* Both Camping and some creationist organizations place a great deal of importance on numbers in the Bible. And, I believe, assign too much significance to them. The YEC's argue that the usage of a number forces a particular understanding of the text. Camping finds significance in certain numbers and does crazy math when he finds them.
* Both only look at verses or evidence that support their position. You don't see Camping out there showing all the other ways the church as viewed eschatology. You don't see AIG or ICR out there showing all the ways the early church fathers (like Augustine or Origen) interpreted these passages differently. Both cherry-pick and present just what evidences support their position. If they mention another position at all, it is only to poke hole in a straw man. There is no real objectivity or irenic attitude in either their approach to the evidence or in their presentation of it.
* Both play the martyr card. They are not open to being wrong, but believe they are being persecuted for standing up for Christ. The fact that the vast majority of the church doesn't agree with them, in their mind, just shows that they are on the "narrow way" and the rest of us are on the "wide" path to destruction.
* And, when wrong, both double-down. Neither admit error. Instead, they spiritualize the evidence to the contrary. Camping says Christ really "DID" return, but it was a "spiritual" return. You can't really see it or test it. Just trust him. It happened. The creationists on the other end of the spectrum, when given things like the distance to stars, apply a God-of-the-gaps solution and propose something that cannot really be tested or proved, like "appearance of age", but "trust" them. It solves the problem. There may be "no" evidence of their belief, but trust them. The "Bible" (or at least their understanding of a translation of it) says so. They can even point you to the verses.
* And ultimately, both of these groups, while professing to be apologetic in nature, turn the world off to Christianity and end up only convincing and indoctrinating the already faithful to their cause. Folks like Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, and Harold Camping are, in a sense, very much like cult leaders. While professing Christianity, they don't teach what most of the church believes, they separate themselves from and condemn those that disagree, the followers have a blind allegiance to their leader and trust them completely, and both end up mixing their pet doctrines with the Gospel in such a way that if you reject them, you reject the Gospel as well. In short, both have an approach that ultimately ends up driving folks away from Christ because ultimately their positions fail when the evidence comes to light.
I was watching an apologetics related show this past weekend. The guy mentioned a statistic that about three-quarters of our Christian kids leave the church within a couple of years of graduating and getting out on their own in college or elsewhere. They are confronted with evidences and facts that we have hidden from them while they were growing up. And maybe we hid it because we believed it to be wrong. But either way, they were not expecting it and didn't have a response to it. It blind-sided them. And, since we frequently tied that creation (or end times) belief so strongly to Biblical inerrancy and the Gospel message, when the "reasonable doubts" rose about one, it caused them the leave the other as well.
I think it is time that we stop practicing a Ham-Camping approach to the Bible. We are majoring on debatable minors and causing division not only within the church, but from the world as well. It is bad on so many levels. And, I am afraid, if we keep it up, most of those kids that leave the faith will never return to it. And, the sad thing is, most that hold to a minority approach to some pet doctrine are not going to see that as a reason to change, but will double-down even more and become even more dogmatic.
Source: healing-magic.blogspot.com
