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?

Sean Pitman M.D.: This sort of stuff doesn’t cause you the briefest pause when it comes to your bold declarations in favor of mainstream thinking?

It gives some pause, but, when the total evidence is evaluated, it still comes out that a short-age model has huge problems. There is a good book, “Noah’s Flood” by William Ryan and Walter Pittman (really, Ryan and Pittman), that gives evidence about the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The most significant thing is that the Mediterranean Sea floor contains a layer of evaporative salts. How did that get there? Could that happen if you close off Gibralter and let it dry out? Maybe so. How long would that take?

Next point: radiometric dating. Would you agree that it is valid to establish a sequence even though it’s not valid for absolute dating? If so, you will be hard pressed to fit the sequence into a short history, especially since the sequence of layers containes a sequence of fossils. (Remember that ecological zonation didn’t work.)

Next: impact craters. Quite a few of those around, some old and some very old. Did those happen before or after the Flood? How long between impacts?

Next: volcanic eruptions. Quite a few of those, also. Some left wide-spread ash layers. How did all of them occur since the Flood?

Next: Yellowstone hot spot. There’s a string of cinder cones from Southern Idaho reaching over to Yellowstone. The dating along the line agrees pretty well with the rate of North American Plate motion for a long time.

Next: Hawaiian hot spot. The Hawaiian Ridge is older on the north end and younger on the south end. The dates agree well with the movement of the Pacific Plate

Next: ice cores. How come we seem to have 800,000 annual layers? Oh, of course, maybe we get several layers per year, say 10. That’s 80,000 years. Are some of the ice layers older than the Flood? Maybe the ice formed where the Flood wasn’t. Woops, the Flood was universal.

Next: Grand Canyon. Did it form quickly? The rock must have been soft. If so, how did we end up with nearly vertical rock walls close to 1,000 feet high?

Next: North American mountains. Why are they quite flattened in the East and very rugged in West?

Last: smooth river rocks. How did all of the rocks get bounced around until they were smooth and then end up in the river beds and other places?

Panda’s Thumb: ‘SDAs are split over evolution’

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.