@george: You are absolutely right. Sean has been calling …

Comment on LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department by Pauluc.

@george: You are absolutely right. Sean has been calling for transparency and truth in advertising. We should now be totally transparent in what is happening. Fundamentalist religious belief is being prioritized over any process of science as a process of understanding the natural world by natural law.

The philistines have indeed breaching the wall of open enquiry that is the academe and LSU is on its way to being a madrasse. We now have a push to introduce the supernatural as the basis for understanding the natural world. We are now moving to deprecate science and scientific knowledge in a way that has not been seen in Universities for the last 150 years. To move biology teaching at LSU out of the hands of those with scientific credentials (Scopus lists a h index of 17 for Grismer) to a teacher of science whose only objective credentials in science is a couple of papers, albeit well cited in 1999 and h index of 2 (scopus John V Perumal). Criteria of selection is moving from academic excellence to religious orthodoxy and an adherence to one and only one particular literalistic view of Genesis.
I know of no public tertiary institution in the world admitting to University status that would have such a low bar of scientific excellence for head of a science department.

Southern does way better than that in terms of recognizing academic excellence. But thanks to David, Sean and their ilk the pickings are likely to be very thin as what self respecting scientist would like to have a job of professor of science based on adherence to the prevailing views of a religious organization.

Sean is of course right about the Darwinism and biology. Just as Sean recognizes evolution speciation and natural selection as part of evolutionary biology, we can teach the process and principles of biology while purging Darwins name from the record but we perhaps should then also purge Boyle, Newton, Ptolemy and Copernicus. Science can be done without reference to any one person but it does lose something of its historical context in the process.

Pauluc Also Commented

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Sean Pitman:

Im sorry Sean but your whole critique seems to be based on a specious argument on your part.

I said that Science is based on methodological naturalism which means

1] Natural law explanations and not the miraculous are the provenance of science.

2] If you cannot couch the question in terms of an hypothesis with testable natural mechanism it is not science.

3] Science is circumscribed and limited. There are many questions outside of science and natural mechanism.

4] Natural mechanism has been successful in understanding the natural world and only the natural world and is likely to be so in the future.

This you construe to be an argument for a God of the Gap. To sustain that argument however you have to
1] first redefine science and natural mechanism as God an extremely idiosyncratic definition of God but necessary if you are to attribute to me a invocation of God as an explanation for any gaps

2] claim that I am arguing that everything that is unknown is within the domain of science or “my God”

This requires you to attribute to me philosophical naturalism, which you have ,dishonestly I believe, done. Completely ignoring that I have repeatedly and consistently said that natural mechanism is concerned with process in the natural world and nothing more.

You have redefined the accepted definition of science to claim I am using it as a universal explanation and redefined science as all possible knowledge and now suggest to George that

Intelligent design is right by default unless someone else can prove it wrong.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@David Read:

just to be perfectly clear;

1] You wish that Adventists should not be at all proficient in their chosen field of endeavour or vocation? What happened to EG White citing of the old testament statement “head and not the tail” as applicable to education?

2] Are you saying that no creationist is sufficiently scientifically accomplished to get a head of department position in a secular institution?

I would suggest you look at John Ashtons book “In 6 days”. You will find I believe that Bergman is indeed a professor and head of department.

3] The criteria for leadership is good science not adherence to a particular theory. You are confusing science with religion if you think there is virtue in an orthodoxy.

4] You still do not understand that science is about the natural world and methodological naturalism. This is the assumption of the scientific method. You will of course be considered a woolly thinker and not considered a good scientist if you introduce miracles as part of science but your religious beliefs are irrelevant to the practice of science.

People like Francis Collins are unashamedly evangelical Christians and are at the very top of science. A religious belief in God as creator is irrelevant to science and represents no barrier to academic status no matter what you may imagine.

5] It seems clear you do not want any Adventist educational institution with University status. What you want is arise writ large.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Sean Pitman:

You win Sean. I am weary and overwhelmed by column inches, prolixity and a sense of futility.

You of course are right and I as a “Mr Scientist” know nothing of science or the process and method of science. But I am in good company with the many who have been unable to inform you of anything beyond what you know or to give you pause in your mission to destroy science and scientists at LSU. Adventism is truly entering its dark ages.

Somehow I doubt the affectation “my friend” but will accept it in good faith.


Recent Comments by Pauluc

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.

You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.

Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath

On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”

You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.

Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?

1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.

I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.

Grace


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.

And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…

Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.

Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.

That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.