I am going to provide just a brief quote from someone on “Scientism” as a preview of a longer, following post that I am going to provide on the recent issue that Christianity Today is highlighting in regards to questioning the historicity of Adam relative to contemporary “Scientific” inquiry. Here’s the quick little quote:

The theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and end-all— that what is not in science textbooks is not worth knowing—is an ideologist with a peculiar and distorted doctrine of his own. For him, science is no longer a sector of the cognitive enterprise but an all-inclusive world-view. This is the doctrine not of science but of scientism. To take this stance is not to celebrate science but to distort it. — Nicholas Rescher, The Limits Of Science

(Quoted by: J.P. Moreland & William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview)

I will be taking a modal/analytical look at the impact that either what has been called a Strong or a Weak form of Scientism is having upon the current debate surrounding the historical reality of Adam in the book of Genesis. It is the ‘Weak’ form of scientism that seems to be at play amongst the methodology at work in this rising discussion amongst Christians. Stay tuned . . .

*PS. I am going to keep comments closed on this post because I want to reserve any forthcoming comments on this topic for my next post; which will be longer and more detailed in regards to the methodology that I see being employed in this whole situation. I think it is important to remember that we all have interpretive grids informing our interpretive decisions relative to any data. The question is, relative to “Science,” is if in fact, as claimed, that they are immune to this reality, and thus their respective conclusions are simple, basic, brute observational realities. If this is not the case, which it is not, then I sense that places like Biologos and other like-minded Christian academicians are being over-wrought (and somewhat triumphalist) in their “Scientific” conclusions. There are an array of inductive steps one takes to come to the conclusions that some Christian scientists are coming to in regards to the “data” and how it affects their interpretation of natural history juxtaposed with salvation history revealed in Scripture. It is these interpretive steps, and the informing assumptions that need to be considered more carefully before we run head-long into a situation that is too quickly being compared (abductively) to a Copernican or Galilean revolution. More coming . . .