Because there’s a lot from Genesis and Paul, but not a lot from Jesus.
@Mark10.45 put it quite well. So did Augustine and Aquinas.
In a sentence, if you stick God into the gaps you perceive (rightly or wrongly) in our scientific knowledge, as our knowledge increases so do the sizes of the gaps, along with the size of the God you stuff into them.
Does he refer to the radiation mutagenesis of Earnest R. Sears? Most of us eat the products of his X-ray irradiation of wheat every day:
I largely disagree here. God doesn’t permit a wide range of views on certain matters. Christians can differ in their preference for the best Bible verses or characters, but they cannot differ in opinion on whether Jesus is the Son of God.
Oh great, so you have Holy Spirit detectors now. How do you know they have the spirit?
Whether Catholics worship silently or Vineyard churchgoers worship loudly is quite irrelevant. What matters most is doctrine. Doctrinal differences is what divided the church. As a Roman Catholic, I appeal to saints to intercede on my behalf before the Holy Trinity, but my protestant friends find this idolatrous and occasionally remind me to give up these “false” beliefs.
Thank you, @thoughtful for taking the time to type that up! The articles you found seem to not support what Sanford is saying? That’s quite a few examples of beneficial mutations created with those methods. Disease resistant cocoa? Woohoo! More chocolate!
I’m no fan of Andrew Snelling in any sense, but this story about him placing people in front of an outcrop so as to hide some features he claims don’t exist is way out of line. This is not the kind of debate to have in geology. Let’s leave that to the politicians.
The correct way to dispute his claim is for another geologist to visit and study the outcrop and report back to us about their findings. Ideally with more photographs but definitely with descriptions and measurements of any fractures they observe. Then, with real data in hand we might have a valid debate between them and Andrew Snelling.
The book The Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth has some details about this particular formation. Obviously, that’s written to a layperson, so may not be what you’re looking for. Images from that book are at the bottom of this blog post:
I am not accusing Snelling of lying because of the two oddly placed people. The people make me suspicious, once I saw the other photographs where large cracks were behind those two locations, but I am not at all saying that those people were placed there to cover those cracks. It’s a possibility, but I don’t have evidence of it. What I do have a problem with is his article saying that we know it was bent while wet because there are no fractures, when in reality there are lots of fractures in that rock. When I asked AiG about it, his (likely canned) response that was forwarded to me basically said the fractures occurred after the rock folded while wet. But in the article, the lack of fractures were given as the reason he knew it folded while wet. So if the rock has fractures (and it does), he needs another reason to say that it folded while wet.
The flexural slippage explanation makes more sense to me, especially since none of the layers are squished together or slumping, as would happen if they folded while wet. The people in front of the cracks are useful for seeing the sheer size of this formation.
I don’t see how you can generalize about her theology from one two-paragraph post, which is what she had offered as a reply to you.
But even if you could, it’s grossly misleading to ignore the fact that the passage from Paul mentions Jesus (or Christ, or various combinations) five times.
Who both believed that God had acted directly, not exclusively through natural causes, in creating the natural world. By your standard, they were both guilty of “God of the gaps.” Don’t call upon them for support! (Or any pre-Enlightenment Christian theologian. Your argument will have to do without the titans of Christian thought.)
You should have said, “so the size of the gaps decreases…”
Well, yes and no. On the one hand I would of course have to agree, the fact of the matter with respect to some geological formation is not assessed by looking at pictures on the internet. Real geologists have to go out there and assess the actual rocks and do whatever tests and analyses are required. That’s how we figure out what is true about that rock formation.
On the other hand, it does seem rather odd for Snelling to have a picture (intended to be posted on a website, for public dissimination) taken of a rock formation with people standing in front of all the interesting features of a particular type thought to be highly relevant to the nature of how that rock formation formed and how long it took. We’re human beings, we have to wonder about it. We’re being naive if we just ignore it as if it doesn’t mean anything. It is relevant with respect to how much trust or skepticism we should be giving to Snelling on other such matters.
And a huge body of literature beyond what has been quoted here.
Maybe I’m being too cynical, but perhaps Sanford is making these claims because mutagenesis is a technology that competes in a way with Sanford’s invention. He may have a hard time granting that there are valid and viable alternatives to his Second Amendment solution to plant genetic engineering.
Let me express it with an analogy to my own line of work (software development).
One of the perennial problems that we have in the software industry is totally unqualified candidates applying for software development roles. In order to cut down on the expense of bringing such people on-site for job interviews, candidates are routinely asked (usually at the start of the preliminary phone screen) to complete a ridiculously simple coding exercise. The canonical example is called “FizzBuzz,” and it asks them this:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
Even the most junior developers should be able to complete such a task with their eyes closed. But many candidates – some of whom even have PhDs – can’t.
Only if they pass FizzBuzz are they then asked about more advanced topics such as object oriented design patterns, regular expressions, database concurrency, test-driven development, or machine learning. If they fail, the phone screen is cut short, they are thanked for their time, and their CV goes straight in the bin.
Your correct way is the geological equivalent of asking a candidate about object oriented design patterns, regular expressions, database concurrency, test-driven development, or machine learning. Snelling’s claim, on the other hand, is the geological equivalent of failing FizzBuzz.
I was at that outcrop of the Tappeats uplifted by the Kaibab Monocline in 2018, along with a dozen or so other geologists. This was a half-day hike (3.5 miles) west up Carbon Canyon to the top of the canyon where the outcrop is seen, then south along the south limb of the Chuar Syncline, and then back east along Lava Canyon to the Colorado River where our rafts waited for us.
At that time I was not aware of Snelling’s unsupported claims of “soft sediment” folding, so I did not have the motivation (or the time) to map in detail the axial plane cleavage or secondary fractures associated with compressive fold structures.
I will be back in the Canyon in May of this year, and if we hike the Carbon-Lava loop I will try to find time to take some more detailed photos (and measure some fracture orientations).
I realize that this thread will be long dead by then, but I will share any new info I find then.
Yes. It’s not as good as using Agrobacterium, mainly because the gene gun yields events with lots of duplications, rearrangements, and the like, which leads to extensive gene silencing. Agrobacterium is fairly free of such things.
That photograph does suggest there are fractures, but it still is very dangerous to draw lines like that unless you have actually stood in front of the outcrop and spent considerable time studying it. It is not clear to me that the person writing the blog has done that.
What irks me in these creo-evo debates is people who feel a need to pontificate about subjects they are not qualified in. It happens way too often and it doesn’t happen just on one side. This is how these discussions that ought to be scientific become politicised to the detriment of understanding.
There are tools and techiques to analyse such structures to help the interpretation become more reliable. One approach is too measure fractions, their orientation and density, and relate that to the stress field we can reconstruct from analysing the fold itself. Doing this usually gives good indications if the fractures are associated with the folding event, or were formed later (or possibly earlier). Something else to look for especially when considering flexural slipping is slickensides on the bed surfaces. Ordinarily we wouldn’t expect slickensides from soft sediment deformation. There are other techniques too.
So what I don’t know is if Snelling has done such work and concluded that insofar as there are fractures, they look as if they are unrelated to the folding; or if he never did such work. Likewise, I don’t know if the people questioning his statements have done this type of work. I see too much armwaving and too little proper field geology, sorry.
Now we are talking! That is the right (and imo the only) way to move these discussions forward. I look forward to your report (and I wish I could come with you on your trip!).
Your second paragraph just breeds mutual paranoia. There are good ways and bad ways to go about situations like this. We should look at the rocks themselves and draw conclusions from that - not from photographs let alone from people standing at the outcrop.
I don’t know who wrote the blog or what their credentials are, nor did I intend for the blog itself to be a reference. I apologize for that miscommunication. I was only including that link because it had at the very bottom of the post an image with the graphics from the book Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth. Here is the graphic I’m referring to (not the blog writer’s own graphics):
In chapter 12, p125, of that book, Bryan Tapp and Ken Wolgemuth explain the structure. I do not, however, know if they have investigated the structure in person or not, and I agree with you that that is certainly the best thing. The structure appears to be difficult to get to, and I don’t know if there is any literature published about it. I tried searching Google Scholar, but I had trouble figuring out proper search terms to get that particular formation. I’m a layperson who has to rely on the expertise of those in the field. When one expert says it folded while wet because there are no fractures, and I can clearly see fractures, I tend to get skeptical. If he believes the fractures occurred after the folding, he still needs to explain how he knows it folded while wet, since his article said the lack of fractures was how he knows that. He has given me no scientific reason to believe that it folded while wet. If he is still doing work to determine that, he shouldn’t be making the claim as one of the top reasons to believe the earth is 6000 years old.
While writing this, it dawned on me to check for citations of any scholarly work in the book itself. Sure enough, I see this mentioned, but I don’t know where to find it online:
Niglio,L., 2004. Fracture Analysis of Precambrian and Paleolithic rocks in selected areas of the Grand Canyon National Park, USA. University of Oklahoma, Norman, Masters Thesis.
Hello @faded_Glory. The trip is organized by the Colorado School of Mines alumni office, and runs from May 15 to May 22 2021. There may be a few seats available. PM me if you interested, I can send the links.
Thank you for clarifying. I may have to get that book myself.
In any case I agree that even if the structure was formed when the sediment was unconsolidated (it doesn’t really look like that to me tbh but I’m not going to make a definitive judgement obviously!) it is unclear how one could derive a 6000 year old age from that information!
