OLDEARTHCREATIONISMANDTHEFALL摘要.PDF

CHRISTIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE PO Box 8500, Charlotte, NC 28271 Feature Article: JAF4344 OLD EARTH CREATIONISM AND THE FALL: A Summary OF The End of Christianity by William A. Dembski This article first appeared in Christian Research Journal, volume 34, number 04 (2011). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: SYNOPSIS The End of Christianity presupposes that the earth and universe are old and, given that presupposition, attempts to answer how the fall of humanity could be responsible for natural evil, such as animal suffering. As such, it is a work of speculative theology. Since, on the presupposition of an old earth, animal suffering precedes the arrival of humans, the challenge is to explain how the effect (natural evil) can temporally precede the cause (human sin and the fall). My solution in my book The End of Christianity is to argue that, just as the effects of salvation at the cross of Christ reach both forward in time (saving present-day Christians) and backward (saving Old Testament saints), so the effects of the fall reach forward in time as well as backward. What makes this argument work is the ability of God to arrange events at one time to anticipate events at a later time. From the vantage of a young earth, The End of Christianity may seem like a vain exercise (given a young earth, natural evil comes directly after the fall and is a clear consequence of it). Yet, the evidence of science suggests that the earth and universe are much older than the chronologies in Genesis 1–11 would indicate. It is classical Christian orthodoxy that the fall of humanity is responsible for both moral evil (the evil that humans commit against each other) and natural evil (the ev