113 thoughts on “LSU Board news release and actions”

1. Carl: To me, the tragedy of Adventism is that we can’t have a rational discussion of the problem because it isn’t safe to do so. As soon as anyone challenges our traditional beliefs, a cry goes up to get them dismissed. That’s the purpose of this Website, and, as long as it’s effective, we will stay locked in our established traditions no matter how irrational our position becomes. By doing so we become completely irrelevant to the educated world, nothing more than another tourist attraction in the history of religions.

   The straightforward, obvious and commonsense interpretation of Scripture is secure. However, if I discovered that the entire foundation of Christianity is a lie, then I would renounce my former faith but certainly not strive to convert Christians to believe in Darwinism.

   I respect having a logically consistent position but see no reason to adopt the assumptions that the world embraces. Frankly, I think it’s logically inconsistent to trust in Jesus for salvation and at the same time entertain the idea that the Savior didn’t understand Genesis in a straightforward literal way.

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2. Carl:
   I believe that science must be taught with complete honesty whether or not it supports SDA traditional beliefs.

   The truth about science is that science is always changing. Light was first thought to be composed of particles. Then that model was abandoned in favor of a wave model, the belief that light is a vibration of a luminiferous aether. Modern science is now back to the particle model.

   Carl:
   So, the complete scientific picture should be taught including the fact that there is no plausible explanation for life within a short history

   According to real, quantifiable science, all the fundamental laws of physics are ultimately probabilistic and it is possible for the Red Sea to split (Exodus 14:21) and for a man to be fully formed out of the inanimate material of the earth in a single day (Genesis 2:7). The process is understandable, although highly improbable. It still satisfies the definition of science. An example of a process that isn’t understandable, demonstrable, or in any way provable, is the assertion that it’s logically possible for all life to have descended from a single-celled animal in small incremental steps. Darwinists today aren’t even able to quantify what Darwin meant by slow, sure steps.

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3. Eugene Shubert:
   The truth about science is that science is always changing. Light was first thought to be composed of particles. Then that model was abandoned in favor of a wave model, the belief that light is a vibration of a luminiferous aether. Modern science is now back to the particle model.
   According to real, quantifiable science, all the fundamental laws of physics are ultimately probabilistic and it is possible for the Red Sea to split (Exodus 14:21) and for a man to be fully formed out of the inanimate material of the earth in a single day (Genesis 2:7). The process is understandable, although highly improbable. It still satisfies the definition of science. An example of a process that isn’t understandable, demonstrable, or in any way provable, is the assertion that it’s logically possible for all life to have descended from a single-celled animal in small incremental steps. Darwinists today aren’t even able to quantify what Darwin meant by slow, sure steps.  

   Eugene,

   What Carl means is that we should teach evolution and to h*** with the Bible. What he does not want to say outright is that evolutionary science is so unreliable that it can be seen to be like a grasshopper jumping from place to place with no seeming pattern. I do not know what that has to to with science.

   True scientists would admit they cannot explain the origin of life and they cannot explain the seeming connections between physical (artifacts) evidences found and what we have today. Thus they substitute wild and fantasizing guesses all based on their pre-determined notions of life.

   Then they sit and pray (who to, I don’t know) that somehow, somewhere a solution that matches their guess will be found. And that is science.

   They are a dishonest or brainwashed set, and that they must admit. The sad part is that there are evolutionists like Colin Patterson who are honest with the lies evolution teaches. Examples:

   1979: Interview with Luther D. Sunderland, June 30,British Museum of Natural History, ERIC Document Reproduction Service microfiche ED 228 056 (available at most public libraries), pp.7-19.

   Sunderland, late creationist activist (d. 1987), interviewed several paleontologists while preparing his book Darwin’s Enigma. This interview is marked by a fair amount of miscommunication, but also by passages such as the following:

   Sunderland: …How do you see that evolution might explain the origin of fishes?

   Patterson: (Pause)

   Sunderland: Then you’d rather not say?

   Patterson:Ten years ago I’d have been perfectly willing to tell you, but it so happens that I know someone who is working this problem for about 15 years–the starfish end of it–the echinoderms. He believes that this development could be traced from the Cambrian with the echinoderms. I could very easily refer you to his work and say that I agree with him that fish are related to echinoderms, but I do not think it is obvious.

   1980: “Cladistics,” The Biologist 27: 234-240.

   A popular article, drafted as the “transformed cladistics” controversy was growing to its height. “As the theory of cladistics has developed,” argued Patterson (p. 239), “it has been realized that more and more of the evolutionary framework is inessential, and may be dropped. The chief symptom of this change is the significance attached to nodes in cladistics. In Hennig’s book, as in all early works in cladistics, the nodes are taken to represent ancestral species. This assumption has been found to be unnecessary, even misleading, and may be dropped.”

   “Phylogenies and Fossils,” Systematic Zoology 29: 216-219.

   More skepticism about fossils and phylogeny: “To me, one of the most astonishing consequences of the furor over cladistics is the realization that the current account of tetrapod evolution, shown in a thousand diagrams and everywhere acknowledged as the centerpiece of historical biology, is a will-o’-the-wisp. For nowhere can one find a clear statement of how and why the Recent groups are interrelated, and the textbook stories are replete with phantoms–extinct, uncharacterizable groups giving rise one to another” (p. 217).

   1981: “Significance of Fossils in Determining Evolutionary Relationships,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 12: 195-223.

   Patterson’s classic, critical analysis of the role of fossils in systematics: “…extinct paraphyletic groups [common in neo-Darwinian phylogenies before the cladistic revolution] seem to me to obscure rather than illuminate relationships, for they exist not in nature but in the minds of evolutionists. Such groups lead to a sterile inversion of problems of relationships, which come to depend not on comparative analysis of what is accessible–the Recent biota–but on juggling with what is inaccessible–uncharacterizable abstractions from the fossil record” (p. 219).

   1982: “Morphological Characters and Homology,” in Problems of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, eds. K.A. Joysey and A.E. Friday, Systematics Association Special Vol. No. 21 (New York: Academic Press), pp. 21-74.

   Perhaps the most widely-cited paper on homology of the past two decades, where Patterson discusses five ways of defining homology (classical, evolutionary, phenetic, cladistic, and utilitarian), taking issue with “the evolutionists…for here I do expect disagreement” (p. 62). Patterson’s main complaint is with extinct, paraphyletic groups, which typically play the role of “transitional forms” in evolutionary reasoning. “Such groups,” Patterson argued, “…are imagined by evolutionists, those most committed to the confirmation of Darwin’s views. The power of this mystery, extinct paraphyletic groups as the source of phylogeny, is shown by the fact that we still have no cladogram, or series of nested homologies, for tetrapods, the group in which phylogeny is supposed to be best known” (p. 64).

   1983: “How does phylogeny differ from ontogeny?” in Development and Evolution, eds. B.C. Goodwin, N. Holder and C. Wylie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 1-31.

   A discussion of the bearing of ontogenetic (developmental) data on phylogeny: “Phylogeny is generalised transformation, but we have no empirical experience of phylogeny; the only transformations of which we have empirical evidence are those of ontogeny” (p. 21).

   1988: “Homology in Classical and Molecular Biology,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 5: 603-625.

   Patterson applies his 1982 analysis of homology (see above) to molecular data. This paper is notable for its claim that, at the molecular level (unlike gross morphology), “there is no detected molecular equivalent of convergence–or of misleading similarity–except in the most trivial sense” (p. 618).

   So keep up your vigorous opposition and we will let people like Carl, Greer and Bradley know that their version of science is all lies and rebellion against God and such is not welcome in a truth telling institution like a SDA school.

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4. What we should see in the fossil record if Darwinian evolution is true.

   http://www.bibleprobe.org/objection.html

   Classic evolution theory says that species gradually developed from previous species. In fact, the process was so slow, it would be impossible to pinpoint exactly when a new species emerged. Each generation would possess infinitesimal differences from the previous generation. Only after several thousands, or even millions of generations, would one be able to recognize species differences. This is much like looking at a motion picture. Each frame captures a split second of time. If you look at each frame one at a time, it would be hard to recognize movement. There isn’t much change between frames. Only if you look at the frames in rapid succession do you see motion. This is what classical evolution says we should see in the fossil record. Fossils represent individual frames in the movie-of-life. As we discover more and more fossils, the frames in evolution’s progress, we should be able to piece them together into a film that shows how life evolved. Like the images on the individual frames in a film, the difference from one frame to the next ought to be too small to distinguish. Fossils should show such gradual changes that eventually we ought to have a fossil record with no exact boundaries between species.

   Yet …

   Is this what the fossil record has shown… over the last one hundred and fifty years? The answer is no! The fossil record shows no transitional forms. It didn’t when Darwin proposed his theory, and it has gotten worse for the evolutionist ever since.

   In his book, Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland reveals much about the truth of the fossil record.(2*)

   “The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find intermediate varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps.” (3*)

   “Back in 1940, Dr. Richard B. Goldschmidt had faced the horns of this dilemma-of-the-gaps with his hopeful monster theory, the idea that every once in awhile an offspring was produced that was a monster grossly different from its parents.” (4*)

   “Dr. Niles Eldredge, curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum, was collaborating with Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard and calling their new theory, aimed at explaining the gaps, ‘punctuated equilibria.” (5*)

   “Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,published an article in the January 1979 issue (vol. 50, no. 1) of the museum’s journal entitled ‘Conflicts Between Darwinism and Paleontology’ in which he stated that the 250,000 species of plants and animal recorded and deposited in museums throughout the world did not support the gradual unfolding hoped for by Darwin.” (6*)

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5. http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/audios/c010.htm

   Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?
   November 1981 Presentation at the American Museum of Natural History
   By Colin Patterson

   Audio CD and Annotated Transcript

   What would happen if you awoke one morning and suddenly realized that you no longer accepted the scientific theory on which, thus far, you had based your life’s work? This is precisely the experience paleontologist Colin Patterson conveyed to the Systematics Discussion Group nearly twenty years ago in his now famous presentation.

   On November 5, 1981, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Colin Patterson gave a presentation entitled “Evolutionism and Creationism” to the Systematics Discussion Group. The presentation was taped, and an unauthorized (bootleg) transcript was made. Now, 19 years later, Access Research Network has obtained the original audio tape of Patterson’s historical presentation. After several months of careful work, in consultation with a witness to the 1981 presentation, ARN is releasing to the public the original audio tape, and an edited transcription of the tape. The transcript includes a large amount of previously unreleased material, notably the 40 minute question-and-answer period, where Patterson interacts with evolutionary biologists such as Niles Eldredge, Keith Stewart Thomson, Stanley Salthe, and James Farris. The transcript also includes an historical introduction by Paul Nelson, biographical footnotes and literature citations.

   Here are a few of Patterson’s famous comments that you can now listen to and read in their full context:

   “But it’s true that for the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been kicking around non-evolutionary or even anti-evolutionary ideas.”

   “Now, one of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realization. For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. That was quite a shock, to learn that one can be so misled for so long.”

   “So either there is something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally I know there’s nothing wrong with me. So for the last few weeks, I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. The question is this: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that you think is true?”

   “Well, I’m not interested in the controversy over teaching in high school, and if any militant creationists have come here looking for political ammunition, I hope they’ll be disappointed.”

   “I shall take the text of my sermon from this book, Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation….He takes it for granted that a rationalist view of nature has replaced an irrational one, and of course, I myself took that view, up until about eighteen months ago. And then I woke up and I realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way.”

   “Well, we’re back to the question I’ve been putting to people, ‘Is there one thing you can tell me about evolution?’ And the absence of an answer seems to suggest that it is true, evolution does not convey any knowledge, or if so, I haven’t yet heard it.”

   “Now I think many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you’ve experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know that’s true of me, and I think it’s true of a good many of you in here.”

   “So that’s my first theme. That evolution and creationism seem to be showing remarkable parallels. They are increasingly hard to tell apart. And the second theme is that evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge, apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics.”

   No longer do you have to depend on incomplete transcripts or bootleg tapes. Now you can experience the full impact of listening to the complete original recording of this amazing talk with the assistance of a well-annotated transcript that required hundreds of hours to compile and transcribe. And this entire product has been carefully reviewed by one of the original witnesses of the event who assisted us in identifying the speakers during the lively discussion session that followed the talk, material which has never before been available and reveals the full impact of Patterson’s presentation on his peers.

   Can You Tell Me Anything About Evolution?
   November 1981 Presentation at the American Museum of Natural History
   By Colin Patterson

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6. Patterson has addressed this tape and this issue repeatedly. He was being deliberately provocative and using a conceit, a rhetorical device, to do so. Here is Patterson himself:

   In November 1981, after an invitation from Donn Rosen [a fish systematist at the American Museum, now deceased], I gave a talk to the Systematics Discussion Group in the American Museum of Natural History. Donn asked me to talk on ‘Evolutionism and Creationism’, and it happened that just one week before my talk Ernst Mayr published a paper on systematics in Science (Mayr 1981). Mayr pointed out the deficiencies (in his view) of cladistics and phenetics, and noted that the ‘connection with evolutionary principles is exceedingly tenuous in many recent cladistic writings.’ For Mayr, classifications should incorporate such things as ‘inferences on selection pressures, shifts of adaptive zones, evolutionary rates, and rates of evolutionary divergence.’ Fired up by Mayr’s paper, I gave a fairly radical talk in New York, comparing the effect of evolutionary theory on systematics with Gillespie’s (1979, p. 8) characterization of pre-Darwinian creationism: ‘not a research govering theory (since its power to explain was only verbal) but an antitheory, a void that had the function of knowledge but, as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none.’ Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there was a creationist in my audience with a hidden tape recorder. A transcript of my talk was produced and circulated among creationists, and the talk has since been widely, and often inaccurately, quoted in creationist literature.

   It’s clear, too, that far from extolling the virtues of creationism, Patterson was using it as an example of a very bad theory that tended to hinder the progress of science. He was making the rhetorical point that evolution was often unhelpful in his own field of systematics/cladistics, in a dramatic way, in response to a paper that had suggested systematics should make more use of evolution than it did.

   Honesty includes not using someone’s words out of context to mean almost the opposite of what they were intended to mean…

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7. Colin Patterson said:

   For Mayr, classifications should incorporate such things as ‘inferences on selection pressures, shifts of adaptive zones, evolutionary rates, and rates of evolutionary divergence.’ Fired up by Mayr’s paper, I gave a fairly radical talk in New York, comparing the effect of evolutionary theory on systematics with Gillespie’s (1979, p. characterization of pre-Darwinian creationism: ‘not a research govering theory (since its power to explain was only verbal) but an antitheory, a void that had the function of knowledge but, as naturalists increasingly came to feel, conveyed none.’

   Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there was a creationist in my audience with a hidden tape recorder.

   It is all too clear that Patterson was livid about Mayr’s dump-science-just-live-with-inferences approach to “stories about one thing coming from another” and so Patterson wanted to “hold their feet to the fire” as it were trying to weed out as many junk-science principles as possible.

   Sadly for Patterson – as he laments — there was a free-thinker in the audience — a “creationist with a tape recorder”. Thus EXACT in context quotes of that speech are now available for ALL to see — and in no way limited to the “faithful devotees of evolutionism”.

   Note the reaction of Niles Eldredge as he listened to Patterson’s speech that day (reported by Roy Slingo).

   .
   Roy Slingo, from the prestigious Scarsdale NY district.

   Slingo later informed me that at one stage of the talk that Niles Eldredge (well known for his anti-creationist perspective) grabbed his forehead and slid down the wall proclaiming, “ O-M-G, how can he be doing this to us.”[/b]
   

   It gets worse.

   in Christ,

   Bob

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8. @Bravus:

   It’s clear, too, that far from extolling the virtues of creationism, Patterson was using it as an example of a very bad theory that tended to hinder the progress of science. He was making the rhetorical point that evolution was often unhelpful in his own field of systematics/cladistics, in a dramatic way, in response to a paper that had suggested systematics should make more use of evolution than it did.

   Honesty includes not using someone’s words out of context to mean almost the opposite of what they were intended to mean…

   Honesty demands that we admit that nobody is arguing that devoted atheist evolutionist Colin Patterson was ever a creationist.

   Honesty demands that we admit that the point of quoting Patterson was neveer to claim “atheiist evolutionists like Patterson really believe creationism” – but rather that Patterson was pointing to the junk-science storytelling so often used to prop up evolutionism — and lamenting it.

   However as a devoted atheist himself – Patterson clearly felt he had “nowhere else to go”. How can that not-so-subtle point be missed??

   in Christ,

   Bob

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9. BobRyan: @Bravus:Honesty demands that we admit that nobody is arguing that devoted atheist evolutionist Colin Patterson was ever a creationist.Honesty demands that we admit that the point of quoting Patterson was neveer to claim “atheiist evolutionists like Patterson really believe creationism” – but rather that Patterson was pointing to the junk-science storytelling so often used to prop up evolutionism — and lamenting it.However as a devoted atheist himself – Patterson clearly felt he had “nowhere else to go”. How can that not-so-subtle point be missed??in Christ,Bob  

   You have the right response Bob. I might add that I was not claiming Patterson did not make a rebuttal, but the essence of Patterson’s discourse shows the faith-based absurdities of evolutionary conclusions which Bravus, Carl and others call science.

   History and ultimately God will judge just who was honest.

   If someone claims to believe in God, it behooves that person to believe God’s word OVER what “scientists” claim. Secondly, if such a person has “scientific training” then before spouting evolutionary garbage, one should evaluate the conclusions drawn to find the weaknesses and loopholes that should weaken its arguments.

   I find the evolutionists posting here are not interested in showing up the weaknesses of evolution, but are desperately trying to find some evidence evolution MAY be true. Patterson could not find ONE TRUTH in evolution.

   Who is dishonest? Could it be that the so-called God worshippers are taking His name in vain? Claiming to believing in God but secretly and openly undermining faith in Him, that is the ultimate form of dishonesty, torpedoing the faith of many.

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10. Pingback: Educate Truth - Evolution vs Creation at La Sierra University

11. the faculty senate affirms support of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and its teaching! do they, do they really? what a bunch of double talk. To La Sierra, at least be honest enough to print a disclaimer that not all teachers believe and teach beliefs taught and accepted by their employing organizations. For love of Christ. BE INTELLECTUALLY HONEST! I will never recommend any of my children seek an advanced degree from one of “our” colleges. I would sooner see them die spiritually of natural causes than of this contrived academically free, but morally bankrupt and artificially segregated teaching methodology that says.”Science should not tell the bible department how to teach the bible, and the bible department should dictate to the science department how to teach science. No wonder we have such a plethora of idiots in Washington because nobody has a right to tell anyone else how it is.

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12. Pingback: Educate Truth - Evolution vs Creation at La Sierra University

13. Quoting Shannon: “Let’s all be a little honest. People act like the only way a student ever can learn about evolution is in the classroom from an evolutionist teacher. If these requirements are not met, then you have not learned about this branch of scientific belief (?) adequately. I think that these suppositions are not necessarily true. Couldn’t students actually learn many other ways? Are non-believers able to teach a subject well–I think so. Also, there have been statements as far as to imply that you cannot learn science unless you understand origins–simply not true. It is like saying you cannot understand Physics if you cannot master Chemistry–yes they overlap but they are not prerequisite”

    Response: Well yes, a lack of honesty is part of the problem isn’t it. Most of the supporters of this web site are not being honest. They are being willfully ignorant of basic Biology. To use your example of the preacher in your house, it would be a little bit like the jailer asking the Apostle Paul “How can I be saved” and then forbidding Paul to talk about God. The concept of God is fundamental to the concept of salvation. You can’t talk about salvation without talking about God. In the same way, evolution is a fundamental principle of biology. All of the systems of genetics and cell biology are simply descriptions of the mechanics of how organisms evolve. It is impossible to function as a Biologist, or even as a physician without a basic understanding of genetics and cell physiology.

    Even if you were to try to explain biology without evolution, it would be kind of like teaching someone how to build an airplane without teaching them about aerodynamics. Eventually your student is going to figure out that it is possible to fly. Why? Because the whole purpose of the airplane is to fly. The minute you ask, “What is the purpose of this machine, why is it designed this way?” the answer becomes obvious. The purpose of this machine is to fly. How much credibility will your denials that that it is possible to fly have when your student gets into the plane and flies away?

    The same way with Biology. If you try to teach basic genetics and cellular biology, eventually the student is going to ask “Why is the process designed this way?” Then as soon as you ask the question, it is obvious, the reason is for the purpose of evolving. So it really is not possible to teach Biology without teaching evolution.

    If Nature is God’s second book, and God really truly is the creator, then the real problem in Adventism isn’t in the Biology department, it is the Theology department. The burden is on the Theology department to reconcile Adventist theology to the simple facts of nature as created by God.

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