Report on our Annual Meeting,
May 2007

News of the James Begg Society — last modified: November 2007

T HE James Begg Society held an Annal Meeting Friday on 25th May 2007, at 7:30 p.m. The meeting was held in the premises of Partick Free Church (Continuing), Glasgow, which was kindly lent for the occasion. For our Public Lecture Mr. Simon Padbury, a member of the Presbyterian Reformed Church, Stockton on Tees, spoke on the subject of "Creation and the Reformed Faith."

Mr Padbury's began his address by stating what the Biblical doctrine of creation was, as given in the plain meaning of the words in Genesis chapter one. He said that it was Trinitarian, six-day, young-earth, providentialist and predestinarian.

The main part of the talk then centred on three major errors which have appeared in the last three hundred years that undermine this biblical account of things. These were:

(1) Rationalism. This is a belief that man by natural reason, without revelation, can explain the origin of the universe and the natural world. The two sub-classes of rationalists, namely deists and atheists, differ in that deists believe that man’s reason alone can prove the existence of God, whereas atheists believe that men can actually prove that there is no God. Both forms of rationalism came into the church in the 18th Century, and were vigorously opposed by such men as Dr. Thomas Halyburton in his treatise " Natural Religion Insufficient."

(2) Uniformitarianism. This is the belief that natural processes occuring at present (e.g. erosion), can be extrapolated back in time, under the assumption that they have always been taking place at their currently observed rates. This leads to the erroneous theory that the earth is millions of years old, rather than the biblical account of a few thousand years. The uniformitarian hypothesis came into the church like a flood in the nineteenth century, through such men as Dr. Thomas Chalmers (who believed the Gap Theory, that the millions of years could be accommodated between Genesis 1:1 and 1:3) and Dr. Hugh Miller (who believed in the Day-Age Theory, that every one of the "days" in Genesis chapter 1 were actually long ages of many millennia). These theories were vigorously opposed by little known Dr. William Rhind of the Church of Scotland, and Dr. John Kennedy of the Free Church.

(3) Evolutionism. With the publication particularly of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1859, the hypothesis that all life forms evolved from one common ancestor, as opposed to the biblical account which talks of "kinds" of animals being created distinct from one another from the beginning, became increasingly popular. This was accepted into the church by such men as Prof. Marcus Dods of the Free Church of Scotland. It again took men like Dr. Kennedy to refute this argument.

Mr. Padbury gave an excellent summary of these things and the address can be listened to or downloaded from this web site, or purchased as a tape.

Notice of our Annual Meeting 2008

Making a Donation

If you wish to make a donation to the James Begg Society, please click the "Make a donation?" button.

Clicking the PayPal button below enables you to make a donation to the James Begg Society. This can be done using a PayPal account if you have one, or else simply by credit/debit card (it is not necessary for you to have a PayPal account in order to do this).