Summary Of Dr. Bush's The Advancement

Introduction

Dr. Bush’s purpose in writing The Advancement: Keeping the Faith in an Evolutionary Age, is an attempt to challenge today’s Christians to defend the faith against a worldview that is no longer theistic in nature. Dr. Bush states in the preface that, “many Americans and Europeans and others have simply adopted a naturalistic philosophy in place of a theistic worldview, and the consequences are showing up everywhere.” The advancement explains that this naturalistic worldview did not arise suddenly, but was slowly developing during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Relativism arose in the late twentieth century and is referred to as the postmodern era. Dr. Bush utilizes “Advancement” as the fitting term to describe the postmodern

Bush eloquently lists seven assumptions of the naturalistic worldview: physical similarity indicates biological connections, modern vertebrates and invertebrates come from common ancestors, multi-cell organisms spontaneously arose from single-cell organisms, all life on earth comes from the same family tree, non-living matter gave life to living matter, all life has evolved from a single cell organism in the primordial soup, and all multi-celled life developed from one another and originally from a single-celled life forms was that of spontaneous random mutations and natural

Bush explains that the rise of a naturalistic cultural worldview from a prior theistic one may be a surprise to all but Bible believers. The next section, “The Four Basic Beliefs of Modern Thinkers”, Dr. Bush explains that these basic beliefs have come to influence the thinking of many people whether they are scientifically minded or not. Only those who hold to a strong religious commitment will challenge these beliefs. In chapter seven, “Why Not Advancement?”, Dr. Bush presents an argument against the modern worldview because it attempts to silence the theistic debate. He also presents an argument against shifts in knowledge versus known, critical thinking versus cultural thought, and how attempts to adjust history has been made by certain cultic demands.
In the eighth and final chapter, “What Then Are We to Believe?”, Dr. Bush presents a final case against advancement thought to show that it fails at crucial points. He reminds the reader that it is internally inconsistent, empirically inadequate, and severely anemic in reasonable explanatory