David&#032Read: The fossil record as a whole supports creationism much …

Comment on Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit by Eddie.

David&#032Read: The fossil record as a whole supports creationism much better than Darwinism.

David, I basically agree with all of your statements–except for this one. Don’t get me wrong: I am not a “Seventh-day Darwinian.” As you point out there are certain aspects of the fossil record that support creationism (and bolster my faith), but other aspects do not and I don’t think they should be glossed over by creationists who insist that the fossil record more strongly supports creationism. It doesn’t.

Here are the cold, hard facts. Single-celled organisms appear before multicellular organisms; non-vascular plants appear before vascular plants; non-flowering vascular plants appear before flowering vascular plants; invertebrates appear before vertebrates; fish appear before amphibians; amphibians appear before reptiles; reptiles appear before mammals; reptiles appear before birds; various primates occur before humans. Even within those groups, more primitive species often appear before more advanced species. For example, reptile-like birds with teeth and long bony tails appear before modern birds, and reptile-like mammals with double-hinged jaws appear before modern mammals.

As creationists often point out, not all fossil sequences perfectly match the predictions of evolutionary theory, but the general trend does–and remains, in my opinion, the strongest evidence for megaevolution and against a 6-day creation 6,000 years ago. I can understand why so many people find the evidence for megaevolution so persuasive. I am personally skeptical of megaevolution, but I don’t think the evidence should be dismissed as hogwash, and I don’t think those who accept it should be banned from the church. It’s very difficult to explain the overall trend in the fossil record from a creationist’s perspective (ecological zonation helps, but doesn’t resolve all the problems, such as mangroves not showing up until the Cretaceous), and I don’t think any arguments that you or Sean or anybody else can come up with will adequately explain why the trend occurs.

Why did God allow such a trend to occur in the fossil record? Did Satan have a role in sequencing the burial of fossils?

Eddie Also Commented

Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit

Sean&#032Pitman: Most scientists who believe in the Biblical model of origins interpret Tertiary sediments as post-Flood sediments.

So if Noah’s flood ended at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, which coincides with a period of high global sea levels according to geologists, does that mean Noah’s flood is represented by the second of two worldwide floods in this graph?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_Level.png

How would you account for the geological evidence for a worldwide flood during the Paleozoic and the lack of geological evidence for high sea levels during the early Mesozoic?


Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Bob Helm: Bob, if you send me an e-mail at sdabioprof2@gmail.com I will send you a pdf file of a 1991 article published by Chatterjee in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 332:277-342, titled “Cranial anatomy and relationships of a new Triassic bird from Texas.”

Curiously his description is based only on cranial anatomy. I don’t think he ever published an analysis of its postcranial anatomy.


Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Bob Helm: Bob, I have the original published articles for both Chatterjee’s Protoavis from Texas and the bird-like tracks from Argentina, both dating from the Triassic. They are tantalizing if not convincingly avian. As you surmised, the only reason why they aren’t widely accepted as birds among paleontologists is because they throw a monkey wrench in evolutionary theory.

For those less familiar with these fossils (Bob is obviously well informed), the theropod dinosaurs (thought to be the ancestors of birds) that look the most like birds first appear in the Cretaceous, well after Archaeopteryx which appears in the Jurassic, so a sequence issue already exists. If birds predated Archaeopteryx and appeared as early as the Triassic, the sequence problem for the theropod origin of birds becomes more acute for evolutionists to explain.


Recent Comments by Eddie

SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
Will humans and animals in New Jerusalem need to sleep?


Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation

Stephen&#032Ferguson: Sean, how did we get to this position? In particular, why after spending decades and millions of dollars has the official Church’s own pet organisation, the Geoscience Research Institute, done so little to disprove evolution?

Why if it is all hogwash has it been thoroughly not been disproved over the last 150 years? Why do some 99% of scientists across a multitude of different fields (e.g. paleontologists, physicists, archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, chemists, cosmologists, historians, cosmologists and geologists etc) all consider evolution to be the most plausible model?

Maybe because the evidence for microevolution and speciation is overwhelming. And some evidence for megaevolution (e.g., sequence of fossils) and long geological ages can be perplexing to explain from the perspective of most (but not all) young life and young earth creationists.

Stephen&#032Ferguson: Why, if it is all rubbish, is there Adventist scientists and theologians who believe in evolution? Why would they risk their careers and standing in the Church to promote something they consider truth, given the huge pressure to just shut up, if they didn’t believe there was something in it?

Maybe because they’re not as honest as some prominent supporters here. Or their faith is weaker. Or, perhaps, physicians and lawyers are simply better trained than scientists and theologians to evaluate scientific evidence.

Stephen&#032Ferguson: I really, really hope Christian scientists, especially Adventist ones, will disprove evolution some day.

Me too.

Stephen&#032Ferguson: If the SDA hierarchy wants someone to blame for all this, they should blame themselves. It has been their pet organisations that have so spectacularly failed to offer scientific arguments in favour of YEC. Ted Wilson must accept some of the blame onto himself – if not personally then on behalf of the hierachy he leads.

I wouldn’t blame anybody. But if they were to fire the current GRI staff, hire certain supporters here, and then move GRI from LLU to SAU or SWAU, I suspect a certain faction of the church would be happier.


La Sierra University won’t neglect creation teaching, president, chairman vow
Sean, you have essentially written enough about this to publish a book, which you ought to do, exhorting SDAs to abandon Sola Scriptura and rely exclusively on empirical data, which surely will be a best seller among neoconservative SDAs.


Dr. Ariel Roth’s Creation Lectures for Teachers
Like Ken, I am puzzled by the lukewarm reception of his suggestion to establish an endowed chair for intelligent design at LSU. Perhaps there was confusion about his term “intelligent design.” I think he had in mind the kind of creationism that most SDAs believe in, specifically young earth creationism or young life creationism (I realize some of you view ID negatively). So it could be called an Endowed Chair of Young Life Creationism, or whatever term is preferred.

For what it’s worth, I like his idea for several reasons:

1) SDA professors in all our institutions with the exception of LLU have relatively heavy teaching loads and scant time available for research, which means they have little time to conduct and publish research on creationism (I’m quite certain Art Chadwick would concur). That’s why as a denomination we have no well published and respected researchers with expertise on the subject, with the sole exception of Leonard Brand at LLU–who ranks among the world’s most successful scientists whose research focuses on YLC (if you believe there are other SDA experts with more expertise, you might be disappointed if you conducted a search of their publication records).

2) Most students in our institutions are seeking a career in a health profession, therefore SDA professors by necessity focus mostly on subjects that prepare students for the biomedical fields. Few have time to keep up with issues related to creationism and evolution, let alone conduct original research on the subject. You can’t really expect all professors to be as well informed with the subject as Leonard Brand.

3) It would be fantastic for LSU to have a professor with the available time and resources to pursue high quality research on creationism, which I believe was the intent of Ken’s wish. We already have one such professor at LLU; why not another at LSU? I’m astonished that some here seem to think it is undesirable to have another expert SDA researcher on the subject. Perhaps some of you naively imagine that ALL professors have the unlimited time and resources to become world-class researchers on creationism–and are wasting the denomination’s money by not doing so.

4) SDA institutions struggle to meet their payroll obligations and can benefit by obtaining financial assistance from donors.

5) If the evidence overwhelmingly favors the traditional SDA position of origins, as some here claim, what harm is there in funding a professor with the time and resources to discover even more evidence? It’s pretty hard to convince the world that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favors our position unless the evidence is published in respectable scientific journals–as Leonard Brand has done repeatedly. It won’t ever happen unless there are more full-time researchers who focus exclusively on issues related to creationism.


A “Christian Agnostic”?
Ken, what do agnostics believe regarding the origin of matter and energy in the universe? I assume an agnostic would simply answer “I don’t know,” but maybe I’m being naive. Did energy and matter always exist or did they have a beginning? If they had a beginning, which the Big Bang posits, did they spontaneously appear out of nothing following natural laws, or did an intelligent power design and create them? I’d love to know your thoughts on the issue.