I admit when I first saw the title of this article, "Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules," I thought, "Okay, another theistic evolutionist playing compromise." (I was once one of these theistic evolutionist compromisers).
Then I saw that it was from the New York Times, and said to myself, "Yep, I was right."
But it turns out I was wrong. The Times gave the issue--or at least the main person in the article--a fair hearing.
Dr. Marcus R. Ross, the main person in the article, is a "young-earth" paleontologist. Part of his studies were at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.
For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”
He likened his situation to that of a socialist studying economics in a department with a supply-side bent. “People hold all sorts of opinions different from the department in which they graduate,” he said. “What’s that to anybody else?”
But not everyone is happy with that approach. “People go somewhat bananas when they hear about this,” said Jon C. Boothroyd, a professor of geosciences at Rhode Island.
So how did a paleontologist get a degree through the institution of the religion of evolution?
Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.
And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”
I did something similar when I was in law enforcement many years ago and the promotion test asked the purpose of corrections (prisons), expecting of course the liberal answer, "To rehabilitate the offender." This is baloney, of course (it's to punish the offender), but I gave them the answer they wanted because to give the correct answer would have been attacking a windmill and potentially depriving myself of a promotion.
Evolutionists aren't adherents to science so much as they are disciples of naturalism, a philosophy that holds the belief that all causes and effects are "natural" (i.e. must happen within the bounds of the natural laws we currently observe). Naturalism posits that there can be no external or "supernatural" causes in our universe.
A very closed-minded philosophy, if God is real (which He is), since as creator of the natural laws of our universe, He would certainly be above them and not subject to them.
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