Be sure to bring your brain, Introduction

I'm going to do a series of posts that follow the path that I have followed so far on the issue of origins. I heartily recommend the Haarsmas' book as it provides a more complete discussion than I will have the attention span to provide.

The question of origins raises such emotion that it's usually the primary question that comes to mind when someone thinks of the relationship between science and theology. In fact, if you tell someone that you are reading a book or teaching a class about science and theology they will typically assume that it's all about either bashing the Bible or bashing Darwin.

In this series of posts, I'm not going to discuss this entire question. Instead, I'm going to focus on something that I have realized over the decades that I have studied this topic and that the Haarsmas' book makes quite clear: there is no conservative position on origins that is a slam-dunk, tidy little package that obviously falls out of a straightforward interpretation of Scripture and science.

All of the standard approaches have difficulties. If you are going to take both scientific observation and the Bible seriously, you are going to have to do some real thinking and make some tough decisions. I know; I have been working through all this myself since my teens (late in the Jurassic).

So I'm going to look at the difficulties in each approach: the reasons why in each case I continued to travel on what I hope is a "hermeneutical spiral" and not a random walk. The first stop is at Young Earth Creationism, the default position for most evangelicals and fundamentalists.