@Geanna Dane: Geanna: It has been fun dialoging with you,

Comment on Board requests progress reports from LSU administration by David Read.

Geanna: It has been fun dialoging with you, even though your tone is so inconsistant–ranging from playful to serious to ornery–that I’m never quite sure exactly what your position is, where you are coming from or what is important to you.

It sounds like you had some very good Adventist teachers who were candid with you about creationism’s strengths and weaknesses, and whose honesty prepared you for the Darwinism you encountered in a public university. On the other hand, you also got some “misinformation”; I’d be curious to know what that was.

On the issue of species, everyone should be aware that there are multiple definitions of species, depending upon the needs and specifications of multiple scientific disciplines. Lay people tend to think of a species as a group capable of interbreeding, but most “species” are much narrower groupings. For example, the mulitple species of Galapagos Finches can all interbreed; they are more like what most people would think of as “varieties.” I wonder how many of the 30 species of rattlesnake can interbreed (although I don’t want to be the guy who does that research). Also the concept of species does not correlate to the creationist “kind”; there will typically be many different species that have diversified from each created kind.

Pitman, et al, can speak for themselves, but I don’t think anyone is saying that evolution is stupid or illogical. It is the best that we can come up with while rejecting inspired history. Obviously, the Darwinian model of earth history is far better elucidated than the creationist model, because many more qualified scientists have work on its various aspects than have worked on a creationist model. But if we have faith in inpsired history, we will believe that God created the basic kinds of animals in the fairly recent past; they did not evolve by accident over the course of >500 million years.

You seem to be particularly troubled by the challenges that biogeography poses for a short chronology. These are significant, but not insurmountable. Darwinian theory tends to lubricate all of its problems–including the lack of a plausible evolutionary mechanism–with buckets of deep time, and creationists obviously do not have that luxury. Perhaps when we discover the true mechanism of evolution, we will see that it doesn’t need the massive amounts of time called for in the hunt-peck mechanism of selection acting upon genetic mutations.

If you’re interested in this area, that’s great! If you are interested in the evolution of rattlesnakes, (1) make a good faith effort to learn the best creationist thinking on the topic, and (2) if you’re not happy with it, come up with a better explanation within the constraints (time and otherwise) of inspired history. Talk to the leaders among the creationist scientists. They’re good people. It is a small, almost intimate community, and they’re always looking for bright scientists willing to work within the constraints of inspired history. I’ll tell you an interesting personal anecdote. When I finished the manuscript of my dinosaur book, I sent it in a 3-ring binder to Kurt Wise, the guy who has a Ph.D. from Harvard, and whose advisor was Stephen Jay Gould. I didn’t know him, had never met him before, and he’s not an Adventist. I was just some guy, a lawyer, not even a scientist, pestering him to read my manuscript. But he took the time to read the entire manuscript and send it back to me, marked up with a red pen. And then he corresponded with me by email. He didn’t have to do any of that, but he did. I think you’ll find that doing science within the confines of the creationist model is just as much fun, if not more so, as doing mainstream science.

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Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
Bravus: “Recognising that *both* our reading of Scripture and our reading of the natural world might need work” sounds like a reasonable idea. But it is not sound exegesis to adopt a certain reading of Scripture merely so that Scripture accommodates some theory of origins. “The Bible is not to be tested by menâ€™s ideas of science.” PP 114. Rather, the Bible should be interpreted using its own internal evidence. The Bible should be read and interpreted by comparing passage with passage, verse with verse, chapter with chapter, and thereby getting a sense of what God was trying to communicate to us in His word. An astonishing consistency emerges from that kind of Bible study.

It is especially unsound and illogical to interpret Scripture so as to accommodate theories of origins that have been developed in accordance with the philosophy of naturalism. Scripture is written from a supernaturalistic point of view, and assumes that God, angels, demons and Satan exist, that God created, and upholds and sustains His creation, and that God has often miraculously intervened in His created universe. So the philosophical foundation of Scripture is contrary to the philosophy underpinning Darwinism and long ages geology. It is exegetically senseless to strain to interpret Scripture, which is marinated in the supernatural, so as to accommodate theories of origins that are premised upon naturalistic (functionally atheistic) philosophical foundations.

You mention that history proved Wm. Miller’s reading of Scripture wrong, and your point seems to be that the facts of nature can prove that a literal reading of Genesis 1 and Exodus 20 is also wrong. This isn’t the case. The data of nature do not interpret themselves, but must be interpreted according to a theory or hypothesis. Those who believe that the facts of nature themselves disprove a literal reading of Scripture suffer from a lack of imagination, an inability to interpret the facts in any way other than along Lyellian and Darwinian lines. To paraphrase Ervin Taylor, they suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding, in many ways, a kind of disease that appears often among the highly scientifically indoctrinated.

Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
Bravus, I think the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are used because they are economical. Clusters of beliefs, attitudes, and views so often reside together in the same individual that it is much more efficient to name the cluster than to go through a long laundry list of all of the constituent beliefs, attitudes and views.

Speaking for myself, I do not claim to know anything about origins, much less to know anything “definitively, finally, and objectively.” I do read Scripture in a certain way (the traditional Adventist reading), and based upon that reading, I explore various hypotheses and theories about origins. I do not hold dogmatically the various hypotheses and theories through which I seek to correlate what I believe from Scripture with the data found in the world (and the universe).

But I DO hold dogmatically to my reading of Scripture, and I think that is the heart of our disagreement. I think it bothers you that I am (as are most of us who post here) so unbending and uncompromising in my faith. Again speaking for myself, my faith in Scripture, as God has given me to understand Scripture, is firm, steadfast, unbending, uncompromising, and non-negotiable. I think it is this attitude that you are interpreting as lack of humility, arrogance, pride, hubris, etc., but to me it is just strongly held faith. I know what I believe, and it isn’t up for debate. If that makes me seem arrogant, then I will just have to seem arrogant.

Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
Bravus, where are you getting the idea that your ideological opponents think they know everything? Where does this come from?

I’ve never claimed to know it all, but what does that have to do with our faith differences? Obviously, nobody knows anything about origins. It is all a matter of faith. I read the Bible the way Adventists have always read it, and you think that reading can’t possibly be correct. So we have a faith difference, or a difference of opinion. How does my opinion make me a know-it-all? Why doesn’t your opinion make you a know-it-all?

I’m not following your logic at all, nor Ervin’s, and I’m really trying to. I think perhaps the conservative mind is cast in such an utterly different modality than the liberal mind that meaningful dialog is all but impossible.