@Jan Long: The basic points presented have not substantively changed …

Comment on Adventist Education–at the crossroads? by Sean Pitman.

@Jan Long:

The basic points presented have not substantively changed as far as I am aware. They certainly didn’t change by the time of the publication of the Two Mile Time Machine – your own recommended authority on ice core dating published in 2000 (eleven years ago).

Tell me, what additional factors have come into play that make volcanic signatures so much more reliable as markers in ice cores during this time?

Here’s a comment from another paper, published in 1995, discussing the problems with volcanic markers in ice cores since just the 1850s:

It is not possible to identify any individual ice core that would be representative of hemispheric-average volcanism. Even cores drilled 2 m apart, opposite sides of the same core, and measurements from the same side of the same core before and after longitudinal cutting exhibit a substantial amount of high frequency disagreements.

Alan Robock and Melissa P. Free, Ice cores as an index of global volcanism from 1850 to the present, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 100, No. D6, Pages 11,549-11,567, June 20, 1995

http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockFree95JD00825.pdf

Have things really improved that much for volcanic markers? If so, I’d be most interested in your references. It seems the best that can be said is that volcanic chemical signals can be detected for some 10,000 layers or so. But, matching them up to a specific known volcanic event for calibration purposes becomes quite problematic beyond a few hundred years. Cases like the misidentification of the Thera eruption signal (as recently as 2003) illustrate this point.

Also, you’ve not yet even addressed the problem of the relatively recent mid-Holocene hypsithermal warm period… a situation of long-standing global warming with temperatures significantly warmer than today all around Greenland (while today the Greenland ice sheets are melting quite rapidly). This is one of the most puzzling problems that I can see for modern ice core dating assumptions…

According to mainstream science, there existed, for millennia, after the end of the last ice age (approximately 11,000 years ago) around 5000 years of warm weather all around Greenland. Strong evidence indicates that the Eurasian arctic averaged nearly 13°F warmer in July than it is now.

This evidence includes forests of large trees, even fruit bearing trees, that are now buried and preserved in the acidic Siberian tundra – and they can be carbon dated. Where there is no forest today, because it’s too cold in summer, there were all these forests of large trees, all the way to the Arctic Ocean and even on some of the remote Arctic islands that are bare today. There were also large numbers of animals living within the Arctic Circle that no longer live in these regions. And, back then, thanks to the remnants of continental ice, the Arctic Ocean was smaller and the North American and Eurasian landmasses extended further north.

Some of this evidence is based on the work of Glen MacDonald, from UCLA’s Geography Department. In his landmark 2000 paper in Quaternary Research, he noted that the only way that the Arctic could become so warm is for there to be a massive incursion of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean. The only “gate” through which that can flow is the Greenland Strait, between Greenland and Scandinavia.

MacDonald, G. M., et al., 2000. Holocene treeline history and climatic change across Northern Eurasia. Quaternary Research 53, 302-311.

So, Greenland had to have been warmer for several millennia, too – right?

Yet, what you are basically suggesting is that the ice core dating evidence is so strong for at least the past 100,000 years or so that it effectively falsifies the Genesis story of origins – to include the literal 6-day creation week and a worldwide Noachian Flood within the last 10,000 years. You are effectively claiming that it is rationally impossible for ice to have layered out much more rapidly than today on Greenland in the recent past. You are saying this despite indisputable evidence that the layering of ice toward the margins of the Greenland ice sheet results in dozens of layers being deposited per year (refer to the burial of WWII planes several hundred layers of ice in less than 50 years). It couldn’t be that many more layers were deposited per year when ice first started to form on Greenland just a few hundred years after the Flood? – During a time of increased moisture, intra-annual warm and cold spells, and numerous seasonal storms over Greenland?

Given new discoveries, such as those of Robin Bell that came out just this month (March, 2011), suggesting that long accepted models of ice sheet development are not correct, how confident are you in your ice core falsification hypothesis? After all, Bell’s work suggests that up to half the thickness of the ice sheets in certain places of Antarctica formed from the bottom up, not the top down as previously assumed.

To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets can be. “This matters to how fast ice will flow and how fast ice sheets will change.”

“It also means that ice sheet models are not correct,” she said, comparing it to “trying to figure out how a car will drive but forgetting to add the tires. The performance will be very different if you are driving on the rims.”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2684493/posts

When it comes to claims for calibration of ice-core dates for many tens of thousands of years, consider the following comments published by Skinner in 2008:

All palaeoenvironmental inference hinges on chronostratigraphy. Without a way to accurately link and order our observations spatially and temporally, they remain at best of ambiguous, and at worst of dubious, significance. Nevertheless, a given chronostratigraphy is best viewed as an hypothesis. Much like any proxy, a chronostratigraphy must be employed in a manner that explicitly allows it to be tested. The Greenland and Antarctic ice-core stratigraphies, together with North Atlantic marine archives, low-latitude speleothem and coral records, and the radiometric dates that these latter archives contain, comprise an integrated chronostratigraphic system that is eminently amenable to consistency testing. The integration of these “chronostratigraphic elements” results in a system that remains underdetermined, in that it’s chronology cannot be resolved unequivocally. However, this is only true to the extent that proposed stratigraphic links and absolute ages can be questioned, and that radiometric ages are subject to uncertain “calibrations” (i.e. we cannot account for the movement of all radio-isotopes in the system).

Based on the assumed accuracy of coral and speleothem U-Th ages, Northeast Atlantic surface reservoir ages should be revised upward by _350 years, while the NGRIP age-scale appears to be “missing” time. These findings illustrate the utility of integrated stratigraphy as a test for our chronologies, which are rarely truly “absolute”.

Skinner, L. C.: Revisiting the absolute calibration of the Greenland ice-core age-scales*, Clim. Past, 4, 295-302, doi:10.5194/cp-4-295-2008

You see how interdependent ice-core dating is on the reliability of other dating methods? Ice core dating is not a truly independent dating technique with fail-safe calibration markers for a hundred thousand years or more. Its accuracy is entirely dependent upon the assumed accuracy of other dating methods which are in turn calibrated against each other. And, I’m not the only one to see logical circularity here. Such circularity in reasoning is inherent with the dating of ice cores and ocean sediment cores.

The task of dating these strata [ocean sediment cores] is difficult because sediments may accumulate more quickly during some eras and more slowly in others. To tell the age of layers between known benchmarks, researchers often use the Milankovitch orbital cycles to tune the sediment record: They assume that ice volume should vary with the orbital cycles, then line up the wiggles in the sediment record with ups and downs in the astronomical record.

“This whole tuning procedure, which is used extensively, has elements of circular reasoning in it,” says Muller. He argues that tuning can artificially make the sediment record support the Milankovitch theory.

Richard Monastersky, The Big Chill, Science News, vol 152, October 4, 1997, pages 220-221.

Such tuning can artificially make various patterns support just about any pre-conceived theory one wants to support. That’s the problem with these patterns from various dating techniques being set up to calibrate each other. They are all “tuned” to each other…

See also: http://www.detectingdesign.com/milankovitch.html

You really think such things have significantly changed since 1997 when I graduated from medical school?

I just hate to see someone leave their faith in the credibility of the Bible behind over a “science” as new and problematic and demonstrably at odds with well established facts as is ice core dating…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Adventist Education–at the crossroads?
@pauluc:

My point in quoting Davies’ review of Polkinghorne was to show that they base their ideas on God’s existence on evidence, on certain features within the universe, which they think can only be explained by deliberate intelligent design on the level of God-like intelligence. That is an intelligent design hypothesis on at least some level.

Just because those who appeal to intelligent design theories on at least some level may also believe in various aspects of the modern theory of evolution doesn’t mean that an ID theory hasn’t been invoked on at least some level. It has.

After all, even I believe in evolution via RM/NS as being responsible for many features of living things. Many features of living things are very well explained by neutral evolution or by low-level functional evolution. This doesn’t mean that all features of living things can be therefore be explained by RM/NS. It is this leap of logic or extrapolation of low-level evolution to much higher levels of evolution, within mainstream science, which isn’t scientific. Many features of living things go well beyond the creative potential of any known mindless mechanism while being well within the realm of ID. This is the very same argument used by Davies to support his belief in a God as the designer behind certain features of the anthropic universe.

By the way, I do know Norman McNulty. I’m just not familiar with his views on perfectionism – which is, in any case, irrelevant to this purposes of this particular website. Also, my transitional internship was completed at Eisenhower Army Medical Center (not an SDA institution) and my hemepath fellowship was completed at the City of Hope under the world-renown Lawrence Weiss (not SDA either).

I remain as perplexed as ever how you can hold views on the the nature of intelligent design as a natural phenomena and the requirement for faith to be subservient to reason and evidence but deny anyone in church employ any leeway to explore or articulate anything beyond what you consider truth.

It isn’t what I consider truth. It is what the Church as an organization considers to be fundamental “present truth”. All are free to join or to leave the Church at will. This is a free civil society in which we live – thank God. However, the Church, as with any viable organization, must maintain a certain degree of order and discipline within its own organizational structure if it is to survive. The Church simply cannot afford to hire those who are ardently opposed to the basic fundamental goals and ideals of the Church as an organization and who go around teaching and preaching against the fundamental positions of the organized Church.

You may not consider the organization of the Church to be all that important. I think that without organization, and the order and control that goes along with maintaining any organization, that the Church would quickly fragment into a meaningless hodgepodge of isolated groups with widely divergent ideas. The organizational aspect of the Church is what gives it its power to spread a unified Gospel message more effectively.

I appreciate your responses to my questions and the glimpses I have gained into the mind of a person who seems to discern truth and sees the justice in imposing it on others.

What employer doesn’t impose various rules and restrictions on its paid employees? – rules that are known upfront before the employee agrees to take the job? You very well know that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t be paid by an organization for doing whatever you want. You are paid to do what the organization wants you to do. If you don’t like what the organization wants you to do, you don’t have to take the job. Again, it’s as simple as that. This isn’t some deep philosophical mystery here.

It is self-evident, is it not, that when one takes on employment in an organization of one’s own free will, one is obliged to take on the restriction, the rules, of that organization. Is it wrong of Reebok to require its own employees to only promote and even wear Reebok shoes? Would it be wrong of Reebok to fire and employee for publicly promoting Nike as making a superior product?

Come now. If you really believe that Nike makes the better shoe, and you are bound and determined to be honest to yourself and tell everyone about the superiority of Nike, why on Earth would you expect to be paid by Reebok to promote Nike? You’re simply making no sense here. You’re basically an anarchist who thinks you deserve to be paid simply for your honesty. I’m sorry, but no viable organization works that way. An honest Catholic should work for the Catholic organization. An honest Baptist should work for the Baptist organization. And an honest evolutionary scientist should work for those numerous organizations who would be more than glad to pay such an individual for their efforts. Why should the SDA Church pay anyone who doesn’t actually want to promote what the SDA Church, as an organization, wishes to promote?

God bless and give you as much insight into his Grace.

Likewise. God is a God of order and disciplined government – not anarchy. All are free to come and enjoy the gifts of God as given through the inspired organization of the SDA Church. However, not all are free to expect payment from the SDA Church for their services since not all are well suited to be official representatives of the Church as an organization.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Adventist Education–at the crossroads?
@Eddie:

I’m a partner in an independent pathology practice. We do some contract work for a Catholic hospital, but I have not been hired by the Catholic Church to be a representative of the Catholic Church or to promote Catholic doctrinal positions.

Teachers in our SDA schools, on the other hand, are specifically hired by the SDA Church to actively promote SDA goals and ideals within the classroom – specifically with regard to the topic of origins. This has been made very clear, in no uncertain terms, by the General Conference Executive Committee:

We call on all boards and educators at Seventh-day Adventist institutions at all levels to continue upholding and advocating the church’s position on origins. We, along with Seventh-day Adventist parents, expect students to receive a thorough, balanced, and scientifically rigorous exposure to and affirmation of our historic belief in a literal, recent six-day creation, even as they are educated to understand and assess competing philosophies of origins that dominate scientific discussion in the contemporary world.

http://adventist.org/beliefs/statements/main-stat55.html

Science teachers, in particular, are not hired to actively undermine the SDA position on origins in our classrooms. Clearly, such activity is counterproductive to the stated goals and ideals of the Church. Why would the Church wish to hire anyone to go around and tell people that the Church’s position is irrational and part of the “lunatic fringe”? – as so eloquently put by LSU science professor Gary Bradley? – in an interview with a secular journal?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Adventist Education–at the crossroads?
@pauluc:

J H Kellogg’s ideas were pantheistic – i.e., God actually within everything. This is not quite like suggesting that various features of the universe in which we live can only be rationally explained by invoking intelligent design on at least the human level of intelligence or beyond. Quite a number of old world and even modern physicists have come to this same conclusion as well. My position is more along the lines of Sir Isaac Newton or of the well-known Australian astrophysicist, Paul Davies, who writes:

The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is “something behind it all” is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists…

The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me that there must be a God who is responsible for these laws and responsible for the universe.

* Davies, Paul C.W. [Physicist and Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Adelaide],”The Christian perspective of a scientist,” Review of “The way the world is,” by John Polkinghorne, New Scientist, Vol. 98, No. 1354, pp.638-639, 2 June 1983, p.638

* http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1572643.htm

You don’t seem to grasp my argument that the term “natural” is a relative term. What seems “natural” to you may seem supernatural to someone else with less knowledge than you have. If God does in fact exist, his own intelligence and power would seem perfectly “natural” to him.

In short, the term “natural” is meaningless without a much more specific definition as to what you’re talking about when you use this word. Simply saying that science is restricted to examining “natural” phenomena does not mean that science cannot therefore detect an intelligent origin behind certain types of phenomena… even if that intelligent origin just so happens to be God. While a God could certainly hide himself from us quite easily. It is most certainly within God’s power to reveal himself to us in a manner that we can in fact detect as requiring a very high level of deliberate intelligence. Certainly you can recognize this as at least a possibility given the hypothesis of God’s actual existence – can you not?

You seem to be able to do this, on at least some level, for you write:

I do agree with you that nature is not enough and is an insufficient explanation of the universe. There is an intelligibility to the Universe and that things like Love, suffering and beauty call out for higher level explanations. But in this I agree with theologians such as Haught, McGrath and Polkinghorne who see the intelligibility of the universe and the anthropic principle as well as those higher functions as supporting a notion of the divine but do not simplistically restrict the divine to [plugs] for the holes in our knowledge or immediate explanations for origins.

Scientific theories are the plugs for the holes in our knowledge. We have limited knowledge. If we had perfect or absolute knowledge, science would no longer be needed. It is because we have limited knowledge that scientific methodologies become helpful to bridge the gaps or “holes” in our knowledge. The ID hypothesis is often a valid scientific bridge for certain types of holes in our knowledge. The notion that intelligent design cannot be invoked by science is simply mistaken.

Did you leave the armed forces when the government became Democrat rather than Republican? (I am of course assuming you are republican in political persuasion but given the statistics I have a high probability of being right). Do you agree in every point with your current employer? Will you resign when they express for example a view on abortion with which you disagree? Like the pharisees of old you are placing on church employees a burden much more than I suspect you would be prepared to bear.

If I felt I had to publicly counter my employer on some issue considered “fundamental” by my employer, and I was originally hired to promote this particular position of my employer, I would most certainly resign. If an employer hires me to do a particular job, and that job is made quite clear when I am hired, it would be morally wrong of me to undermine the clearly stated fundamental purpose of the job for which I was hired. That would be, in effect, stealing money and time from my employer. I would have misrepresented myself to my employer to get paid for something I never intended to deliver to my employer. Such activity is very deceptive and underhanded. It is a lie calculated to rob the employer of what the employer hired me to do – no bones about it. And that, I’m afraid, is a moral problem in anyone’s book.

If you think the SDA Church was somehow unclear about what it expects from its science professors regarding the topic of origins, think again. The following statement of the SDA General Conference Executive Committee is very clear in this regard:

We call on all boards and educators at Seventh-day Adventist institutions at all levels to continue upholding and advocating the church’s position on origins. We, along with Seventh-day Adventist parents, expect students to receive a thorough, balanced, and scientifically rigorous exposure to and affirmation of our historic belief in a literal, recent six-day creation, even as they are educated to understand and assess competing philosophies of origins that dominate scientific discussion in the contemporary world.

http://adventist.org/beliefs/statements/main-stat55.html

Regarding Brinsmead’s teachings, and their dramatic evolution over time, I’m sure I’m not aware of all of the subtleties of his numerous theological positions as they changed over time, but I think I’m well enough informed.

Also, Des Ford (since you brought him up) was not simply let go from Church employment for some minor issue. He was attacking clearly stated fundamental pillars of the SDA Church – to include the Church’s position on origins. Ford believes in and strongly supports theistic evolutionary ideas where life has existed and evolved on this planet over hundreds of millions of years of time. Ford does believe in the Divine inspiration of Genesis, but not based on the straight forward reading of the text so much as on a hidden mathematical code similar to the “Bible Code” of Michael Drosnin – on the same level as astrology if you ask me.

It is for such reasons that the likes of Ford and Brinsmead cannot represent the SDA Church in any sort of official capacity.

Really though, I do not want to get off on a debate on perfectionism. I do not agree with Brinsmead, and am not familiar with the views of Normal McNulty on this issue, but that isn’t the purpose of this particular website.

The purpose of this website is to inform members of the SDA Church as to what is really being taught in some of our schools on the issue of origins… a fundamental issue for the SDA Church.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Recent Comments by Sean Pitman

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Thank you Ariel. Hope you are doing well these days. Miss seeing you down at Loma Linda. Hope you had a Great Thanksgiving!


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Thank you Colin. Just trying to save lives any way I can. Not everything that the government does or leaders do is “evil” BTW…


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Only someone who knows the future can make such decisions without being a monster…


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Where did I “gloss over it”?


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I fail to see where you have convincingly supported your claim that the GC leadership contributed to the harm of anyone’s personal religious liberties? – given that the GC leadership does not and could not override personal religious liberties in this country, nor substantively change the outcome of those who lost their jobs over various vaccine mandates. That’s just not how it works here in this country. Religious liberties are personally derived. Again, they simply are not based on a corporate or church position, but rely solely upon individual convictions – regardless of what the church may or may not say or do.

Yet, you say, “Who cares if it is written into law”? You should care. Everyone should care. It’s a very important law in this country. The idea that the organized church could have changed vaccine mandates simply isn’t true – particularly given the nature of certain types of jobs dealing with the most vulnerable in society (such as health care workers for example).

Beyond this, the GC Leadership did, in fact, write in support of personal religious convictions on this topic – and there are GC lawyers who have and continue to write personal letters in support of personal religious convictions (even if these personal convictions are at odds with the position of the church on a given topic). Just because the GC leadership also supports the advances of modern medicine doesn’t mean that the GC leadership cannot support individual convictions at the same time. Both are possible. This is not an inconsistency.