Aquila Report: Must We Believe in an Historical Adam?

Anyone who has read Gordon H. Clark's critique of empirical science knows that he rejected empiricism, logical positivism, and the tabula rasa or blank mind as self-refuting axioms that cannot be established by empirical science.  Induction, Clark further stated, can never produce a universal law.  This is known as the inductive fallacy.  If all crows are claimed to be black and even one crow turns out to be white, then the universal law is refuted.

Furthermore, any science that begins with unproven axioms has no advantage over Christianity.  Why would those who advocate axioms have a problem with the Christian axiom that Scripture alone is the Word of God?  Therefore, the author of the following article gives away the bank, despite his concern to uphold the creation of Adam and Eve by divine fiat from the dust of the ground and from Adam's rib respectively.  Worse for the compromisers with common grace and modern science, the Bible says that Adam and Eve were created as fully human adults who had an innate ability to reason and to speak in a known language. 

See:  Aquila Report: Must We Believe in an Historical Adam?

For a Clarkian response to Empirical Science see:  Science and Truth

 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:26-27 NKJ)

 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7 NKJ)


 And the LORD God said, "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him." 19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. 21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. 22 Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. 23 And Adam said: "This is now bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man." (Genesis 2:18-23 NKJ)

Gordon H. Clark and Philosophy of Science | foxinthevineyard

Of course, Clark is by no means the first to realize these problems. Bertrand Russell did:

“All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: ‘If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.” This argument is of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: “If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.’ If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the argument upon which all scientific laws are based.” The Scientific Outlook By Bertrand Russell (Publisher: Routledge; New edition (July 18, 2001)

And Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations:

“First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it…. We know that our scientific theories always remain hypotheses…. In science there is no“knowledge” in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth…. Einstein declared that his theory was false: he said that it would be a better approximation to the truth than Newton’s, but he gave reasons why he would not, even if all predictions came out right, regard it as a true theory…. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement;… our knowledge, our doctrine is conjectural;… it consist of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.”

See: Gordon H. Clark and Philosophy of Science | foxinthevineyard

Postmodernism and the Decline of Western Science

With the advent of postmodernism and the departure of the soft sciences from empirical, evidentiary discipline we begin to see the spiraling of science itself into absurdities where reason itself contradicts itself. A good example of this is the transgender movement, homosexuality and gay rights movement, and abortion. It seems obvious that political clout can influence the sciences more than pure science itself.

I guess Thomas Kuhn was right after all. Science is not so much dependent on pure reason and the facts or evidentiary and logical proofs as it is dependent on authoritative sociological factors like peer pressure and dominant paradigms. Seizing the insight of Kuhn, the gay rights and transgender rights movements have actually been able to overturn the dominant paradigm within the scientific community simply by exerting political muscle in the media. Hence, we see homosexuality no longer described as a psychological disorder in the American Psychological Association's catalogue of disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition.

How long will it be before the transgender lobby also overturns current "science" which describes the transgender condition as a disorder? As it stands now, according to the DSM-IV-TR 4th ed., Gender Identity Disorder is still as disorder contra Barbara Walters and ABC's 20/20:

Gender Identity Disorder is where a persons anatomical sex and their gender identity conflict. This is also called transsexualism. In this disorder, there is a desire to be rid of one's own gender appropriate anatomy and to live as a person of the opposite gender. These people often, but not always, cross-dress to be in line with their gender identity. Increasingly, numbers of those with this disorder are choosing surgical interventions.  (See: Medical Interventions).  (Note:  This is apparently a dead link now.  Sorry about that.)

Notice that the sick patient chooses to mutilate himself or herself with the full approval of the treating psychiatrist/psychologist. Could it be that doctors of psychology and psychiatry are more interested in personal profit than the well being of the patient? Instead of curing the patient of the disorder the doctor helps the patient to mutilate his or her body to conform with the irrational thinking at the root of the disorder.

What other disease is treated by giving the patient the power to treat himself or herself? I suppose we should just dispose of the medical profession altogether and let the patients treat themselves?

If the current trend continues, science itself is headed back toward the dark ages where superstition and magic were dominate over reason. Perhaps we need a healthy dose of Enlightenment/modernist thinking to check this irrational trend toward postmodernist irrationality? Just a thought.