Emanation ex nihilo

“Evolution and the Reformation of Biology” is a somewhat peculiar work written by Hebden Taylor, a Reformed missionary and reverend within the Anglican Communion. Theologically, he saw himself as following in the footsteps of Dutch Neo-Calvinists Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd. His book against Darwin's theory of evolution is published by Craig Press, which also carries works by Christian Reconstructionists Rousas Rushdoony and Gary North.

The first part of the book contains the usual young earth creationist (YEC) arguments against evolution and modern geology. Taylor frequently references “The Genesis Flood” by Henry Morris and John C Whitcomb. He explicitly says that God created the universe with the appearance of age!

The second part is an exposition of Dooyeweerd's hard-to-understand Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea, which Taylor sees as an alternative to the materialism underlying Darwin's “apostate science”. However, Dooyeweerd's ideas doesn't strike me as creationist in the strict YEC sense. They sound more akin to Neo-Platonism, with God “creating” (or emanating?) a long series of “modalities” and “radical types” in a descending hierarchy. The “types” (archetypes or Ideas?) created by God seem to unfold their inner potentialities in a progressive sequence within time. This is compatible with old earth creationism (OEC), but also with a “hard” teleological form of theistic evolution.

As far as I understand, Herman Dooyeweerd wasn't a creationist sensu stricto. This makes me wonder why Taylor chose this particular (and peculiar) philosopher to begin with? (Kuyper also accepted evolution, as long as humans were somehow kept out of it.) J Glenn Friesen has suggested, in his tome “Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy”, that Dooyweerd was heavily inspired by the Hermetism of Franz von Baader. If true, it would raise a lot of questions about the Calvinist “orthodoxy” of Dooyeweerd. Not that I mind – I'm more sympathetic to Neo-Platonism, Hermetism and even evolutionism than to Calvinism (“Neo” or otherwise). Many of Dooyeweerd's arguments against reductionism sound correct, albeit expressed in an arcane language probably made even worse by bad translations. However, they are not arguments against “evolution” as such, but against Darwinism in the more narrow sense (think Dawkins).

Perhaps Taylor should have stopped at “The Genesis Flood”…