Eddie, I couldn’t agree with you more about the need …

Comment on LSU memorandum confirms Educate Truth’s allegations by David Read.

Eddie, I couldn’t agree with you more about the need to pay our college professors better. I know how difficult it can be for our college teachers because my father taught at an Adventist college for many years, and, no, he could not support a family of four children on what he was paid, and, yes, he was forced to moonlight. I know exactly what you’re talking about and it is a real problem.

You also are correct about the need to adequately fund professional travel and development. We should not only be reimbursing our professors for the full cost of travel to creationist conferences, both Adventist and inter-denominational, we should be promoting and hosting such conferences. Not only would this better educate and ground our own professoriate in the relevant research and arguments, it would provide tremendous opportunities for Adventist diplomacy and outreach to other conservative Christians.

Regarding grant money, the Geoscience Research Institute (GRI) has some grant money for research, but funds are limited: http://www.grisda.org/research/.

Additionally, ICR has the “National Creation Science Foundation”: http://www.icr.org/ncsf/.

But this is an area that needs much more attention and thought. Because most sources of grants and funding are closed to explicitly creationist research, I would like to see an Adventist foundation created solely to fund creationist research. There are journals that publish such research (Origins, Answers Research Journal, Journal of Creation, etc.), but the research funding needs more attention.

David Read Also Commented

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.


LSU memorandum confirms Educate Truth’s allegations
Kent, the general lack of bioturbation on surfaces in the geological column that are thought to represent secession of deposition for millions of years is an argument I’m familiar with. It is an indicator that the hiatus in deposition might have been hours rather than mega-years. I didn’t use this argument in my book, but I’ve heard it used by qualified paleontologists like Kurt Wise.

If it later turns out to be a bad argument, then the better informed creationists will discard it. It certainly wouldn’t have any effect on my faith, because my faith is in God and His Word, not in any particular apologetic argument. Darwinists have frequently had to discard arguments–“vestigial organs”, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, Piltdown Man, etc.–and they haven’t lost faith in their theory, so I’m puzzled why you think my faith might depend on some argument or another.


LSU memorandum confirms Educate Truth’s allegations
“To think that any research findings are truly “fact” reflects your lack of understanding.”

Kent, I don’t think that research findings are truly “fact.” That was my whole point. I totally agree with you that research “findings” are not facts. They are facts (if we’re lucky) combined with interpretation, and the interpretation is heavily influence by the theory or hypothesis the researcher is assuming to be true. And if that is true with regard to experimental, repeatable, observable science, think how much more true it is when it comes to the singular, complex, unrepeatable events of the distant past.


Recent Comments by David Read

The Reptile King
Poor Larry Geraty! He can’t understand why anyone would think him sympathetic to theistic evolution. Well, for starters, he wrote this for Spectrum last year:

“Christ tells us they will know us by our love, not by our commitment to a seven literal historical, consecutive, contiguous 24-hour day week of creation 6,000 years ago which is NOT in Genesis no matter how much the fundamentalist wing of the church would like to see it there.”

“Fundamental Belief No. 6 uses Biblical language to which we can all agree; once you start interpreting it according to anyone’s preference you begin to cut out members who have a different interpretation. I wholeheartedly affirm Scripture, but NOT the extra-Biblical interpretation of the Michigan Conference.”

So the traditional Adventist interpretation of Genesis is an “extra-Biblical interpretation” put forward by “the fundamentalist wing” of the SDA Church? What are people supposed to think about Larry Geraty’s views?

It is no mystery how LaSierra got in the condition it is in.


The Reptile King
Professor Kent says:

“I don’t do ‘orgins science.’ Not a single publication on the topic. I study contemporary biology. Plenty of publications.”

So, if you did science that related to origins, you would do it pursuant to the biblical paradigm, that is pursuant to the assumption that Genesis 1-11 is true history, correct?


The Reptile King
Well, Jeff, would it work better for you if we just closed the biology and religion departments? I’m open to that as a possible solution.


The Reptile King
Larry Geraty really did a job on LaSierra. Personally I think it is way gone, compromised beyond hope. The SDA Church should just cut its ties to LaSierra, and cut its losses.

As to the discussion on this thread, round up the usual suspects and their usual arguments.


La Sierra University Resignation Saga: Stranger-than-Fiction
It is a remarkably fair and unbiased article, and a pretty fair summary of what was said in the recorded conversation.