@Geanna Dane: Geanna: you are correct that the creationist model

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

Geanna: you are correct that the creationist model posits a good deal of rapid evolutionary change shortly after the Flood. If I resist calling it “evolution” it is because that term evokes the Darwinist model of common ancestry and evolutionary change over 500+ million years, which of course the creationist model rejects. But both models clearly have a great deal of evolutionary change in them. They differ over rate and mechanism.

Adventist scientist Leonard Brand acknowledges that the creationist model includes micro-evolution and even macro-evolution, and he has coined the term “mega-evolution” to describe the mainstream idea of common descent of all creatures over hundreds of millions of years. Creationists believe that entire genera or even families of animals diversified from a single created “kind” or baramin (a term coined by Adventist scientist Frank Lewis Marsh). There is a creationist discipline called baraminology that tries to determine which animals descended from an original created pair, and Harvard Ph.D. paleontologist Kurt Wise has done work in this field.

Also, I don’t think the current scientific thinking on the mechanism of evolutionary change–natural selection acting upon genetic mutations, i.e., DNA replication errors–is adequate to explain the change I believe happened since the Flood. I agree with you that some of the post-Flood evolutionary change has been exquisitely adaptive, but Stephen Vicaro is right that genetic mutation typically leads to the loss or garbling of genetic information; mutation does not add genetic information. I discuss this for several pages in my book, mentioning bacteria/anti-biotics, insects/insectides, and sickle cell anemia. For an in-depth discussion of this topic, I recommend Lee Spetner’s “Not by Chance.” But, in a nutshell, these types of mutations are degenerative changes that happen to have a very positive side effect.

For example, Mycin-type antibiotics work when the mycin attaches to a matching site on the ribosome of a bacterium and prevents the bacterium from assembling necessary amino acids. As a result, the bacterium makes the wrong proteins and cannot grow, divide, or propagate. If the bacterium has a mutation that alters the site where the mycin would normally bind, the drug can no longer interfere with protein production, and the bacterium has become resistant to mycin. But the mutations that make bacteria resistant to mycin degrade their ribosomes, making them less specific and slower in translating RNA codons into protein. Similarly, the insecticide DDT works when a molecule of DDT binds to a matching site on the membrane of an insectâ€™s nerve cells, preventing the nerve cells from functioning properly. Eventually, when enough of the insectâ€™s nerve cells have DDT molecules bound to them, its nervous system breaks down and it dies. A mutation that changes the site of the nerve cell at which the DDT molecule would normally bind prevents it from binding and renders the insect resistant to DDT. But the resistant insects are less active and slower to respond to stimuli than are nonresistant insects. Their resistance to insecticide is bought at the price of a more sluggish nervous system. Finally, the point mutation-induced sickle cell allele, if inherited from one parent, does convey a very significant survival advantage in the presence of the malaria parasite (Plasmodium), but if inherited from both parents leads to sickle cell anemia, a potentially fatal disease.

So even these types of “beneficial” mutations aren’t really beneficial. They are degenerative, just like all other mutations. This is why I have to insist that there are, or in the past have been, other genetic mechanisms that have driven the “evolutionary” change that creationists acknowledge must have taken place, even in a short-chronology creationist model.

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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.