Starting to get more technical now.  These first three lessons are the “foundation” for the rest of the series.  After this, I introduce the concept of a “folk-science” and compare/contrast this to standard laboratory science.  Then the fun really begins! 

Enjoy!

As promised, here is the second installment.  I noticed when I was doing the FLV conversion that there are unfortunately no graphics in Lesson 2.  I think it’s the only one with just me talking, which I tried to minimize.  However, Lesson 3 has plenty of eye-candy to keep the pace moving.  If anybody has any thoughts on graphics that I could use to reinforce the monologue, I’m open to suggestions. 

The fisrt video lesson was viewed 174 times during the first two days.  This makes me question the 4,798 hits my website supposedly received during that same time.  What were the other 4,624 people looking at?

Next one will go up Sunday.

Here is the first installment on the new video series.  I’m still playing around with the technical aspects of flash video, so I need feedback on how well the video runs, and if the data transfer can keep up.  The goal is to have the best possible quality and still be able to stream through the average connection speed.  The frame rate seems choppy to me, which could be the effect of this new flash video conversion utility (that I have yet to register).  The original version is DVD quality in widescreen format.

I would also like to get some useful content feedback.  Unless there is something really distracting in the video narration, I probably will not shoot that again.  But changes to the graphics and titles are relatively painless.

Check back in a couple of days for the next one.

First the bad news: I’m suspending my “Science and Christian Education” blog series.  I simply can’t keep up with it right now.

Now the good news: The entire series, Science Education in Private Christian Schools, has been made into videos!  For those of you familiar with my other videos – forget about it!  This new series is definitely a “cut above” the rest.  I can promise that you WILL be sharing these with friends and family who have added you to their “prayer list” for accepting the scientific consensus on origins. 

I hope this series of video lessons will actually provide a valuable service.  For those of you in academia who are too busy doing real science to stop and “explain yourself” to every curious Christian that thinks you’re living a double-life, I want these videos to be a valuable resource that you refer people to often.  Articulating the EC/TE position can be challenging, and sometimes the subtle nuancing required gets lost in the brevity of the response.  These videos are of sufficient quality to refer to students, parents or other faculty who might not be thrilled that you actually teach useful science in the science classroom (imagine that?).  They can also be used in a teacher training setting to stimulate discussion about how we present the natural sciences to our students without appearing to have “sold out” to secularism.

There are a total of 12 lessons, ranging from 6 min to 20 min each, with most of them averaging about 10 min.  They are very easy to watch, full of graphics, illustrations, audio and anecdotes that reinforce the narration.  I’m also going to make them available on DVD for only the cost of burning a disk and mailing it.

The first 7 lessons are ready to post, and I’m going to put them up soon.  I would have posted Lesson 1 today but I had some technical difficulty with my FLV conversion utility.  If anybody can convert AVI files into quality FLV files, please let me know.  My web-hosting service has a free FLV converter but it makes my stuff look like garbage.  The plan is to post one lesson every few days or so.  That should give me enough time to finish editing lessons 8-12 while I get the first 7 up.

Here are the lesson titles:

Lesson 1:   Seeing Through a Glass Darkly
Lesson 2:   Science, Naturalism and Materialism
Lesson 3:   Proximate and Ultimate Causality
Lesson 4:   What is Chirstian Folk-Science?
Lesson 5:   A Brief History of Folk-Science
Lesson 6:   Christian Folk Science Today
Lesson 7:   Young-Earth Creationism
Lesson 8:   Flood Geology
Lesson 9:   Special Creation Part 1
Lesson 10: Special Creation Part 2
Lesson 11: Intelligent Design
Lesson 12: Closing Thoughts

Please spread the word!

In other news, I received the typeset manuscript for the second printing of BTF this weekend from the publisher.  As I’ve mentioned previously, there were many typographical mistakes that ended up in the initial release, and I’m very excited about having the opportunity to clean those up.  Moreover, we added an endorsements page in the front with gracious remarks from folks like: John Walton, Loren Haarsma, Steve Matheson and others, as well a few remarks from fellow EC and TE bloggers listing their URLs. 

I assume that most of my readers also frequent Steve Martin’s blog.  But if not, I recently posted an essay there about Teaching Evolution in Private Christian Schools.  Click here to read it.  Also, this (click here)  is a good example of why I keep a list of interesting blogs on my blogroll.  If you check my blog and are bummed ’cause there is nothing new, check my blogroll.  There is always something interesing happening there.

Check back frequently, and please give me some feedback on the videos.  Since I’m intending these to be a resource for the community, I’m going to hold off on rendering the final DVD tracks until folks have had time to review and comment on the on-line versions.

GJG

Is Flood Geology Folk-Science?

Just as the assumption of a young cosmos is of no use to our systematic study of the astronomical data, the assumption of a young earth is of no use when dealing with the geological data. To explain the miles of sedimentary layers that cover every inch of the earth, YECs use an alternate geological paradigm called ‘flood geology’ that actually pre-dates Darwinism by a century, although it had a different name back then.

By the early 1800s, as roads and canals were being carved through mountains and peninsulas, it became clear that the great catastrophic flood of Noah’s time could not account for the uniform disposition of so many carefully placed layers of geological strata.  And each layer appeared to contain specific fossilized remains of different prehistoric organisms.  And no matter where in the world people looked, the same layers, with the same fossils, were always found in the same sequence.

A group of Christian geologists, who called themselves “scriptural geologists,” spent several years in the field attempting to reconcile the assumptions of a young earth and global flood with the new data. But by the 1830s this quest was abandoned for lack of evidence.  These discredited ideas were dropped in the dustbin of history not by biblical critics, but by Christians committed to biblical authority.  Eventually, these same ideas were resurrected in the 1960s by a hydraulics engineer named Henry Morris and a professor of Old Testament history named John Whitcomb with a new title.  Unlike the “scriptural geologists” of the 19th century, neither Morris nor Whitcomb had any formal training in geology, and neither spent any time in the field examining the data up close.  So once again, we have Christians with no formal training in science publishing books that completely up-end the modern scientific consensus on earth history without ever having conducted any original research in the field, written any peer-reviewed articles for scientific journals, or presented their ideas at professional conferences where other world-renowned experts can evaluate them.   This fact alone should cause your folk-science-o-meters to start registering.

I could write several posts demonstrating just how absolutely off-base flood geology really is, but consider this simple test: if there was ever an industry that depended on sound geological principles for its survival, it would definitely be the oil industry.  And if there was ever an industry that put profits over principle, the case might be made that this would also be the oil industry.  So we can be fairly confident that the oil industry is more concerned with results in the field (ie: the bottom line) than taking a principled stand in the creation/evolution debate.  So many Christians are surprised to learn that oil and gas exploration companies have large staffs of paleontologists, geologists and geophysicists that spend their entire day sifting through mountains of geological data to help locate fossil fuel deposits. These companies don’t care about the age of the earth or the Noahic flood; they are only interested in useful paradigms that can pinpoint the location of oil reserves with a high degree of certainty.  After all, drilling for oil in the wrong location is a big fat waste of money.

Here is my point: of all the billions of dollars that the oil industry invests in novel ideas, and in building secret bunkers to hide the free-energy machines and electric cars that run on watch batteries, how much of that do you think goes to conduct research in flood geology?  How many Old Testament scholars, like John Whitcomb, do you think they have on staff combing through Genesis for secrets about Earth’s short history that can be used to one-up the competition?  And trust me, this has nothing to do with politics or religion.  They would invest in black magic, voo-doo, and hire teams of psychics if any of these showed even the slightest bit of promise.  But as it turns out, the only geological paradigm that actually works is called biostratigraphy, and it is based on two fundamental assumptions: a very old earth and the gradual evolution of marine invertebrates.

The ancient seabeds accumulated layers of sediment over hundreds of millions of years, and these layers contain a very high concentration of marine invertebrates fossils, making the gradual step-by-step evolution of these ancient organisms a very well documented scientific fact.  In most cases, the first and last appearance of each separate species can be fully documented without gaps or missing links. This detailed biological record enables micro-paleontologists to make very accurate estimates on the age of specific sedimentary layers simply by examining core samples.  According to micropaleontologist, Anne Hill, who works for Shell Offshore,

“The fundamental principal in stratigraphy is that the sedimentary rocks in the Earth’s surface accumulated in layers, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top . The history of life on Earth has been one of creatures appearing, evolving, and becoming extinct. Putting these two concepts together, we observe that different layers of sedimentary rocks contain different fossils. When drilling a well into the Earth’s crust in search of hydrocarbons, we encounter different fossils in a predictable sequence below the point in time where the organism became extinct…It is palaeontology that uniquely explains the element of geologic time and depositional environment to petroleum geology.”

So how do the flood geologists/YECs treat the geologic column?  John D. Morris had this to say,

“Creationists, on the other hand, consider that the bulk of earth’s sedimentary rock accumulated rapidly beneath the waters of the great Flood of Noah’s day. One layer followed another in swift succession, sometimes interrupted by brief periods of quiescence, uplift, and erosion. Some time may have passed between depositional events, but these periods were not long, and the bulk of the sedimentary rock record may represent hardly more than one year.”

Flood geology claims that sedimentary fossils are the remains organisms killed in the flood, and that the entire geological column was deposited in about a year.  And even though the flood was violent enough to carve out canyons a mile deep and cover the tops of mountains, it somehow perfectly sorted the biological carnage in a pattern that is so consistent that it is often mistaken as evolution by secular scientists.  Hmm…

The truth is, Henry Morris, John Morris and John Whitcomb can say whatever they want because their ideas don’t have to work in the field where it counts.  Their bills are paid, not by those who demand results, but by other Christians who just want a scientific-sounding alternative to mainstream science.  The obvious motivation here is giving scientific credibility to the biblical flood story by turning it into a scientific paradigm that competes with secular geology. But there is no competition. The scriptural geologists were right to abandon flood geology in the 1800s, and we would do well to abandon it today.  For a detailed history of flood-related folk-science click here.

Unfortunately, websites like AiG and ICR still have scores of scientific-sounding articles that attempt to explain how the geological data can be explained by Noah’s flood, even though these ideas have been universally rejected by the scientific community for almost 200 years.  But the proof is in the pudding!  Anti-Christian bias in secular academic institutions is understandable, but if the flood geology paradigm could do something useful in industry, like find petroleum or other mineral deposits, ICR and AiG wouldn’t have to beg hard-working Christians for donations because private companies would be paying them millions.  Exxon’s annual budget is around $20 billion for exploration.

I would invite my readers to also read the testimony by a fellow named Glenn Morton. Glen is a geo-physicists who wrote over 20 articles for ICR and fully supported the young-earth paradigm, along with flood geology.  In the 1980s he went to work for an oil and gas exploration company because he wanted to spend his days sorting through real geological data and writing articles for ICR based on actual field-work.  In other words, he was one of the few creationists who had the scientific integrity to at least go into the field and tackle the challenging problems.  Of course, like most YECs who come face to face with a world that doesn’t look like it should, Glen experienced a crisis of faith and rejection by his friends at ICR because he could no longer honestly support the YEC/flood geology paradigm.

So what about the Flood?  Personally, I’m not sure.  I wasn’t there, and neither was Moses.  But God was — and since He gave us both Genesis and the geological column (with biostratigraphy included), I guess He wasn’t that concerned about the details either.  The story of Noah’s flood is an important biblical narrative, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to account for the precise patterns of invertebrate succession up through the geological column.  As soon as Christians insist that this narrative can be used to solve question of geology or earth history, we’re back in folk-science territory.

In our next post, we’ll look at the idea of instantaneous miraculous creation (special creation) as folk-science — and see how much this idea can (or can’t) help us when doing biological systematics.  You won’t want to miss that!