Christians and Evolution by Berry R J;

Author:Berry, R J;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2014-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Deluged

Philip Pattemore is Associate Professor of Paediatrics in the University of Otago, in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was born to missionary parents in India, but has spent almost all his life in New Zealand, qualifying in medicine from the University of Auckland. His main research interest is in childhood asthma.

First contact

The first I remember hearing anything about creationism was when I was about eleven or twelve years old, in a slide presentation given in 1968 by the father of a school friend. We were boarders at a school for missionary kids in Ooty1 in the Nilgiri Hills of South India. I don’t remember much about the talk except that the man seemed quite vehement about the six days of creation and Noah’s flood, and cast slurs of one sort or another about dinosaur fossils. It all seemed pretty convincing to me, but not particularly surprising – many of these things had been unspokenly assumed as I grew up. What was unfamiliar to me was the forcefulness and fervour with which he presented the subject, suggesting that he was doing battle with someone for these beliefs.

We may have regarded this man as a bit eccentric. I recall difficulty in identifying with his message; even though I was not qualified to disagree, his unusual forcefulness on the topic meant that I couldn’t easily put it into context with what my family and other Christian adults with whom I was familiar believed. His talk just seemed to be a fervent oddity which I had nowhere to hang in my developing framework of beliefs. I didn’t even know whether my parents (missionaries in the Pune area of Western India) were creationists – I had never heard them hold forth on the topics this man covered.

I had already become a committed believer by the age of nine and was active in my school dorm in Bible studies and prayer meetings. When I was thirteen years old, my family moved to New Zealand. I was pretty conservative. As a teenager I read many Christian books, most of which were evangelistic or missionary in background, and some of which included books about the rapture, a belief common among conservative Christians. My older brother, however, whose expression of faith developed strongly during university, was always quite dismissive of such speculative writings.

Swept away by the flood

In my last year or two of school I came across The Genesis Flood, published in 1961 by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. I had by then read some superficial creationist material, probably tracts of one sort or another. But The Genesis Flood had me enthralled. Morris was an accomplished scientist, a hydrologist; Whitcomb was a theologian. Here they were discussing the creation and Noah’s flood in apparently detailed and referenced scientific writing. The Genesis Flood caused a deluge of its own – a reaction against evolution. Suddenly many evangelicals, who as a whole had been largely indifferent to the issue, became fervent creationists fighting evolutionary atheism and atheistic evolution, particularly in the USA.

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