@Eddie: Eddie, ecological zonation will yield the same basic order …

Comment on Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit by David Read.

@Eddie: Eddie, ecological zonation will yield the same basic order that you’re pointing to: invertebrates appear before vertebrates; fish appear before amphibians; amphibians appear before reptiles; reptiles appear before mammals; reptiles appear before birds, etc.

The fact that something appears before something else in the fossil record is not proof than anything evolved into anything else. It only means that, if we accept the uniformitarian timescale, such an evolutionary transition is temporally possible. But the fossil evidence of transition is typically lacking.

And the proposed mechanism of evolution–DNA copying errors–is completely unpersuasive. It’s like postulating that we can go from “Don Quixote” to “War and Peace” by re-copying the book a billion times with small errors creeping in each time we re-copy it. Nonsense!

You seem to be complaining that God has not made the fossil evidence compulsory, i.e., so clear that no reasonable person can possibly doubt it. And if God hasn’t made the evidence skeptic-proof, then the skeptic is God’s fault, God is responsible for the skeptic. Not true. The unbeliever is responsible for his own unbelief. God has provided plenty of evidence to confirm our faith, but He’s not going to remove the necessity of faith. There will always be hooks for skeptics to hang their doubts on, but if you cannot ultimately overcome your doubts and exercise faith, you cannot be a Christian believer. Only people of faith can be saved, that is, only people who are willing to trust God and put away doubts can be saved. And this is as it should be, because otherwise sin could reappear and the Great Controversy could start all over again.

David Read Also Commented

Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Professor Kent: “Naturalism applies the evidence to understand scripture, and creationism applies scripture (in no small part) to understand the evidence.”

Jeff, your clauses are not parallel. Naturalism first assumes that there was no Creator God (a faith assumption) and then uses that assumption to interpret the data of nature. It then uses its (atheistic) interpretation of nature to re-interpret Scripture. But since Scripture is all about miracles, all about an omnipotent Creator God, why would anyone who rules out such a God in his interpretation of the data of nature even be interested in the Bible?


Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Professor Kent: Jeff, see my response to Eddie, above. It is clear that the modern world is not a reliable guide regarding conditions that existed before the Flood. Inspired history tells us that there were no bare, jagged mountain tops, no dismal swamps and no arctic wastes; the world was very different, and the conditions that prevailed then are not the conditions that prevail now.

The fossil record confirms inspired history; warm-weather flora and fauna are found in abundance in arctic and antarctic zones, and this fact cannot remotely be explained by continental drift. How were the arctic climes ever able to support these life forms? The fossils tell us that conditions differed radically, but they don’t tell us why. Inspired history tells us that conditions were very different before the Flood

These types of mysteries are at least as prevalent in the mainstream model as in the the creationist model.


Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Eddie: The fossil record gives evidence of a pre-Flood world differing in many respects from present conditions. But we also know that from inspired history, such as the fact that there was no rain in the antediluvian world, but rather the earth was watered by a mist. There were no desert wastes, no dismal swamps, and no arctic ice fields.

The radically different climatic conditions of the pre-Flood world might well have given rise to ecological zonation somewhat different from what we see in the modern world. Plants that have taken over in the modern world, such as angiosperms, might have had a much more restricted ecological niche in the pre-flood world.


Recent Comments by David Read

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: I do not agree that science must be naturalistic, but if that is your bottom line, it will not trouble me much where it concerns most day-to-day science–the study of current, repeating phenomena. But a rigid naturalism applied to origins morphs into philosophical atheism. Hence, mainstream origins science is not science but atheistic apologetics. This is what should not be done at an Adventist school, but sadly what has been the rule at La Sierra.


Dr. Paul Cameron and the God of the Gaps
@Pauluc: The Adventist doctrine of creation is that God created the world in six days and rested on the Seventh day and hallowed it. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) Do you believe that doctrine? It won’t do to say that you accept some vague “Christian doctrine of creation.” The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a very specific mission to call people back to the worship of the creator God, on the day that He hallowed at the creation.

You say you believe that the “core doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,” but what was Jesus Christ incarnated to do? Wasn’t his mission to redeem fallen humanity, to be the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed? And doesn’t your view of origins make nonsense of a perfect creation, a literal Adam who fell, and the need for redemption because of Adam’s sin? You seem to want to gloss over all the very profound differences you have not only with Seventh-day Adventist dcotrine, but with the most basic reasons that Seventh-day Adventism exists.

The syncretistic hodgepodge religion you’ve created for yourself, combining elements of a biblical world view (the incarnation) and elements of a pagan worldview (a self-created creation) is not Adventism. It is anti-Seventh-day Adventism.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Holly Pham: Holly, I will try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: Since no creationist could land a job as chairman of a biology department at a public university, it seems entirely appropriate that no Darwinist should be given the chairmanship of a biology department of a Seventh-day Adventist college.

The SDA educational system doesn’t exist to expensively duplicate the public university system. It exists to provide a uniquely biblical and Seventh-day Adventist education to interested young people. If mainstream origins science is correct in its assumptions and conclusions about our origins, the entire enterprise of Seventh-day Adventism is an utterly foolish waste of time. So at Adventist institutions, our professors should assume that Darwinistic science is false, and that creationistic science is true (just the reverse of how it is done at public universities), and proceed accordingly.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: What I like about your list of topics, Gene, is that it points out that many disciplines are implicated in the necessary change of worldview. It isn’t just biology and geology, although those are the main ones. History, archeology, anthropology and other disciplines should also be approached from a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview should pervade the entire curriculum.