…and (newest post on this site about La Sierra PR) I’m not the one who is claiming someone is “bordering out right [sic] lies”.  

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@Bravus:

…and (newest post on this site about La Sierra PR) I’m not the one who is claiming someone is “bordering out right [sic] lies”.

When someone is presenting a particular story as the “truth” when he/she knows that what is being said is clearly mistaken or not the whole truth, that, by definition, is a deliberate lie – is it not?

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  

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Carl: @Sean Pitman M.D.:
Sean,You have a great deal of information that raises questions about the accuracy of dating methods.But, how big are the uncertainties?If all of the dating methods are as wrong as you suggest, how long is the history of life?You still have very old trees on top of very old mountains.You still have ice ages, the Bretz floods, very old fossils, very old lava flows and very old islands in the Pacific Ocean.My conclusion is that no matter how you challenge dating methods, you can’t fit the evidence into any time spane reasonably close to Ussher’s chronology.I can’t find any way to get past that point, so I conclude that the Genesis text was written not to teach literal history, but rather to teach a spiritual truth.To me, that makes Genesis more credible, not less.  

Carl,

It is not an either/or here, it is a both/and. Genesis was both literal and figurative. Peter, in the New Testament, seems to have understood the latter, and if you study 2 Peter 3 carefully, this is discernible there.

God created mature trees, not merely their seeds. Supposing one had the “age” of 2000 years when God created it, and that it was atop the mountains and remained anchored through the flood, it might now appear to be ~8000 years old. Therefore, the ages of the known oldest trees do not surprise the recent creationists.

However, scientists have not been entirely objective with their dates of the trees. The fairest way would be to count the rings. However, of the trees for which they have done this, the oldest ones date back no more than 4000-5000 years. To get older trees, such as the “oldest” tree on earth in Sweden, they use one or both of two methods: 1) estimation of age on a “clonal tree” in which they date not the tree, but the estimated age of the tree’s clonal parents; and 2) radiocarbon dating, which we all know is inaccurate. In the case of Sweden’s tree, dated at 9550 years, it was both a clonal tree and was estimated using carbon dating. (No need to bring up living snails dated to be thousands of years old here, is there?)

So there is no conflict here with the science, if the science is properly conducted. The conflict comes in with the fact that scientists have preconceptions about the amount of time involved, and thus do not question their own estimates (which may be inaccurate), and present them as “fact.”

This is the same thing biologists at LSU are doing. To believe and to teach that man evolved from apes is to require millions of years in the process, because every person in his or her right mind knows this kind of transition has not happened in recorded history, and that it would not happen quickly.

The Bible teaches that God created both man and ape, each after his own kind. The LSU board needs to support this Biblical truth, and perfunctorily weed out the professors who would imply God or His Word is a liar.

Erik  

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@Bravus:

Bravus says:
November 19, 2009 I actually agree with all that.

Telling the truth about modern biology means telling the truth about evolutionary theory – that it is the best explanatory framework science has for the diversity of life.

The argument that attempts to reposition that POV as something other than Theistic Evolutionism is the one that that I find illusive.

in Christ,

Bob  

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As I have often been known to remark – Chemistry can be thought of as applied physics as biology can be thought of as applied chemistry. In the same way a component of medicine is in fact applied biology.

There is always “art in science” (imagination that creates the leap to the next discovery) as there is “art in medicine” — the fact that one would argue that biology needs evolutionism but medicine does not is a “telling” observation revealing the useless religous nature of the evolutionist paradigm.

in Christ,

Bob  

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Bravus,

To me it seems like you have bitten the bug of the “nose in the air” people who assume that science is something desirable in itself. This “science” is something that denies or ignores any phenomena that defies human exploration – i.e. miracles.

Well, guess what? The Bible calls that science “ falsely so called”, and that we are to avoid it and its oppositions.

For a person who attended Adventist schools I would have hoped you understood that if Jesus is not involved in something it is not to be desired. And it has often been proved that Jesus took Genesis literally, all of it.

Thus if you believe in Jesus you would believe His word. I am bold enough to say that failure to accept Jesus’ word is a rejection of Him.

So many of you people would rather believe men and so called “evidence” while blindly rejecting the evidence of the faithful who show that “mainstream science” is not all right.

May God continue to bless people like Sean Pitman who has done the work to compile readily available scientific refutation of evolutionary distortions. Now you cannot claim ignorance. But you will not believe!

Luke 18:8 … Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?  

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Sean Pitman M.D.:There are two ways to be dishonest here. One way is to teach something you don’t actually believe. That would be morally wrong on a personal level. The other way is to teach something you do honestly believe to be true, but which goes directly against what your employer hired you to teach. This is also being dishonest, not against your own beliefs, but against your employer.

Sean,

You’ve made the above point several times. If I were employed by a secular enterprise and found myself at odds with its declared values and purpose, I would leave. However, Adventism claims a special quality that I value highly, a value that secular organizations do not espouse. That is, traditional beliefs are not to be accepted without close examination. Searching for truth must involve reexamination of fundamental beliefs. Therefore, I believe that science must be taught with complete honesty whether or not it supports SDA traditional beliefs. This is not being dishonest against ones employer because the employer has claimed that integrity with the scientific data is vitally important.

So, the complete scientific picture should be taught including the fact that there is no plausible explanation for life within a short history and including the fact that dating methods are possibly not very accurate.

You could provide an important service if you got together with the science staff at Geoscience Research Institute to develop a short-history model with enough credibility to be taught in a science curriculum. This will be a challenge since I have read their statements admitting that no such thing exists. Until you can do that, I find that you have very little to offer. There is no way to explain many features of the earth in anything less than many millions of years even if all of the dating methods are wildly wrong. You are misleading many people by suggesting that difficulties with the dating methods somehow makes it reasonable to think that life was created within the last ten thousand years.

So, come up with a short-history model and you will solve a great many problems for the LSU Board. If you can’t do that, you should stop making it appear that your objections to mainstream science somehow imply that life was created a short time ago.  

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@Carl:

You’ve made the above point several times. If I were employed by a secular enterprise and found myself at odds with its declared values and purpose, I would leave. However, Adventism claims a special quality that I value highly, a value that secular organizations do not espouse. That is, traditional beliefs are not to be accepted without close examination. Searching for truth must involve reexamination of fundamental beliefs. Therefore, I believe that science must be taught with complete honesty whether or not it supports SDA traditional beliefs. This is not being dishonest against ones employer because the employer has claimed that integrity with the scientific data is vitally important.

Everything, not just science, should be taught with complete honesty within the SDA Church organization. However, if your honesty leads you to take a fundamentally different view than that taken by the Church, the Church simply cannot maintain your services. Just because the Church holds that integrity is of prime importance does not mean that the Church can maintain all those who have fundamentally opposing views just because they do so with integrity. The Church, as an organization, would quickly fragment into chaos if this were the case.

As I explained to you before, if your view were in force within Church government, the Church would have to pay everyone who honestly disagreed – to include those who honestly decided that the Virgin Mary really is alive and well in Heaven and is deserving of our worship, or that there really is a purgatory and we should pray for the souls of our dead loved ones, or that perhaps Sunday is really the day God has made holy because of the resurrection of Jesus on Sunday… and on and on. Why wouldn’t these opposing views count as worthy of financial support within the SDA Church according to your argument? – if held with integrity? Why only support honest divergent “scientific” opinions?

You see, your argument simply isn’t consistent or tenable. If you want to get paid for your ideas, you need to find an organization that is fundamentally in line with your ideas and is willing to pay you to present them. Presenting ideas that go directly counter to the stated goals of your employer, and expecting to be paid by that employer at the same time, is complete nonsense – the very definition of anarchy. No organization could long remain viable given your system…

Beyond this, the SDA Church, as an organization, does not support your argument. The organized SDA Church leadership has said that paid representatives who do not support the Church’s stated fundamental positions should resign. In light of this request, it is dishonest for anyone to continue in opposition to this request as a paid representative. At the very least, you should respect your employer’s wishes. Your employer does in fact have a right to hire only those who accurately represent the employer on issues the employer considers to be important.

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  

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@Erik:

Was God “deceptive” because He created a full-grown Adam and Eve, who had the appearance of age, while not being more than a day old? Should God have created just a sperm and an egg for each of them instead, in order to avoid charges of being “deceptive?”

Hi Erik. I have to agree with Carl here that you can take this argument too far. It can basically be used to argue that anything that clearly appears to be one way could actually be completely different “because God made it that way”. That basically removes any logical basis for belief in God or in the Bible beyond the pretty useless concept of blind faith.

However, Carl is also mistaken in his suggestion that no credible, well-trained scientists have any sort of viable model or basis for interpreting the data as supporting the theory of young-life on Earth and a rapid catastrophic model for the formation of the geologic and fossil records. There are many such scientists – both within and without the SDA Church. It is just that much of Carl’s thinking and understanding of the relevant data is outdated or simply mistaken…

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  

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@Erik:

Then do you also agree with Dr. Lawrence McCloskey that the earth must necessarily be at least 12,000 years old? You see, the sea corals are his specialty, and they add a layer each year, dating back 12,000 years. They have done core drillings on the corals to determine this. If God did not create a mature coral colony, what did God create? or do you agree with Dr. McCloskey that life on earth must be at least 12,000 years old?

I don’t agree with McCloskey’s assumption regarding the age of living coral reefs – to include his notion that corals can only add one growth layer each year. This notion simply isn’t true.

Beyond this, living coral reefs did not survive the flood. Corals reefs are very delicate and would not have survived the world-wide flood intact. While fossil corals do also exist, the fossil “reefs” that supposedly took hundreds of thousands of years to form, really aren’t reefs at all…

For further information on this topic see:

http://www.detectingdesign.com/DesmondFord.html#coral

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com  

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@Carl:

Your argument is one that troubles me a great deal. If you are convinced that, indeed, we have correctly figured out that things look to be older than the Biblical chronology will allow, but, in fact, God made them look older than they are, and He did it in a way that is certain to deceive us, what does it say about the nature of God? Adventism includes the idea that nature is God’s second book. What happens to that idea if nature is so deceptive that we cannot correctly figure it out?

Time to “define terms”.

“Figure it out” — as in “perform corrective surgery”??
“Figure it out” — as in “know the best diet for the species”??
“Figure it out” — as in “promote a healthy environment for the species being studied”??

What is facinating is that even our evolutionist friends here seem to readily admit that those applied sciences have no need to “imagine that birds came from reptiles” in order to work.

Or “Figure it out” as in — “figure out to to Be God and CREATE that species from the dust of the earth”??

I guess it depends on what you mean by “figure it out”.

For the atheist — the challenge is to “figure out how to get one of those without needing God”.

Nobody else actually has that “as a need”. So for the rest of us “detecting design” will have to do. Agreed?

in Christ,

Bob  

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You seem to have sidestepped the question.

In the examples given – we have good illustrations of “figure it out” to the point of practical applied sciences related to biology such that corrective surgery is “understood” and possible. The same is true with drug therapy, and determining the most healthy environment or physical, mental, social exercises etc.

What we don’t have is “figure it out” as in “figure out how to BE God and make the animal from the dust of the earth and breath life into it”.

If the argument is that “we whould be able to figure that out as well” (which I agree that the Atheist POV needs to argue — as even Dawkins admits that this kind of research allows for the first time – an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”) then as Christians we will have to settle for “intelligent design” research “instead”.

That get’s back to the old “Hidden things vs revealed things” God keeps talking about.

Interesting that when Satan tempts Christ in Matt 4 — Satan seems to think that “creating life” (turning stone to bread) would be a “sign” that Christ was in fact God.

Or did he mean that it would be a “sign” that Christ was just a well-informed evolutionist scientist??

In John 5 – Christ says that God alone gives life to whoever He wishes. Might he have been mistaken? Should we claim that evolutionists will eventually “understand” how to make life as well?

I seem to recall an old argument going something like “for he knows that as soon as you do that you shall be as gods”

in Christ,

Bob  

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@BobRyan:

We seem to be arguing about two different things. I realize that the issue at LSU has been painted almost entirely as question about teaching evolution, but I am not talking directly about evolution. What I am talking about is using a literal historical interpretation of Genesis to claim that life was created roughly as it now exists not more than about ten thousand years ago. That interpretation of Genesis leads to so many contradictions of the evidence that it leaves one no better off than believing that God does whatever He pleases whenever He pleases and then provides evidence to make everything look very old. It forces you to believe that there is no rational way to understand the earth and its life.

For many years, Adventists have been avoiding a clear examination of the evidence. For example, where in the Adventist system would a student go to get a BS in geology? There isn’t one simply because we haven’t had the courage to face the facts that exist all around us. The result is that most Adventists can’t have an informed discussion of the earth sciences because we have been biased to believe that the Devil, in the form of “infidel scientists,” is waiting to deceive us. Our fear of being deceived has sometimes left us behaving like a superstitious cult.

To me, the tragedy of Adventism is that we can’t have a rational discussion of the problem because it isn’t safe to do so. As soon as anyone challenges our traditional beliefs, a cry goes up to get them dismissed. That’s the purpose of this Website, and, as long as it’s effective, we will stay locked in our established traditions no matter how irrational our position becomes. By doing so we become completely irrelevant to the educated world, nothing more than another tourist attraction in the history of religions.  

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Carl: To me, the tragedy of Adventism is that we can’t have a rational discussion of the problem because it isn’t safe to do so. As soon as anyone challenges our traditional beliefs, a cry goes up to get them dismissed. That’s the purpose of this Website, and, as long as it’s effective, we will stay locked in our established traditions no matter how irrational our position becomes. By doing so we become completely irrelevant to the educated world, nothing more than another tourist attraction in the history of religions.

The straightforward, obvious and commonsense interpretation of Scripture is secure. However, if I discovered that the entire foundation of Christianity is a lie, then I would renounce my former faith but certainly not strive to convert Christians to believe in Darwinism.

I respect having a logically consistent position but see no reason to adopt the assumptions that the world embraces. Frankly, I think it’s logically inconsistent to trust in Jesus for salvation and at the same time entertain the idea that the Savior didn’t understand Genesis in a straightforward literal way.  

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Eugene Shubert:
The truth about science is that science is always changing. Light was first thought to be composed of particles. Then that model was abandoned in favor of a wave model, the belief that light is a vibration of a luminiferous aether. Modern science is now back to the particle model.
According to real, quantifiable science, all the fundamental laws of physics are ultimately probabilistic and it is possible for the Red Sea to split (Exodus 14:21) and for a man to be fully formed out of the inanimate material of the earth in a single day (Genesis 2:7). The process is understandable, although highly improbable. It still satisfies the definition of science. An example of a process that isn’t understandable, demonstrable, or in any way provable, is the assertion that it’s logically possible for all life to have descended from a single-celled animal in small incremental steps. Darwinists today aren’t even able to quantify what Darwin meant by slow, sure steps.  

Eugene,

What Carl means is that we should teach evolution and to h*** with the Bible. What he does not want to say outright is that evolutionary science is so unreliable that it can be seen to be like a grasshopper jumping from place to place with no seeming pattern. I do not know what that has to to with science.

True scientists would admit they cannot explain the origin of life and they cannot explain the seeming connections between physical (artifacts) evidences found and what we have today. Thus they substitute wild and fantasizing guesses all based on their pre-determined notions of life.

Then they sit and pray (who to, I don’t know) that somehow, somewhere a solution that matches their guess will be found. And that is science.

They are a dishonest or brainwashed set, and that they must admit. The sad part is that there are evolutionists like Colin Patterson who are honest with the lies evolution teaches. Examples:

1979: Interview with Luther D. Sunderland, June 30,British Museum of Natural History, ERIC Document Reproduction Service microfiche ED 228 056 (available at most public libraries), pp.7-19.

Sunderland, late creationist activist (d. 1987), interviewed several paleontologists while preparing his book Darwin’s Enigma. This interview is marked by a fair amount of miscommunication, but also by passages such as the following:

Sunderland: …How do you see that evolution might explain the origin of fishes?

Patterson: (Pause)

Sunderland: Then you’d rather not say?

Patterson:Ten years ago I’d have been perfectly willing to tell you, but it so happens that I know someone who is working this problem for about 15 years–the starfish end of it–the echinoderms. He believes that this development could be traced from the Cambrian with the echinoderms. I could very easily refer you to his work and say that I agree with him that fish are related to echinoderms, but I do not think it is obvious.

1980: “Cladistics,” The Biologist 27: 234-240.

A popular article, drafted as the “transformed cladistics” controversy was growing to its height. “As the theory of cladistics has developed,” argued Patterson (p. 239), “it has been realized that more and more of the evolutionary framework is inessential, and may be dropped. The chief symptom of this change is the significance attached to nodes in cladistics. In Hennig’s book, as in all early works in cladistics, the nodes are taken to represent ancestral species. This assumption has been found to be unnecessary, even misleading, and may be dropped.”

“Phylogenies and Fossils,” Systematic Zoology 29: 216-219.

More skepticism about fossils and phylogeny: “To me, one of the most astonishing consequences of the furor over cladistics is the realization that the current account of tetrapod evolution, shown in a thousand diagrams and everywhere acknowledged as the centerpiece of historical biology, is a will-o’-the-wisp. For nowhere can one find a clear statement of how and why the Recent groups are interrelated, and the textbook stories are replete with phantoms–extinct, uncharacterizable groups giving rise one to another” (p. 217).

1981: “Significance of Fossils in Determining Evolutionary Relationships,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 12: 195-223.

Patterson’s classic, critical analysis of the role of fossils in systematics: “…extinct paraphyletic groups [common in neo-Darwinian phylogenies before the cladistic revolution] seem to me to obscure rather than illuminate relationships, for they exist not in nature but in the minds of evolutionists. Such groups lead to a sterile inversion of problems of relationships, which come to depend not on comparative analysis of what is accessible–the Recent biota–but on juggling with what is inaccessible–uncharacterizable abstractions from the fossil record” (p. 219).

1982: “Morphological Characters and Homology,” in Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, eds. K.A. Joysey and A.E. Friday, Systematics Association Special Vol. No. 21 (New York: Academic Press), pp. 21-74.

Perhaps the most widely-cited paper on homology of the past two decades, where Patterson discusses five ways of defining homology (classical, evolutionary, phenetic, cladistic, and utilitarian), taking issue with “the evolutionists…for here I do expect disagreement” (p. 62). Patterson’s main complaint is with extinct, paraphyletic groups, which typically play the role of “transitional forms” in evolutionary reasoning. “Such groups,” Patterson argued, “…are imagined by evolutionists, those most committed to the confirmation of Darwin’s views. The power of this mystery, extinct paraphyletic groups as the source of phylogeny, is shown by the fact that we still have no cladogram, or series of nested homologies, for tetrapods, the group in which phylogeny is supposed to be best known” (p. 64).

1983: “How does phylogeny differ from ontogeny?” in Development and Evolution, eds. B.C. Goodwin, N. Holder and C. Wylie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 1-31.

A discussion of the bearing of ontogenetic (developmental) data on phylogeny: “Phylogeny is generalised transformation, but we have no empirical experience of phylogeny; the only transformations of which we have empirical evidence are those of ontogeny” (p. 21).

1988: “Homology in Classical and Molecular Biology,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 5: 603-625.

Patterson applies his 1982 analysis of homology (see above) to molecular data. This paper is notable for its claim that, at the molecular level (unlike gross morphology), “there is no detected molecular equivalent of convergence–or of misleading similarity–except in the most trivial sense” (p. 618).

So keep up your vigorous opposition and we will let people like Carl, Greer and Bradley know that their version of science is all lies and rebellion against God and such is not welcome in a truth telling institution like a SDA school.  

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http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/audios/c010.htm

Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?
November 1981 Presentation at the American Museum of Natural History
By Colin Patterson

Audio CD and Annotated Transcript

What would happen if you awoke one morning and suddenly realized that you no longer accepted the scientific theory on which, thus far, you had based your life’s work? This is precisely the experience paleontologist Colin Patterson conveyed to the Systematics Discussion Group nearly twenty years ago in his now famous presentation.

On November 5, 1981, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Colin Patterson gave a presentation entitled “Evolutionism and Creationism” to the Systematics Discussion Group. The presentation was taped, and an unauthorized (bootleg) transcript was made. Now, 19 years later, Access Research Network has obtained the original audio tape of Patterson’s historical presentation. After several months of careful work, in consultation with a witness to the 1981 presentation, ARN is releasing to the public the original audio tape, and an edited transcription of the tape. The transcript includes a large amount of previously unreleased material, notably the 40 minute question-and-answer period, where Patterson interacts with evolutionary biologists such as Niles Eldredge, Keith Stewart Thomson, Stanley Salthe, and James Farris. The transcript also includes an historical introduction by Paul Nelson, biographical footnotes and literature citations.

Here are a few of Patterson’s famous comments that you can now listen to and read in their full context:

“But it’s true that for the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been kicking around non-evolutionary or even anti-evolutionary ideas.”

“Now, one of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.”

“So either there is something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally I know there’s nothing wrong with me. So for the last few weeks, I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. The question is this: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true?”

“Well, I’m not interested in the controversy over teaching in high school, and if any militant creationists have come here looking for political ammunition, I hope they’ll be disappointed.”

“I shall take the text of my sermon from this book, Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation….He takes it for granted that a rationalist view of nature has replaced an irrational one, and of course, I myself took that view, up until about eighteen months ago. And then I woke up and I realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way.”

“Well, we’re back to the question I’ve been putting to people, ‘Is there one thing you can tell me about evolution?’ And the absence of an answer seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge, or if so, I haven’t yet heard it.”

“Now I think many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you’ve experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know that’s true of me, and I think it’s true of a good many of you in here.”

“So that’s my first theme. That evolution and creationism seem to be showing remarkable parallels. They are increasingly hard to tell apart. And the second theme is that evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge, apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics.”

No longer do you have to depend on incomplete transcripts or bootleg tapes. Now you can experience the full impact of listening to the complete original recording of this amazing talk with the assistance of a well-annotated transcript that required hundreds of hours to compile and transcribe. And this entire product has been carefully reviewed by one of the original witnesses of the event who assisted us in identifying the speakers during the lively discussion session that followed the talk, material which has never before been available and reveals the full impact of Patterson’s presentation on his peers.

Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?
November 1981 Presentation at the American Museum of Natural History
By Colin Patterson  

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Colin Patterson said:

For Mayr, classifications should incorporate such things as ‘inferences on selection pressures, shifts of adaptive zones, evolutionary rates, and rates of evolutionary divergence.’ Fired up by Mayr’s paper, I gave a fairly radical talk in New York, comparing the effect of evolutionary theory on systematics with Gillespie’s (1979, p. characterization of pre-Darwinian creationism: ‘not a research govering theory (since its power to explain was only verbal) but an antitheory, a void that had the function of knowledge but, as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none.’

Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there was a creationist in my audience with a hidden tape recorder.

It is all too clear that Patterson was livid about Mayr’s dump-science-just-live-with-inferences approach to “stories about one thing coming from another” and so Patterson wanted to “hold their feet to the fire” as it were trying to weed out as many junk-science principles as possible.

Sadly for Patterson – as he laments — there was a free-thinker in the audience — a “creationist with a tape recorder”. Thus EXACT in context quotes of that speech are now available for ALL to see — and in no way limited to the “faithful devotees of evolutionism”.

Note the reaction of Niles Eldredge as he listened to Patterson’s speech that day (reported by Roy Slingo).

.
Roy Slingo, from the prestigious Scarsdale NY district.

Slingo later informed me that at one stage of the talk that Niles Eldredge (well known for his anti-creationist perspective) grabbed his forehead and slid down the wall proclaiming, “ O-M-G, how can he be doing this to us.”[/b]

It gets worse.

in Christ,

Bob  

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BobRyan: @Bravus:Honesty demands that we admit that nobody is arguing that devoted atheist evolutionist Colin Patterson was ever a creationist.Honesty demands that we admit that the point of quoting Patterson was neveer to claim “atheiist evolutionists like Patterson really believe creationism” – but rather that Patterson was pointing to the junk-science storytelling so often used to prop up evolutionism — and lamenting it.However as a devoted atheist himself – Patterson clearly felt he had “nowhere else to go”. How can that not-so-subtle point be missed??in Christ,Bob  

You have the right response Bob. I might add that I was not claiming Patterson did not make a rebuttal, but the essence of Patterson’s discourse shows the faith-based absurdities of evolutionary conclusions which Bravus, Carl and others call science.

History and ultimately God will judge just who was honest.

If someone claims to believe in God, it behooves that person to believe God’s word OVER what “scientists” claim. Secondly, if such a person has “scientific training” then before spouting evolutionary garbage, one should evaluate the conclusions drawn to find the weaknesses and loopholes that should weaken its arguments.

I find the evolutionists posting here are not interested in showing up the weaknesses of evolution, but are desperately trying to find some evidence evolution MAY be true. Patterson could not find ONE TRUTH in evolution.

Who is dishonest? Could it be that the so-called God worshippers are taking His name in vain? Claiming to believing in God but secretly and openly undermining faith in Him, that is the ultimate form of dishonesty, torpedoing the faith of many.  

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Quoting Shannon: “Let’s all be a little honest. People act like the only way a student ever can learn about evolution is in the classroom from an evolutionist teacher. If these requirements are not met, then you have not learned about this branch of scientific belief (?) adequately. I think that these suppositions are not necessarily true. Couldn’t students actually learn many other ways? Are non-believers able to teach a subject well–I think so. Also, there have been statements as far as to imply that you cannot learn science unless you understand origins–simply not true. It is like saying you cannot understand Physics if you cannot master Chemistry–yes they overlap but they are not prerequisite”

Response: Well yes, a lack of honesty is part of the problem isn’t it. Most of the supporters of this web site are not being honest. They are being willfully ignorant of basic Biology. To use your example of the preacher in your house, it would be a little bit like the jailer asking the Apostle Paul “How can I be saved” and then forbidding Paul to talk about God. The concept of God is fundamental to the concept of salvation. You can’t talk about salvation without talking about God. In the same way, evolution is a fundamental principle of biology. All of the systems of genetics and cell biology are simply descriptions of the mechanics of how organisms evolve. It is impossible to function as a Biologist, or even as a physician without a basic understanding of genetics and cell physiology.

Even if you were to try to explain biology without evolution, it would be kind of like teaching someone how to build an airplane without teaching them about aerodynamics. Eventually your student is going to figure out that it is possible to fly. Why? Because the whole purpose of the airplane is to fly. The minute you ask, “What is the purpose of this machine, why is it designed this way?” the answer becomes obvious. The purpose of this machine is to fly. How much credibility will your denials that that it is possible to fly have when your student gets into the plane and flies away?

The same way with Biology. If you try to teach basic genetics and cellular biology, eventually the student is going to ask “Why is the process designed this way?” Then as soon as you ask the question, it is obvious, the reason is for the purpose of evolving. So it really is not possible to teach Biology without teaching evolution.

If Nature is God’s second book, and God really truly is the creator, then the real problem in Adventism isn’t in the Biology department, it is the Theology department. The burden is on the Theology department to reconcile Adventist theology to the simple facts of nature as created by God.  

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