Seven Days that Divide the World

Abstract

This present comparison between volumes by Oxford Mathematics Professor, John Lennox and Civil Engineer, Philip Stott is the last of this series of articles on evangelicalism’s syncretism with modernity’s epistemology. It will be the most controversial. Modernity’s foundational presupposition begins with autonomous human observations.  Humanity, it then postulates, can correctly make all the right connections and relationships between the various data points humans observe. Out of these observations, modern humans believe that they then can correctly discern aspects of history, cosmogony, and cosmology that can overturn centuries old readings of Scripture based on classic hermeneutical principles. Based on these autonomously discerned connections and relationships, modernity-bound humans and modernity-bound evangelicals who adopt its empiricist epistemology believe they can now give the true story of the universe. They assume that they can also provide the accurate meaning of the pinpoints of light we see in our telescopes and their distance from the earth, that we can know that we on earth exist in a spiral shaped galaxy called the Milky Way, and so forth. Therefore, based on these interpretations of data points (which they call facts), modernity-bound evangelical Christians can contradict a clear, historical consensus concerning what the Scripture teaches about the creation and age of the universe, how it interacts within itself, and where it all came from.