Comment on New NAD president: ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean we won’t deal with issues by Sean Pitman.
@Ken:
Sorry to be like a dog with a bone but what about the erosion rate on the Tibetan Plateau? If forest and steppe grew on it how much has it eroded?
As already noted numerous times, erosion rates are closely tied to slope angle. The Tibetan Plateau, being a plateau, has relatively little surface erosion because there is obviously no significant slope (the sloped edges of the plateau are a different story). This is why the average erosion rate of the surface of the Tibetan Plateau is less than 30 mm/ka while the erosion rate for the steep mountain slopes is around 4000 mm/ka.
Sean you have not presented any specific evidence to indicate that the Tibetan Plateau is 4000 years old.
Erosion rates are a good way to put a maximum cap on the exposure of certain features as erosional surfaces. The modern claim is that the Himalayan Mountains, to include Mt. Everest, have been at their current elevation as mountainous terrain for over 20 million years and have been uplifted as erosional surfaces for some 50 million years. Erosion rates on the mountainous slopes suggest that these ages are off by at least an order of magnitude. Other lines of evidence, such as that presented by Yang Wang on lake sediments, suggest the same thing… that the uplift of the Himalayas could not have taken place more than a couple million years ago.
This means that the uplift could have taken place much more recently than that. And, there are other lines of evidence that restrict the time of formation much much further – as I’ve already noted for you in this forum and on my website.
Some of these evidences include the very flat formation of the layers of the geologic column with minimum erosion between layers. The lack of expected bioturbation, universal paleocurrents on the surfaces of the sedimentary layers, the presence of significant amounts of radiocarbon within the fossils, the presence of elastic soft tissue and sequencable proteins within the fossils, the high mutation rate and rapid deterioration of the genomes of slowly reproducing creatures (i.e., the genetic meltdown rate puts a maximum cap on the age of many types of living things), etc.
All of these features are much more consistent with a very recent universal watery catastrophe or shortly-spaced series of catastrophes within recent history than with the mainstream interpretation of the geologic column, fossil record, and various geologic features like the Himalayan Mountains and even the Tibetan Plateau.
Like Dr Clausen. a GGI Adventist with a PhD in nuclear physics has said there is no young earth scientific model. Now I have read your website and read your critique on and old life on earth, but where is your young life on earth model? What is your scientific dating method?
As I’ve already explained, there is a young-life model that suggests that much of the geologic column and fossil record was produced by a recent worldwide Flood or very closely-spaced series of flood that were likely part of a single universal Flood – consistent with the Noachian story recorded in Genesis and more loosely in the nearly universal Flood legends of ancient cultures around the world today.
The evidence for the recent occurrence of such a Flood, as already noted, comes in the form of maximum age limits of many features associated with either the geology itself or the fossils or organic material within the geologic column. K-Ar dating, and other such radiometric dating methods, are not the only ways to reasonably estimate elapsed time – nor are these radiometric dating methods consistent with each other or other the other dating methods listed (as noted by Yang Wang).
Now, it’s fine to conclude that you really don’t have enough evidence to come to a reasonable conclusion in the credibility of the Biblical account – or even the existence of God as is your position. However, you do yourself a great disservice to remain in the boat you’re in. At the very least, the evidence for the existence of a Designer that is effectively indistinguishable by humans from a God or God-like Intelligence and Power is, in my opinion, enormous. Even many modern physicists are coming to this conclusion based on the anthropic features of the universe itself that are needed to make this place able to support complex life.
http://www.detectingdesign.com/detectingdesign.html#Special
Given such evidence, how reasonable is it for someone to continue to avoid taking advantage of what God offers to those who believe in Him and ask for His personal help in daily life? I know it is nice to be in an unfalsifiable position. You can never be wrong because you don’t put yourself out on the line. It is very easy to simply avoid taking any position whatsoever on the existence of God – to be free to argue all sides without personally committing to one or the other. However, this fence-sitting position is not without its own costs and losses. You will end up loosing much that you might have had in this life if you remain on your fence…
Just something to think about. I do appreciate your natural kindness and apparent sincerity, but I do not envy you your position.
All the best…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
New NAD president: ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean we won’t deal with issues
@Ken:
Is there any empirical evidence to indicate that surface water can move tectonic plates?
The water didn’t move the plates. The sudden energy release that produced the massive Flood moved the plates – possibly, perhaps even likely, something like a large meteor impact…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
New NAD president: ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean we won’t deal with issues
@Ken:
Dear Sean
Of course this raises the issue of theodicy and a designer that planned for death and destruction. Not a pretty concept is it?
According to the Bible, God never intended for there to be any death or the suffering of sentient creatures in His universe. The death and suffering that now exists on this planet in the direct result of our own rebellion against God and His original plan.
As you have often acknowledged if biological life is indicative of design this does not necessarily mean, ipso facto, that biblical God is the designer of our universe. Based on what we see it could be a haphazard designer who built in catastrophe and death into the equation. It could be a dice thrower who if It threw the celestial dice often enough in enough metauniverses would eventually, randomly hit upon a design that would render evolutionary evolving life upon certain planets with the right physical properties.
Given the physical laws of the universe and of statistical probability in play in this universe that are known so far, it really doesn’t matter how many times the dice are thrown, evolution via the Darwinian mechanism would still be untenable.
Also, when it comes to the responsibility for suffering and death, you forget about the concept of the freedom of choice that God has given to higher level intelligences throughout His universe.
You earlier noted that EGW saw life on other planets. Why isn’t there life on all planets or only one planet if there is a design to the universe? Bit haphazard of a design isn’t it? I do not see a pattern there, unless it is one of random natural selection – life adapting to harsh environments where it is able.
Just because you might now have done it the way it is does not mean that there isn’t very good evidence of deliberate design. Also, what may appear to you to be poor design at first approximation may turn out to have been very good design once you learn more information.
Design flaw arguments have been around a very long time. Most of them end up becoming resolved once more information is discovered about the workings of the phenomenon in question. For example, the tonsils and appendix used to be routinely removed without any thought. No longer as it has since been discovered that tonsils and the appendix are functional parts of the body’s immune system. The same thing is true of the inverted human retina. It was once thought that the inverted retina was poor design; that no intelligent designer would have wired the human eye “backward”. This is no longer the case as many important functional features have been discovered for the inverted nature of the inverted retina that are ideally suited for the human condition.
So, I would recommend that design flaw assumptions regarding the nature of the universe are also just a bit hasty. Why not have planets and moons and even entire solar systems or galaxies that serve other functions besides to host living things on their own surfaces?
With respect, I think you are taking one of those ‘leaps of faith’ when you leap from the notion of design to the transcendent biblical God. Trite to say that all designers do not see the same design. Behe of the irreducible complexity argument clearly does not support young life on earth. He just sees life evolving from a later point than chemical soup.
Actually, Behe does not believe in any kind of evolution beyond very low levels of functional complexity. He clearly believes in an “edge” to evolutionary progress beyond which the mechanism of RM/NS cannot go. He is therefore a theistic evolutionist in that he believes that intelligent input was required to produce all higher level functional differences within the biosphere…
Look at the beginning of human life from a zygote. Clearly a repetitive design. Is human embryonics part of the evolutionary ‘design’ of simple celled organisms evolving to more complex ones? Arguable isn’t it? If God made Adam and Eve instantly in a day, why don’t we see a full formed miniature human formed on the day of conception?
Embryologic recapitulation has been falsified. There really is no such thing. If you care to study embrylology in just a bit of detail you will soon realize the extreme intricacy of what is required to get all of the developing cells to interact and fold properly to end up with the final product. It is the height of magnificent design and mechanical engineering – absolutely amazing.
Again, just because you might have done it differently does not mean that the evidence for design is therefore unrecognizable. Also, just because you may make a cake differently one day vs. the next doesn’t mean that the various methods of making a cake aren’t equally apparent as being the result of deliberate design.
Sorry Sean, but for me at least, there are a lot of gaps to fill before I can make the leap of faith you advocate. I have to slowly and methodically build those rational bridges across the gaps to make progress down the ontological brick road.
You cannot be more than you are. All I’m saying is that you’re missing out. You’ll only realize how much you’ve missed out once you get to the end of your yellow brick road and actually make the rational leap of faith to put your trust in God and start to develop a personal relationship with Him…
Your comments on my fence sitting are very apt and I appreciate your concern for my salvation. That is a far more kinder, humanitarian appeal than fire and brimstone- the ‘hard sell’! But you see I am not looking for personal salvation as a pre cursor for investigation of reality. In fact, with the greatest respect for all my Adventist friends, I see that need as something that would cloud my objective judgement. Just as I see an atheist bias doing the same as well. If my agnosticism comes at the price of my mortal ‘soul’ I accept that as the price of relentless objectivity. Sean, in that I hope you can trust in my absolute sincerity.
I do trust your absolute sincerity. In fact, I believe that if you really are absolutely sincere, that God will accept that sincerity and you will be saved in Heaven someday. However, in the mean time, you are missing out big time on the relationship and happiness that you could have had here and now. I realize that you cannot be more than you are, but you must also realize that this is no small issue for you personally. It might not mean a loss of your soul, but it certainly means a loss of what you could have had in this life regarding your own conscious realization of hope and happiness.
What concerns me about faith is the cart driving the horse when it corms to scientific investigation. My life long study suggests that all religions are social constructs of Man. That does not mean that I disparage faith or your faith. I find it quite remarkable and forth moreover a tool of moral and social order. I am especially interested in how religions schism over doctrinal differences and In I think Adventism is on the brink of that now, fueled by the debate of crescent creationism vs. theistic evolutionism.
You cannot escape the exercise of “faith”. Atheists and even agnostics make leaps of faith when they come to their conclusions regarding the nature of reality or the lack thereof. There is simply no escaping it. Science itself is based on making educated leaps of faith. All that matters is what faith you choose as most rational. Your agnosticism is your faith of choice – – that’s all.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
New NAD president: ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean we won’t deal with issues
@Professor Kent:
You and other readers can Google “ancient DNA contamination” for a good start on this issue. There are so many articles describing the problem that I’m not going to bother educating you with quotes from the literature. The unbiased, objective readers can read for themselves and judge your claims.
DNA contamination isn’t the same thing as radiocarbon contamination. There’s a big difference. Besides, there are ways to control for both DNA and radiocarbon contamination. These controls haven’t worked for radiocarbon in fossils, coal, or oil that is supposed to be many tens of millions of years old. The contamination argument might be reasonable if the problem were limited to only a few instances. However, explaining why every such sample that is actually analyzed has way too much radiocarbon in it is quite a problem for mainstream science.
You’ve chosen to base a major part of your theology on one literal interpretation of “all” while admittedly dismissing many comparable usages–even within the same narrow portion of Genesis–as non-literal. That’s just plain and simple wrong. And you are too obtuse to see your arbitrary and capricious interpretation.
The author of Genesis is very clear to the candid mind who is actually able to follow the concept of qualifications of “all” as in “all the land” or “all land-dwelling animals”… etc. Certainly the majority of Hebrew scholars are not confused by the author’s intended meaning here. This isn’t some private SDA interpretation of the intended meaning of the author of Genesis you know. You’re just making yourself look rather foolish is all… in your claims that the author of Genesis was obviously inconsistent. Your interpretations of the meaning of the Genesis narrative are not remotely obvious to most Biblical scholars…
Where does the Bible mention anything about “tectonic forces” creating mountains? You write as if you know this as fact. But you obviously made this up because you require observations from “science” to explain what your faith is too weak to accept. If God can form the earth at his spoken command (if you can still believe this absent any confirmatory science), why does he require “tectonic forces?”
I didn’t make anything up. My reference to a lack of the existence, before the Flood, of the massive jagged mountains we have today is from the writings of Mrs. White – from her book, Patriarchs and Prophets:
As the earth came forth from the hand of its Maker, it was exceedingly beautiful. Its surface was diversified with mountains, hills, and plains, interspersed with noble rivers and lovely lakes; but the hills and mountains were not abrupt and rugged, abounding in terrific steeps and frightful chasms, as they now do; the sharp, ragged edges of earth’s rocky framework were buried beneath the fruitful soil, which everywhere produced a luxuriant growth of verdure.
– Ellen White, PP, p.44
Notice that Mrs. White claims that the rugged rocky mountains we see on Earth today were the result of the energy released during the Noachian catastrophe. Such a catastrophic release of energy is quite consistent with the breaking up of continental plates and their initially rapid collisions with each other…
But, of course, I’ve been “brainwashed by the SDA Church” according to you. You, on the other hand, have somehow avoided the Church’s brainwashing techniques? Yet still claim to believe all of the Church’s doctrines? How does this make any sense? One can only believe in the SDA Church’s doctrines if he/she has been “brainwashed”? – and you haven’t been brainwashed in your beliefs? Interesting…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Recent Comments by Sean Pitman
Science and Methodological Naturalism
Very interesting passage. After all, if scientists are honest with themselves, scientific methodologies are well-able to detect the existence of intelligent design behind various artifacts found in nature. It’s just the personal philosophy of scientists that makes them put living things and the origin of the fine-tuned universe “out of bounds” when it comes to the detection of intelligent design. This conclusion simply isn’t dictated by science itself, but by a philosophical position, a type of religion actually, that strives to block the Divine Foot from getting into the door…
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Why is it that creationists are afraid to acknowledge the validity of Darwinism in these settings? I don’t see that these threaten a belief in God in any way whatsoever.
The threat is when you see no limitations to natural mindless mechanisms – where you attribute everything to the creative power of nature instead of to the God of nature.
God has created natural laws that can do some pretty amazing things. However, these natural laws are not infinite in creative potential. Their abilities are finite while only God is truly infinite.
The detection of these limitations allows us to recognize the need for the input of higher-level intelligence and creative power that goes well beyond what nature alone can achieve. It is here that the Signature of God is detectable.
For those who only hold a naturalistic view of the universe, everything is attributed to the mindless laws of nature… so that the Signature of God is obscured. Nothing is left that tells them, “Only God or some God-like intelligent mind could have done this.”
That’s the problem when you do not recognize any specific limitations to the tools that God has created – when you do not recognize the limits of nature and what natural laws can achieve all by themselves.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Bill Sorensen:
Since the fall of Adam, Sean, all babies are born in sin and they are sinners. God created them. Even if it was by way of cooperation of natural law as human beings also participated in the creation process.
God did not create the broken condition of any human baby – neither the physical or moral brokenness of any human being. God is responsible for every good thing, to include the spark or breath of life within each one of us. However, He did not and does not create those things within us that are broken or bad.
“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?'” Matthew 13:27-28
Of course, all humans are indeed born broken and are in a natural state of rebellion against God. However, God is not the one who created this condition nor is God responsible for any baby being born with any kind of defect in character, personality, moral tendency, or physical or genetic abnormality. God did not create anyone with such brokenness. Such were the natural result of rebellion against God and heading the temptations of the “enemy”… the natural result of a separation from God with the inevitable decay in physical, mental, and moral strength.
Of course, the ones who are born broken are not responsible for their broken condition either. However, all of us are morally responsible for choosing to reject the gift of Divine Grace once it is appreciated… and for choosing to go against what we all have been given to know, internally, of moral truth. In other words, we are responsible for rebelling against the Royal Law written on the hearts of all mankind.
This is because God has maintained in us the power to be truly free moral agents in that we maintain the Power to choose, as a gift of God (Genesis 3:15). We can choose to accept or reject the call of the Royal Law, as the Holy Spirit speaks to all of our hearts…
Remember the statement by Mrs. White that God is in no wise responsible for sin in anyone at any time. God is working to fix our broken condition. He did not and does not create our broken condition. Just as He does not cause Babies to be born with painful and lethal genetic defects, such as those that result in childhood leukemia, He does not cause Babies to be born with defects of moral character either. God is only directly responsible for the good, never the evil, of this life.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Again, your all-or-nothing approach to the claims of scientists isn’t very scientific. Even the best and most famous of scientists has had numerous hair-brained ideas that were completely off base. This fact does not undermine the good discoveries and inventions that were produced.
Scientific credibility isn’t based on the person making the argument, but upon the merits of the argument itself – the ability of the hypothesis to gain predictive value when tested. That’s it.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
Don’t be so obtuse here. We’re not talking about publishing just anything in mainstream journals. I’ve published several articles myself. We’re talking about publishing the conclusion that intelligent design was clearly involved with the origin of various artifactual features of living things on this planet. Try getting a paper that mentions such a conclusion published…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
