@Geanna Dane: Geanna: I think you are focused on

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

Geanna: I think you are focused on mechanisms rather than models. The real issue is which model are you committed to, the Biblical model or the anti-biblical model. The mechanisms are very much secondary.

For example, the scientific world was committed to naturalistic evolution for some 80 years before it was even ascertained that genetic information is carried in the DNA molecule. Darwin thought that “natural selection”, which was just selective breeding in the wild, was sufficient to accomplish all the changes envisioned in his theory; he had no idea of the limits of selective breeding, or the need for new genetic information to get where he needed to go. The Neo-Darwinian theory, the idea that evolution proceeds by natural selection acting upon genetic mutations (DNA copying errors), is a product of the 1940s and 50s, but science had been committed to naturalistic evolution since the 1860s. Theories about mechanisms follow, and are secondary to, the larger model of earth history. This has clearly been the case with Darwinism.

There’s no question which model should be taught in Seventh-day Adventist institutions. Adventists believe in a creator God who created the basic kinds of animals in a literal week in the fairly recently past, after which there was the Fall, and a worldwide Flood (that comprehensively reshaped the surface of the earth and created most of the fossil record and the stratigraphical pile). A non-literal reading of Genesis totally deracinates and destroys the Adventist way of reading the Bible, and would cause our entire doctrinal structure to collapse. It would also impeach our founding prophet beyond any hope of rehabilitation. Obviously we should be committed to the biblical model, and I think that, LaSierra notwithstanding, most Adventists and even most Ph.D.-level Adventist scientists are committed to that model.

The reason why you are having such difficulty with the idea of a rapid post-Flood speciation and diversification is that you are viewing the problem through the lens of the Darwinian worldview, and trying to plug in the currently poplular Darwinian mechanism of selection of DNA copying errors. If I were viewing the problem through that lens and trying to use that mechanism, I would agree with you that the problem is completely hopeless. The Darwinian model is faced with having to build up genetic information out of nothing. I don’t think this is possible, but if it were, I agree that it would take a long, long, long, long time.

But the creationist model is NOT faced with the problem of having to create new genetic information. In our model, a Creator God of ineffable genius, majesty, and power created all the genetic information that any creature’s descendants would ever need in order to cope with all of the various environmental conditions that they would face. So I have no trouble envisioning a process by which creatures were able to rapidly change, to adapt to, and exploit, changed environmental conditions.

But I’m not trying to use the hunt-peck method of random DNA copying errors–which are almost always deadly or deleterious for the organism. I’m envisioning a process that is mostly turning on or turning off previously existing genetic information, probably in response to environmental stimuli. I’m also thinking that adaptive genetic information, on/off switches or even major sections of coding, can be transferred virally by horizontal genetic transfer, which would greatly speed up any adaptive changes.

But again, the mechanism follows the model, not the other way around. Mainstream science seems content with the mechanism of selection of random DNA copying errors because it has hundreds of millions of years to get where it wants to go. But I don’t think that even the ceaseless ages of eternity is enough time for random DNA copying errors to build up new genetic information sufficient to create new biological mechanisms, organs and organ systems. I think the role of natural selection has been conservative and preservational, not innovational.

Table of Contents

1 David Read Also Commented
- 1.1 Recent Comments by David Read
2 Related

David Read Also Commented

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.