Readers may be interested to know that the Australasian Division’s …

Comment on Silence of the Geoscience Research Institute by milton hook.

Readers may be interested to know that the Australasian Division’s RECORD, July 17, carried a news item by Mark Kellner in which Ted Wilson was given his academic title of Doctor but Benjamin Clausen was given no academic title. Clausen was simply tagged MISTER or was untitled. It says it all, doesn’t it? We wouldn’t want the church members to think Clausen was a knowledgable man, would we? Far better to portray him as a lone crackpot defying the vote at the GC session.
Further, the idea of having a bipolar or disparate approach to the creation debate seems absurd. Why would we want to throw millions of dollars at a research institution that consistantly denies a short creation model and at the same time spend more millions for an ongoing campaign to promote a short model?
If I was a scientist at the GRI I would be looking for another job. Church administration will find some pretext to axe those who do not voice the party line. Administrators will use the line “change for change sake,” or the accussations of “non-cooperation” or “unsuitability” or something similar.
Ted Wilson’s father and his predecessor brought theological schism in the 1970s and 1980s because they were not theologians but insisted on retreating to untenable church traditions. Memories are short. We never learn from history, do we? Church administrators want us to move forward. They don’t want to be judged by the mistakes of the past. Instead, they want the chance to do it all over again. It seems to me that Ted Wilson, who is not a scientist, is now about to cause schism once more by silencing the GRI and find solace in tradition.
Where are the theologians who can inform the discussion about the literary genre of Genesis 1-11? They are, no doubt, trembling in their offices with an OUT FOR LUNCH sign hanging on their doors.