of nations and diverse languages at the tower of Babel." I wonder if Prof. Dembski will be required to recant his belief in an old earth?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Origin of diverse languages at the tower of Babel? Can't leave cosmology and biology well enough alone, now they've got to encroach on linguistics.

Schenck said...

That Tower of Babel bit jumped out at me too. Do linguists actually get into arguments with these guys? Do they think after the tower fell that Proto-Indo-european was a spoken language and the rest of the family spread from there, or do they think English and Hindu sprang up full formed?

These guys absolutely cannot deal with anything changing over time can they?

Anonymous said...

Dembski's gonna have some splainin' to do, for sure.

~~ Paul

Circe said...

Actually, claiming that Hindi sprang up "full formed" would be rather hard to digest, since even Ken Ham would have to be persuaded that there is ample written evidence that there are no Hindi texts of consequence before the 12th century AD (before which other very different derivatives of Sanskrit prevailed in North India).

KeithB said...

Circe:
Why just Hindi? Don't forget Italian, Spanish, French, English ...

Anonymous said...

Do linguists actually get into arguments with these guys?

Imagine what the arguments would look like:

-If English descended from a Germanic precursor, why is there still German?

-Where's the Missing Link between Old English and Early Middle English? Where's Old Crocoduck Middle English?

-Languages are irreducibly complex. If you remove words, or change grammatical ordering, you completely alter the meanings of sentences. There's no way languages can evolve into whole new languages.