…can you claim to be a professional * geologist* while supporting a Biblical Creationist notion of the world’s physical development? Surely the two are mutually exclusive?
See, I can imagine many science-type boffins being able to reconcile their particular speciality with a belief in Creation Science. Y’know, like opticians, and maybe obstetricians. I could even imagine a mathematician revelling in the rational beauty of what Og created for our intellectual amusement 6000 years ago.
But a *GEOLOGIST? *
How can someone like that hold credentials like that and not see the utter incongruence of their stance?
I can understand at least why he is on the lecture circuit. No one would bother employing him as a geologist, that’s for sure.
It seems some people just wear blinders. I had a serious young lady work for me once who was a fundie. She was very nice, never tried to push her beliefs. We got in a discussion once where she insisted the earth was something like 5700 years old (forget the exact figure she used). We kicked this around for a while.
Finally, I asked her how she accounted for the dinosaurs. She insisted there were no such things. I gave up.
In the Christian school I attended, they taught that humans and dinosaurs had co-existed until Noah’s flood. They had a drawing of people farming with brontosauri grazing on trees in the background. (Always wondered what happened if a T-rex came along. THAT would have been an interesting sketch.)
All of the bones that we find are the dinos who died in the flood, but Noah did have a few on the Ark. (Another drawing of a stegosaurus in a stall next to a zebra was included.)
That’s a step up from what I was taught in Sunday school, that people were like cookies and God left the Negroes in the oven too long and they got “burnt”.
I wonder why this dunderhead never realized it is such a “secret” because for the extremist religious minded people in England it is a bigger embarrassment that Darwin had graduated in theology, it is less embarrassing to more scientific minded people since for them it showed that a fellow that originally “knew” the truth found evidence contrary to that and instead of hiding the evidence he published the findings.
However, it seems there was a more mundane reason, Darwin was already learned in taxidermy and wanted to be a Naturist but in those days (like Mendel) being in the church was most likely to provide time and a comfortable income. And most naturalists in England were clergymen who saw it as their duty to explore “the wonders of the creation”.
Obviously this dunderhead ignores that Punctuated Equilibria already saw that opportunity and what is worse, it is not mutually exclusive of phyletic gradualism.
Birds of a feather, and I’m not talking finches here.
I’ve met some YEC geologists. Big on cataclysmic flood sedimentation. They were nice people, & pretty good at thinking outside the conventional wisdom box.
I wonder how many people responding in horror to this thread are trained in geology. Also, how many of us are “refuting” these people with arguments from authority? (“Well, Steven Jay Gould said…”) Don’t think you’ve disproven an argument just because you’ve repeated “what everybody knows.” Maybe what everybody “knows” is an assumption.
The sharper Young-Earthers make a goofy kind of sense: Many people accept the current scientific theory of any given thing simply on authority, 'cos it’s out of their area of expertise. But many theories are built on inference & assumption. There are some frankly bizarre conclusions that have been put forth as scientific truth. For examples, I was taught that there is no neurogenesis in adult primates, which is totally wrong; geologists used to pooh-pooh any regional cataclysms as creeping creationism. If you’re going to accept something on authority, the “Inspired Scriptures” can look like as good a choice as any.
Of course, any argument from authority is invalid. Besides, I think there are good philological reasons to take Genesis with a grain of salt or twelve. But these people aren’t historians, or theologians, or philologists. They’re observant Christians trying to reconcile their religion with their scientific understanding. And sometimes they come up with some interesting ideas.
I’m glad people like this exist, because they remind us of the cocksureness of conventional wisdom, & they challenge our ideas about how X came to be. It’s good to seriously consider whether they could be right, & to work on explaining why they’re wrong, instead of simply repeating what we think is right, lest we become as hidebound as the worst religious conservatives ourselves.
That’s horrible. Thankfully, most churches don’t teach such a thing.
Mind you, I’m sure that this story was only told for illustrative purposes, and was not meant literally. I also suspect that there was no illwill intended. Still, people often don’t realize the implications of such tales.
FTR, I doubt that it was intended as a white superiority tale, either. In the version that I’m familiar with, the white people were undercooked and the dark people were overdone. The brown-skinned folks are the ones that came out “just right.”
In the interest of combatting ignorance, I think it’s worth pointing out that “punctuated equilibrium” is a description, not an explanation. You cant’ really explain anything by pointing to punctuated equilibrium, since that merely describes what supposedly occurred. It doesn’t offer an explanation for how this might have happened.
I’m a bit less charitable than you as (IMO) there is fine, but fairly bright line between challenging authority with a viable competing paradigm and trying to argue for something that is manifestly ludicrous on multiple levels like YEC. The first is “outside the box” science, the second is a knowing con game.
Trying to prove what’s in the bible is different from using the bible as a set of hypotheses that can be disproven. Taking the bible as fact and ignoring any evidence that might disprove it flies in the face of scientific method. How do these people feel about scientific method? Do I even want to know?
