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The Advancement Book Critique

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The Advancement Book Critique

Liberty University

BOOK SUMMARY L. Russ Bush, a dean and professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His book entitled, The Advancement (2003), is an apologetic approach to naturalism. He came up with the term “advancement” to explain philosophical revolution because it was portray newness to modernism. He felt like the name “modern” seem outdated and old-fashion. Modern tends to provoke an attitude of staleness, rather than revolving and advancing. Bush’s book (2003) is divided into eight chapters. It starts with Chapter 1, entitled “The Worldview of the Advancement”. This chapter discusses the fundamental of compare and contrast of modern view and earlier view of God, nature, history and mankind. The second chapter of Bush’s book, The Rise in the Advancement of Science, pays particular attention the development of modern science. The rise of uniformitarian thought in evolution. “The human body is related to nature, and it is similar in many respects to the body of animals” (34). This thought does not include that the Christian view that a human body is different than animals. We have a soul, whereas, animals do not. Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, argued that religion base on wishful illusion, rather than reality. Bush’s third chapter (2003), The Advancement and the Theory of Knowledge, concentrate on how science effects and outcomes with the absence of God. The Bible promotes the idea that man was made in the image of God. However naturalistic biological evolution “explains the variety of living things as being a set of natural variations of organic matter. Every life-form, including human life, supposedly arose from the same underlying reality” (page 38). The only reality that exist is physical reality. Bush refers to this as “nature”.
Chapter four, Modern Theistic

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