Comment on Are LSU professors breaking the 8th commandment? by Carl.
Sean Pitman M.D.:
3. We do not have a comprehensive model that can fit the evidence into about 10,000 years.
Again, I’m not sure what you mean by “comprehensiveâ€, but we do in fact have models that can indeed fit the significant weight of evidence into a <10,000 year time frame…
Go to the GRI site, or anywhere else, and find a short-age model that we can discuss. Your statements that we had a flood, then a warm period, then a cold period, and then things settled down do not constitute a model. It’s strange that the Genesis account would describe the Flood but not the unusually warm period or the unusually cold period that followed. After the Flood, it says that Noah planted vineyards – sounds like things were pretty much back to normal.
I’m mystified to know what is unclear about “comprehensive.” It would be something that can explain Mt. Everest with sea-floor deposits on its top, the mid-Atlantic sea floor with its pattern of magnetic reversals that correspond well with radiometric dates, the migrations of the Hawaiian and Yellowstone hot spots which correspond well with plate tectonics, multiple ice ages, the Hawaiian Ridge which is older on the north end and youngest on the south end, the Grand Canyon, the ice cores, the geologic column and its fossils, and much more within 10,000 years without requiring a violation of the laws of physics.
The standard model fits these things together reasonable well. You need to do at least as well. Your quibbles with radiometric dating do not shorten the time periods to anything remotely realistic.
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Are LSU professors breaking the 8th commandment?
Sean Pitman M.D.: Why is this a problem? The Mediterranean did in fact empty and dry out after the Flood – only to be suddenly filled in again once the first ice age ended and the sea levels increased and burst through, filling the basin in less than 2 years time.
You’re going to dry out the Mediterranean, get thick salt layers, have animals roam around on it, and then fill it up all since the Flood. And, wait, the water in the Mediterranean was, I presume, the water left from the Flood. So, the Flood was a flood of salt water? Really?
And, this fits somewhere in the sequence of the really warm period and the really cold period, and none of this took much time.
It seems that everything is possible.
Are LSU professors breaking the 8th commandment?
Shane Hilde: I was told that creating curriculum isn’t even a part of GRI’s responsibilities.
You’re quite right that curriculum development is not part of the GRI mission statement. However, I’m guessing that the person you talked to is too young to remember how it all started fifty years ago. There’s been a lot of shifting and the organization has never reached the goals that it began with.
There’s a very good history of creationism that relates a good part of the GRI story in “The Creationists,” by Ron Numbers. It should be required reading.
Are LSU professors breaking the 8th commandment?
Jonathan Smith: Carl and Bravus are trying desperately hard to find justification for holding on to the religion of evolution.
Can’t speak for Bravus, but I don’t like evolution much at all. It’s always interesting to hear from people who know what I’m thinking.
There are two things going on here. One is the big question about science and what it says about how to understand Genesis. The second closely related question is how science should be taught at LSU.
The purpose of this Website, as stated above in one form by Kevin Paulson, is to demand action to reform the science curriculum at LSU. In response, the Board has formed a group to address that question. That’s not good enough for the sponsors of this site, so the argument continues. My point in the debate is that the Board does not have an alternative. We do not have a scientific short history to be taught, so give LSU some room.
Sean appears to be the primary spokesman for the scientific case, and he has created an extensive Website giving many objections to the dominant scientific explanations of earth history. He has raised challenges against widely accepted explanations, but that’s about it. If he has really solved the problem, don’t you think someone would notice? GRI has been working on these issues for 50 years, and what they say is that the issues are “complex.” It doesn’t sound like a ground swell of support for the “Sean Pitman earth history model.”
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These layers should have been washed away many times over by now. That’s the problem.
Well — maybe. I’d say the real problem for your position is that no one has proposed a comprehensive model that can explain the evidence of geology within about 10,000 years. That is such a huge problem that I don’t know why we are talking about anything else. The evidence for life beyond 10,000 years is massive as compared to the few objections that Sean has collected.
Dr. Ervin Taylor: ‘A truly heroic crusade’
Sean,
I understand better how you have reached your conclusions. You have a powerful bias that the Bible must be literal history, and that predisposition has driven much of your scientific thinking. What still mystifies me is that you attempt to take the open issues of science and use them as an argument that a short history is equally as believable (I think you claim more believable) as a long history. That is one huge leap.
I’ve read parts of your personal Web site, and it seems to me that you have failed to establish your points. In what you have written, I have found no compelling evidence to believe a short history. You do well in raising doubts about the standard model, but doubts on one side are not a convincing argument on the other side.
You do not have any detectable theory of how the earth could possibly come to be as it is within about 10,000 years. Your discussion above again misses the major issue. The evidence that is at odds with a short history is much greater than the evidence that is at odds with a long history. You have come nowhere close to showing otherwise. Ten thousand years is a very short period of time.
Report on LSU constituency meeting
Here’s a link for Hammill’s interesting report:
http://spectrummagazine.org/files/archive/archive11-15/15-2hammill.pdf
Report on LSU constituency meeting
@BobRyan:
Not found in Adventist literature.
Not found in Quiquinium voted documents.
So “general†as in you and a few of your closes friends?
How is that “general�
The Consultant Committee on Geoscience Research was terminated and a new emphasis was instituted for staff activities. Research tended to concentrate on selected areas where the data were most supportive of the 6,000-year biblical chronology of Bishop Ussher. Before long, the tacit policy arrived at in the 1950s during the General Conference presidency of W. H. Branson (to the effect that the 6,000-year chronology need not be emphasized in Seventh-day Adventist publications) was abandoned. (Richard Hammill, AAF Spectrum, Vol 15, No. 2 p 41)
I did not know Dr Hammill personally, so, no, this wasn’t cooked up among my closest friends.
Report on LSU constituency meeting
@Art Chadwick:
The theology department has preceded the sciences by some year in losing confidence in the Scriptures and in promoting belief in naturalism.
Here again is the suggestion that we must interpret Scripture literally or else we are “losing confidence” in them. I think it often works the other way around. By insisting on literal details, we can miss the most important point and make it more difficult to believe.
The tragedy of this Web site is that it thwarts the creative thinking that we need for dealing with modern science issues. It’s not an easy problem, and the success of this site will drive many thinking people into seclusion. That’s where we’ve been for decades.
In the 1950s, there was a general understanding that Adventist literature would not emphasize a 6000 year history. President Robert Pierson brought that to an end and set us on a path to avoid any science that we did not like. The result is that many Adventists are very suspicious of science and scientists.
If truth has nothing to fear from examination, which sometimes seems to be a Adventist assumption, I say it’s time to stop trying to fix LSU. Students are pretty good at figuring out who to believe. So, if you’re afraid to think out of the box, go where you’ll be told what to think. If you want think it out for yourself, go where the box has been opened.
I have little doubt that Geanna, Adventist Student, and many others will figure things out with or without the “help” of the reformers sponsoring and speaking on this site.