Dr. Jonathan D. Sarfati will speak on "Design, Deluge, and Dilemma."
The institute will include lectures titled "Real Science Supports the Bible," "Creation and Bioethics," "Exegetical Defense of Creationism," "Incredible Design in Nature," "Are Miracles Scientific?" and more.
“Because Satan has provided people with a way of looking at the world that doesn't need God (evolutionary theory), and we need to expose the weaknesses in that proposition rather than compromise with it.”
”Because we recognise the importance of revelation in our approach to knowing.”
“Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." (Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437).
“Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in disputes about the natural world in opposition to reason; lest time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture assert.” Telluris theoria sacra (1684 English edition, “The Sacred Theory of the Earth” Preface, pg. 10), Reverend Thomas Burnett (1635?-1715)
"For to my mind this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy and the other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.” And later he stated, “It must be remembered, that Moses does not speak with philosophical acuteness on occult mysteries, but states those things which are everywhere observed, even by the uncultivated, and which are in common use. (Genesis, I, 79 & 84 (1554).”
“ Lastly since the Spirit of God here opens a common school for all, it is not surprising that he should chiefly choose those subjects which would be intelligible to all. If the astronomer inquires respecting the actual dimensions of the stars, he will find the moon to be less than Saturn; but this is something abstruse, for to the sight it appears differently. Moses, therefore, rather adapts his discourse to common usage.” Calvin J., Genesis, Vol. I, Part 3 (1554).
"In discussing questions of this kind two rules are to be observed, as Augustine teaches. The first is, to hold to the truth of Scripture without wavering. The second is that since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty to be false, lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing." Thomas Aquinas, c.a. 1225 - 1274, Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Q68. Art 1. (1273).
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. {Augustine here has referred to 1 Timothy 1.7}”
James 3:1. Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.
Thanks again for reading my article and taking the time to respond to it.
There was a time I was intimidated by evolutionist dogma, but after I studied evolution as part of my first degree, I realised how much philosophy is involved and how the evidence lends itself to widely different conclusions. I've simply sought to be open and honest in my search for truth.
What you've written doesn't cause me to doubt that I have good ground for my views on origins. You seem to have taken my headlines, written your own articles under them in my voice and then argued against yourself. I don't recognise my thinking in what you've said.
For example, I don't hate Darwin - in fact I admire him in many ways. I think his theology was faulty and I disagree with him on some points, but that's not the same thing.
When I mention revelation in knowing, I am not talking crazy - I am standing firmly in mainstream orthodox Christian tradition. A fully formed Christian epistemology accepts that we know some things through data coming via physical senses (empirical epistemology), we know some things through the use of our reason (rationalist epistemology), but there are also certain things we can only know through God revealing them (revelational epistemology). A key text would be Hebrews 1:1-2 - In the past God spoke through prophets and now He speaks to us through Jesus.
In fact, to adopt a view that accepts a Christian epistemology and yet is uncritical of science founded on a non-Christian epistemology is inconsistent - I would feel crazier doing that than adopting the consistent worldview that I am working with. The point of my article was to call Christian thinkers to engage deeper in conversation where there are disagreements, so that we might all be thinking consistently.
If you really want to rid the world of creationists, the way I see it, you have 2 choices. You can shout as loudly and intimidatingly as you can, which will cause a lot of those who are undecided about the issues to avoid creationism because they don't want to be victim to that. Or you can take us seriously, understand the philosophical issues that we're dealing with and give us sound reasons why our philosophical foundations are shaky. The latter is a more challenging route but would be more effective. No need to call us crazy.
3:41 AM PDT
”Because we recognise the importance of revelation in our approach to knowing.”
Third, I sketched out some of the specific objections to evolutionary theory, but they were not the best ones, being limited by the letter length requirements.
Expanding a bit, every scientific theory or fact must have the property of being able to be falsified. Darwin's theory is no different. In fact Darwin identified two ways for falsifying his theory. One would be if gradualism in the genome did not show up [it hadn't at the time], and if a mechinism(sic) in life could be found that absolutely could not have come into being through microevolutionary(sic) incremental steps.
”Gradualism does not show up in the fossil record, especially in the Cambrian, and this is affirmed by most evolutionists, then ignored. The Cambrian Explosion was known to Darwin even 150 years ago, and he stated at the time that if gradualism was not found to explain the sudden appearances of such a vast array of advanced life, his theory would die on the spot. Searching the Cambrian and PreCambrian, has revealed millions of fossils, but no gradualism.”I dealt with the millions of years long Cambrian “explosion,” and the millions of years long precursor, the Ediacaran, twice already in just this one newspaper discussion, most recently on July 6, 2011 at 4:43 p.m. I see no need to repeat myself. Caldwell did ad a slight alteration, using the word, “gradualism.” We do of course have excellent examples of gradualism in the fossil record. But they are all from rather boring, stable organisms living I rather boring stable environments. They are marine snails, and little critters called foraminifera. The latter live in the billions in the Earth’s seas, and as they die, their calcified bodies drift down to the bottom of the sea. Happily for the oil industry, and evolutionary theory, the evolution of forams leaves a clear testament to gradual change in evolution. The other best example is also of a small class of many millions of marine snails that also live in a rather stable shallow, warm sea environment.
Manfred Eigen, won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work measuring extremely fast chemical reactions brought about by energy pulses. Though proud to use the term evolution, his models of the origin of life are not based on chance but on self-organizing chemical reactions that cycle to higher and higher levels. He is also the author of Eigens Paradox that explains a critical problem in positing cycles of RNA that lead to DNA.
Abstract: The error threshold for replication, the critical copying fidelity below which the fittest genotype deterministically disappears, limits the length of the genome that can be maintained by selection. Primordial replication must have been error-prone, and so early replicators are thought to have been necessarily short. The error threshold also depends on the fitness landscape. In an RNA world, many neutral and compensatory mutations can raise the threshold, below which the functional phenotype, rather than a particular sequence, is still present. Here we show, on the basis of comparative analysis of two extensively mutagenized ribozymes, that with a copying fidelity of 0.999 per digit per replication the phenotypic error threshold rises well above 7,000 nucleotides, which permits the selective maintenance of a functionally rich riboorganism with a genome of more than 100 different genes, the size of a tRNA. This requires an order of magnitude of improvement in the accuracy of in vitro–generated polymerase ribozymes. Incidentally, this genome size coincides with that estimated for a minimal cell achieved by top-down analysis, omitting the genes dealing with translation.
Ilya Prigogine, won his 1977 Nobel Prize for his theory that biological life self-assembled from inorganic non-life through the non-equilibrium thermodynamic processes. Again, random chance was abandoned, this time for the notion of an outside force arising in a thermodynamic process that, somehow, energized evolution. Such a force has never been identified.
Christian de Duve, for example, a Nobel Prize winner, and in no way an advocate of Intelligent Design, has abandoned random chance as the agent of upwards evolution or the ascent of man. He envisions primordial planet earth as a chemical reaction
waiting to happen. Recognizing that the odds of random chance being impossibly against
the formation of a single cell, let alone man, he has ceaselessly been searching for the string of chemical reactions that, once started, must have inevitably and, without chance, led to mankind. So far... no luck.
"I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences."
"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
"It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."
"He even cited an only half-joking statement in a university astronomy class about 20 years ago by Irwin Shapiro: since there were no good (naturalistic) explanations, the best explanation is that the moon is an illusion! This counts as strong evidence for the moon's special creation".
"All in all, developing a theory of lunar origins that could make sense of data obtained from the Apollo lunar landing programme proved very difficult. So much so, in fact, that when I took a class on our planetary system from Irwin Shapiro two decades ago, he joked that the best explanation was observational error — the Moon does not exist".
An off-center collision of a Mars-sized projectile with Earth would produce the present high angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system and would eject enough material into Earth orbit so that the dust could accumulate to form the Moon.
During the past 30 years, a scenario in which a giant object collided with Earth has emerged as the leading theory for Moon formation. An off-center collision of a Mars-sized projectile with Earth would produce the present high angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system and would eject enough material into Earth orbit so that the dust could accumulate to form the Moon. The first numerical simulations of this hypothesis nearly 20 years ago used about 3000 particles whose trajectories were followed through the entire collision. In a new set of simulations published in Icarus, Canup used up to 120,000 particles and a new equation of state that describes the behavior of material at extreme pressures and temperatures. Although the results are not very different from the earlier calculations of similar impacts, they include the most detailed predictions to date of the provenance of the material that makes up the Moon. This is crucial for geochemical arguments relating Earth mantle and Moon. [Original references deleted]
"The material that ends up in orbit around Earth and from which the Moon is made comes predominantly from the leading, outer regions of the projectile. These regions do not collide directly with Earth, and after the initial impact they expand to distances of several Earth radii where they are placed into stable Earth orbits by gravitational torque. The impactor core loses energy by its more direct collision with Earth, is thus more strongly decelerated, and (after distortion by gravitational forces) largely collides again with Earth." Palme (2004).
This is a slightly updated version of a web page I made for Valeri Craigle of the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library at the University of Utah. Original funding was provided by a grant from the National Library of Medicine, Grant #1 G08 LM05684-01A1.
Valeri created a significant resource for Forensic Anthropology that was used by researchers, criminal investigators, and students around the world. Unfortunately, short-sighted administrators prevented site maintenance after expiration of the grant, and have not even supported it as a static resource on their server. The page was archived at:
https://archive.ph/TE1me
I have added additional photographs, and text, but have tried to leave the page "dated."
I was personally honored to be associated with the project. I have also been involved with criminal investigations I can now identify (2013);
