A non sequitur. You were speaking about “fundamentalists,” not “large, denominational, confessional churches.” I am well aware of the denominational, confessional churches such as the Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox. But these are not fundamentalist churches in the normal American meaning of the term (though perhaps having spent your life in Australia and Taiwan you are not aware of typical American usage).
Nor is “evangelical” a subset of “fundamentalist,” as your sloppy grouping above seems to imply.
Most of the Baptists and Baptist-type denominations (there are hundreds if not thousands of such denominations) known to me do not subscribe to the classic Lutheran, Reformed, etc. confessions, and have no confession of their own, beyond a generic Protestant statement of belief in God (often with the Trinity affirmed, but no elaborate doctrine of Trinity presented), in salvation through Jesus Christ by faith alone, and in the Bible as the true, inspired, trustworthy, and inerrant (sometimes qualified by “in all that it teaches”) word of God. Sometimes they mention the Apostles’ Creed, rarely the other two major Creeds. I married into a mainline Baptist family, and none of the creeds are ever read in the services. That is not to say they are repudiated, but no emphasis is put on them. The emphasis is all on Bible, Bible, and Bible.
Finally, the vast majority of Pentecostals and charismatics I know of barely give a fig for creeds, confessions, etc. – their whole emphasis is on “religious experience.”
Another non sequitur. “Fundamentalist” does not equal “pre-modern.” Thomism is a pre-modern religious stance, but it is not fundamentalist. So are the stances of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, etc. “pre-modern,” but they are not fundamentalists. I’m very proud to describe myself as holding a “pre-modern” theology – I’m in the best imaginable theological company (the Greek and Latin Fathers, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin…), and I make no apology to you or anyone else here for that. But I’m certainly not “fundamentalist” in any normal sense of the word, as I reject typical fundamentalist interpretive methods and avoid churches with anything like a fundamentalist culture as far as possible.
First, I have not made specific ID arguments here (irreducible complexity, etc.) I have merely rebutted common misconceptions about what ID people say and think.
Second, it is outright false to say that I have consistently argued against evolution. Joshua has already corrected some people on this when they have accused me of it. I define evolution as “descent with modification” and accept that as my working understanding of the earth’s biological history. As always, in your inability to handle nuance of any kind (a characteristic I have found very common among autodidacts, who tend to see everything in black and white terms), you fail to distinguish between “denying common descent” and “expressing skepticism that proposed mechanisms A, B, etc. are capable of accounting causally for the transformations they are supposed to have produced.” Elementary logic should enable you to see the difference between “I believe that Mr. Boddy was murdered” and “I am skeptical that the knife wound was responsible for the death; it looks to be in the wrong place for a fatal wound; it may be that he was poisoned by his wife, who then stuck a knife in his back to make it look as if a housebreaker did it.” One can believe that X happened while being unsatisfied with any current causal account of how it happened.
Third, you have proved incapable of expressing in your own words the specific claim of “the modern evolutionary synthesis,” or even of justifying the word “the” in that expression, given that there are many quite differing views of evolutionary mechanism floating around in the field. You’re in no position to accuse me of “refusing to accept” a position that you personally can’t even define.
Finally, accusing me of
is absurd. You might as well accuse Darwin of the same thing, since he used the term “descent with modification” rather than “evolution” in the Origin, and only adopted the term “evolution” later when it became current. It might help if you read some actual primary texts of evolutionary theory, instead of relying so much on the opinions of others. Your posts show no indication that you have ever cracked the spine of any book by Darwin, Wallace, Gould, Gaylord Simpson, etc.
Not one of the examples you gave allows unlimited independence of thought and expression. And laughably, you chose as one of your examples the Adventists, one of the narrowest of all religious groups – and in fact one of the major drivers of American fundamentalism, which you so despise. You seem very badly confused.
There is no retreat. That is what I meant in the first place. Every Christian tradition has non-negotiables. To that extent, every Christian tradition is as guilty of putting apologetic interests above freedom of thought as the “fundamentalists” are. It’s merely a difference of where the boundaries are. For the Orthodox, the Trinity is beyond question. For others, it’s not. But all have their limits to “freedom of expression” within the church. Your implied distinction between “anti-intellectual apologetics” and “responsible Christian theology” is much harder to maintain than you imagine. The word “apologia” means “defense,” and every Christian tradition has a position it must defend. To that extent, all Christian theology is inevitably “apologetic.” Christianity isn’t an open-ended, Socratic discussion about the truth. There are boundaries. But those people who have boundaries you don’t respect, you call “fundamentalist” or anti-intellectual or the like. Those people who have boundaries you do respect, you leave alone. Your pretense that you are open to any conclusion someone might derive from the Bible is just that – a pretense. You are just as agenda-driven as anyone else posting here, and your affectation of pure scholarly neutrality will not fool anyone.
That’s not my position, but it’s not as stupid a position as you imply. Arguably the damage done to Christianity by the post-Lutheran anarchy of 10,000 denominations was greater than the damage done by the Medieval church with its total authority. I don’t make a final judgment on that, but the verdict is not clear. A Christian world in which people regard someone like Aquinas as laying out the true theology is much better than a Christian world in which people regard someone like Ken Ham or Hal Lindsey or Herbert W. Armstrong as possessing the correct understanding of the Bible, or in which the cowardly and nebulous nothingness taught by the clerical and intellectual leaders of The United Church of Christ or the American Protestant Episcopal Church passes for Christian belief. If forced to live with theological error, I would rather live with pre-modern theological errors than the errors introduced either by the post-Enlightenment prostration of Christianity before secular modernity or by the misguided (if understandable) fundamentalist reaction to that prostration.