My Parents Are to Blame!

Joel Duff has written many articles against AiG and our position on the authority of Scripture beginning in Genesis. Recently he wrote an article decrying an article I wrote concerning our 2017 theme, Igniting a New Reformation. I have no intention of answering this typical attack article from him point by point since people can read the answersingenesis.org website for themselves and find out about the high-quality creationist research our highly qualified researchers have conducted (which Duff continually ignores).

In regard to Duff’s somewhat sarcastic and at times demeaning language (really invoking ad hominem attacks on me), what I specifically wanted to comment on was the false accusation that what we believe at AiG had its roots in the Seventh Day Adventist movement with Ellen White.

Actually, what I believe concerning God’s Word beginning in Genesis is a result of my parents training me to stand boldly, uncompromisingly, and unashamedly on the authority of the Word of God. My parents hated compromise and did their best to uphold and honor the authority of God’s Word without in any way knowingly compromising God’s Word with fallible ideas of man. I was a creationist interested in teaching God’s Word in Genesis and opposing evolutionary ideas before I ever heard of Henry Morris or any others that Duff mentions who had an interest in the topic of origins, the Flood, and other issues in Genesis.

Young-earth creation . . . was historic Christian orthodoxy until the 19th century when the millions of years myth was popularized.

Dr. Duff is just following the distorted historical analysis of the openly agnostic, apostate Seventh Day Adventist historian, Ronald Numbers (whom he refers to in the article). Young-earth creation is not a novel view invented by Seventh Day Adventists. It was historic Christian orthodoxy until the 19th century when the millions of years myth was popularized by atheist and deist geologists (and some professing Christian geologists who ignored Genesis), as is documented in the first three chapters of Coming to Grips with Genesis. In the early 19th century, most of the church quickly compromised with millions of years, but the young-earth “scriptural geologists” at that time raised biblical, geological, and philosophical arguments against those old-earth ideas and reinterpretations of Scripture, as The Great Turning Point documents.

Duff also incorrectly implies that Adventist George McCready Price invented the young-earth view and that it was merely modified by Whitcomb and Morris (authors of The Genesis Flood). But Price most definitely did not. He was interpreting the geological record using “biblical glasses,” just like the scriptural geologists did and as modern young-earth creationists do. Duff needs to do some careful research instead of following unbelievers like Ronald Numbers and the writers of Wikipedia articles (who, among other things, have ignored Mortenson’s scholarly work on the scriptural geologists)!

You can read Duff’s article (showing his compromise on Genesis and opposition to those who stand with AiG) here. This article illustrates why we desperately need a new reformation in the church!