From: Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu>
> There are circles, however, in which Ron's work is simply not appreciated.
> One of his first books was a scholarly biography of Ellen White (she is
> mentioned in various posts lately), a book that some viewed as an "expose"
> of this SDA prophetess, and a book that helped get Ron sacked from his
> teaching job at Loma Linda University.
In the preface to "Prophetess of Health: Ellen G. White" Ron makes the
following statement, "I have refrained from using divine inspiration as an
historical explanation." (p. xi) Thus, in a single sentence, Ron
automatically excludes any possibility that God could have prophets
(including Paul, John, Isaiah, etc.) any where and at any time thoughout
history. The only kind of historical explanation allowed is from strictly
human sources. In this way, the Bible is also automatically just a
collection of myths and irrelevant to reality. Since he automatically
excludes any possibility that God could have communicated with Ellen, then
Ellen MUST have gotten all her ideas from strictly human origins. Does this
book prove that Ellen got all her ideas from strictly human sources? No, it
cannot do so because that is assumed from the beginning. (You cannot prove
what you assume) All Ron does is show some similarities between some things
that Ellen has written and what others have written. It has absolutely no
impact on whether she received visions or not. It is completely irrelevant
to whether she was a prophet or not.
But Ron thinks he has exposed Ellen as false prophet (he hasn't and
couldn't) and therefore he has chosen to think of her as simply a deluded,
religious person. It is no wonder that he was sacked from LLU.
Ron's book on Creationism, while in some respects providing a lot of
historical information that would otherwise be unavailable, has very little
impact on Creationism itself for the same reasons. Since there is no divine
inspiration, the Bible cannot be the inspired word of God. And Genesis is
simply mythology. Because Ron starts with these assumptions, his "history"
is fatally flawed and doesn't prove anything about the validity or
invalidity of Creationism.
He calls himself an agnostic. In reality he is one of Christianity's
greatest enemies.
Allen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 23 2001 - 02:51:27 EDT