It is a remarkably fair and unbiased article, and a …

Comment on La Sierra University Resignation Saga: Stranger-than-Fiction by David Read.

It is a remarkably fair and unbiased article, and a pretty fair summary of what was said in the recorded conversation.

Recent Comments by David Read

SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
@krissmith777: Philo of Alexandria used allegory to try to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. He was a Hellenized Jew who probably did not read Hebrew, who was trained in Greek philosophy, and his main enthusiasm, in addition to numerology, was blending pagan Greek philosophy and Judaism, not reading the Torah on its own terms. As it states in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Philo attempts to harmonize the Mosaic and Platonic accounts of the generation of the world by interpreting the biblical story using Greek scientific categories and concepts.”

Of course, Darwinism has roots in Greek philosophy, so in trying to blend paganism with the biblical worldview, Philo was doing exactly what modern compromising Christians do when they try to blend Darwinism into a biblical worldview. Philo is a case in point that the project of trying to blend paganism with the biblical worldview has been underway for a long time.

This blending of Greek philosophy with biblical and Christian concepts is the pride and joy of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was already well underway by the time of Cyprian’s conversion in the mid-Third Century, but Adventists have sought to return to a purer biblical worldview.


SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
@krissmith777: Kriss, you write that you can’t accept the argument because it demeans God by implying that He didn’t get it right the first time. But the fact that God created light on the first day (Gen. 1:3) is not an “argument.” It is a Scriptural fact.

You also write, “What would be the point in God creating a light source, getting rid of it, then making a new one?” I don’t know, maybe to have light to work by during the first three days of creation?

When builders are framing a house, the house doesn’t yet have any electricity, but the builders need electricity to run power tools. So they bring in a generator or set up a temporary power pole at the site. When the house is finished, the generator is taken away, the power pole taken down, and the house is powered by the wiring that was eventually installed and hooked up.

Does it “demean” the builders that they brought in a temporary power source until the house was permanently wired? I think not. To the contrary, it shows their power, in that they were not dependent upon what they eventually built.

In the same way, it is an important aspect of the Genesis narrative, in the context of ancient societies that worshiped the sun, to show that God is not dependent upon the things He creates. He did not need the sun for light; He created another light source before He created the sun. The sun is merely the permanent light source that he installed later in the creation week. To acknowledge this is the opposite of demeaning God; to the contrary, it demonstrates that we should worship God, not the sun.


SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
@Sean Pitman: It doesn’t make better sense to me as a straightforward reading of the text. God created light, and also created days with a dark portion and a light portion, on the first day. Gen. 1:2-5. Then, on the fourth day, God created the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. Gen. 1:14-19. These were apparently the sun and the moon, although they are not specifically named in the narrative (perhaps to further demean them and show them to be unworthy of worship).

From a straightforward reading of the text, these seem like two completely different creative acts on two different days. But I sense that you have some external scientific concern that would be eased by not reading the text in this way, and instead interpreting the light created on the first day and the “greater light to rule the day” created on the fourth day as being the same thing. What is that concern?


LSU memorandum confirms Educate Truth’s allegations
@pauluc: What is the unproven axiom?

The unproven axiom is that the mega-evolution story is true. It is further assumed that primates share a common ancestor. Obviously, there is no attempt to prove this, it is simply an assumption that is taken for granted in this study and in the previous studies cited in this one.

Another unproven assumption is that scientists will be more successful in using the genetic characteristics of various species to tease out assumed evolutionary relationships between species than they were using gross anatomical and morphological features. This hasn’t been the case so far, but it has provided endless opportunities to get research funding and publish papers, and to use genetic data to re-arrange clades originally based upon gross anatomical characteristics. But the conflict between clades based upon genetics with clades based upon gross anatomy just underscores the speculative nature of all Darwinian phylogenetic theories and conclusions.

Another assumption is that genetic mutations occur at a constant rate through time, a sort of biological uniformitarianism. The authors of this study assume “a substitution rate of 2.5 × 10−9 substitutions/site per year.” All “molecular clock” studies assume both common ancestry and a constant average rate of genetic mutation through huge tracts of time. Interestingly, if these authors’ analysis of their data is correct, retro-transpositions of Alu repeats are 10 times more common in the lemur line than in the human line, which doesn’t seem consistent with the assumption of a steady rate of genetic mutations.

What are the “actual facts” here?

Alu repeats are found in the genomes of all primates, but they are slightly different in the various species. It isn’t clear to me that there were any other facts in this article.

What is the creationist interpretation of this? How does it support the creationist perspective?

The article recognizes that Alu repeats probably have a function that has yet to be precisely determined:

“Recent work increasingly recognizes that Alu elements have a greater impact than expected on phenotypic change, diseases, and evolution. Alu elements were demonstrated to mediate insertion mutagenesis, ‘exonization’ by alternative splicing, genomic rearrangements, segmental duplication, and expression regulation causing disorders like Hunter syndrome, hemophilia A, and Sly syndrome.”

It is a prediction of creationism and design theory that junk DNA would prove to have non-obvious, but eventually discoverable functionality. The authors seem to concede that this is the case with Alu repeats.

The authors also believe that the rate of Alu retro-transpositions was much higher in the distant past than today in the anthropoid or human line. This coincides with the longstanding creationist theory that genetic diversification was much faster and more extensive during the immediate post-Flood centuries than today or in the recent past.


SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
@krissmith777: There’s no contradiction in there being days with a light and dark portion prior to the creation of the sun. God created light on the first day (Gen. 1:3), and as long as there is a light source and the globe revolves, there will be days with a dark and light portion. God doesn’t need the sun to provide light. Rev. 21:23-24.