The nasty truth

The approach to the biblical text advocated by [Ken] Ham above is heavily indebted to Enlightenment philosophers like René Descartes (1596-1650) and John Locke (1632-1704), who claimed that we could actually surmount our own context and attain pure readings of texts and reality. In fact, evangelical historian Mark Noll argues that virtually every aspect of the evangelical attachment to the Bible was shaped by the Enlightenment (Noll, Betweeen Faith and Criticism, 97).—Early Christian Readings of Genesis One, page 81