@Professor Kent: Ten years ago when I was active at …

Comment on Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Why Evolution is an Idea that Won’t Die—IV [A Review] by George Evans.

@Professor Kent: Ten years ago when I was active at talk.origins I used the Loma Linda University and the University of California Riverside libraries.

George Evans Also Commented

Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Why Evolution is an Idea that Won’t Die—IV [A Review]
@Professor Kent: I agree with your assessment: “And this highlights and handful of ENORMOUS problems Christians have in trying to base their beliefs on evidence:

“1 – They lack access to original material.”

This has always been true for the rank and file.

“2 – They lack formal training to understand and interpret it.”

In the past, scientists would present interesting things to their local churches, and schools, much like the old lyceum idea. But now our scientist have let us down.

3 – The material out there is immense and an honest soul can claim to have good understanding of only a minute fraction of it.”

We scientists need to repent of evolution and begin to digest the material so we can educate the people in the wonders of nature–God’s second book.


Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Why Evolution is an Idea that Won’t Die—IV [A Review]
@pauluc: I only have one abstract, in bone metabolism in early 1980’s.


Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Why Evolution is an Idea that Won’t Die—IV [A Review]
@pauluc: Paul, you wrote, “I have never yet met a person with training in science who is a literal creationist who derived that position denovo from scientific data and understanding.”

I am a scientist and from the first time I saw a flower I was a literal creationist. And the more I learned, the stronger that belief grew. I guess I didn’t meet the bad guys.


Recent Comments by George Evans

Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: You wrote, “In the Adventist tradition I am not dualist and accept that our brains are simply part of the natural world. They are not the repository of the soul or an antennae for the supernatural world but are highly complex elaborations of the invertebrates head ganglion.”

I didn’t realize we had this tradition. Now that I think about it, you seem to be voicing an idea I call neo-deism. I have used the term anti-pantheism in Adventist circles for obvious reasons. As a people we got so afraid of pantheism that we bolted to the other side of the road, and apparently developed a new tradition when I wasn’t looking.

This is very interesting. Until now I hadn’t understood the nexus of anti-pantheism opening the door for theistic evolution. Thank you, Paul.


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: A bee is not an extrinsic agent. Bees are not artistic.


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Sean Pitman: From Merriam-Webster:

1. a : something created by humans usually for a practical purpose; especially : an object remaining from a particular period
b : something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: I think you are the only scientist that defines a beehive as an artifact.


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: In this case the Torah is the evidence. Before we get to criticizing the Pentateuch, we should consider it’s provenance. It is not a document that we dug up in some foreign land. It has been in the continuous possession of the original “family”. And this lays in the dust the charge that it is an old document written in a dead language also.

So what does the document say? It says that sometime during the event known as the Exodus, Moses, the leader of the group, chiseled out two tablets of stone, and God wrote on them. Shortly thereafter Moses apparently recorded the inscription, and we have it in Exodus chapter 20.

Modern scholarship is a flash in the pan by comparison. For us, at this end of history to question this story’s veracity be we gentile or even Jew, is ludicrous.