Person, woman, man, camera, TV. Donald Trump bragged that he aced a “difficult” cognitive test by remembering five words and reciting them in order. Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador – and strong evangelical – who resigned under good terms with Trump carries a Republican gravitas. She recently alluded to President Biden, noting “anyone above a certain age in a position of power… should have some sort of cognitive test”. She parrots many right-wing pundits who insist the lights are out and nobody’s home in the White House. (Of course, they skip over the previous President, who many in his own administration (and his siblings) believed had early onset Alzheimer’s.)
Conservative evangelicals like Ken Ham believe that if Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, it calls into question the truth of Scripture. One question Mr. Answers in Genesis has never asked is, did Moses ever take a cognitive test?
Exodus 7 informs us that Moses was eighty years old when he challenged Pharaoh. Did we get the Torah from a Moses suffering from old age dementia? It seems that if we can question a 78 year-old President’s mental acuity, what conclusions can we draw from Sinai? Here we have an elderly, perhaps senile, man who trudges up a mountain and comes down saying he saw G_d. Couldn’t the rhetorical argument be made that an aged, maybe hallucinatory, Moses saw something that wasn’t really there?
Conservative evangelicals believe the Bible’s divinely-inspired authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science. I believe the miracles of Exodus and agree the Bible is infallible in terms of faith and practice. But the same can’t be said for the accounts in Genesis being historically, scientifically, and factually inerrant. And conservative evangelicals believe the first five books were all written down by Moses.
I’m not a geriatric physician diagnosing Moses’ cognitive impairment. I’m merely pointing out that making reckless age-ims about President Biden’s mental acuity logically leads to places where conservative evangelicals are loath to go.
From Under The Rubble 