Glenn Morton Has Died

 Glenn Morton, one of the first people to go public with his recantation of young earth creationism has died.  Todd Wood has the news:

I just got word that Glenn Morton passed away on August 5. You can see a brief obituary here. I never met Glenn, but I certainly knew of him. Back in the 1980s, Glenn was an active young-age creationist researcher, looking at questions in by geology. As he continued "digging," he had an increasingly difficult time figuring out how to explain his findings in the context of the Flood geology of the day. So he left, and eventually became a fairly regular critic of young-age creationism.

I remember reading one of Glenn's posts that was cross-linked on the old newsgroup Talk Origins.  The classic post by Morton, which appeared on Old Earth Ministries, detailed his tortuous, painful break from young earth creationism:

In order to get closer to the data and know it better, with the hope of finding a solution, I changed subdivisions of my work in 1980. I left seismic processing and went into seismic interpretation where I would have to deal with more geologic data. My horror at what I was seeing only increased. There was a major problem; the data I was seeing at work, was not agreeing with what I had been taught as a Christian. Doubts about what I was writing and teaching began to grow. Unfortunately, my fellow young earth creationists were not willing to listen to the problems. No one could give me a model which allowed me to unite into one cloth what I believed on Sunday and what I was forced to believe by the data Monday through Friday. I was living the life of a double-minded man--believing two things. By 1986, the growing doubts about the ability of the widely accepted creationist viewpoints to explain the geologic data led to a nearly 10 year withdrawal from publication. My last young-earth paper was entitled Geologic Challenges to a Young-earth, which I presented as the first paper in the First International Conference on Creationism. It was not well received. Young-earth creationists don't like being told they are wrong. The reaction to the pictures, seismic data, the logic disgusted me. They were more interested in what I sounded like than in the data!

I never corresponded with Glenn but now wish I had. He will be missed.

A New Kind of Geology Class

I think that if more people took a class like this, flood geology wouldn't be quite so well accepted. Clay Farris Naff of The Humanist (a magazine that I don't ordinarily read) has a good article on how geologist David Harwood, of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, teaches his students to understand geology. Naff writes:

What would happen if the pro-science side quit trying to win over young people with words and instead let them discover science for themselves? That is what geologist David Harwood, holder of the Stout Chair in Stratigraphy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), decided to find out. Together with his former doctoral student, Richard Levy, he has created a unique geology field course for future teachers. The idea is simple: In the rocky wilderness of Wyoming, a dozen students are pressed into teams and tasked with recapitulating centuries’ worth of geological discovery in a matter of days.

It really isn't very simple. It took quite some time to understand the geology of the Rockies. Still, interesting things happen along the way. He writes about a particular student:

It soon becomes clear that everything he knows about science comes from the standard creationist cant. He brushes Harwood’s idea of science aside as “a lot of this’s and that’s. It all comes down to one word—theory.” It turns out that his main objection in this class is to the geological column, which sets the Earth’s age at billions of years. “It’s a hypothesis that can’t be proven or hasn’t been proven,” he says. “It’s not a fact.” To avoid the possibility of heresy, David avoids writing any dates at all in his field journal.

And yet, within a week, David’s mind opens up to new ways of thinking, and he becomes a vigorous advocate of the inquiry method of learning. That is not to say he drops his lifelong commitment to fundamentalist Christianity. That would be too much to expect. But change washes over him all the same like a baptism in broad-mindedness.

This is sad because it reminds me a bit of Glenn Morton's "conversion" from flood geology, which almost cost him his faith. If the church would simply teach good science to start with, then discoveries like this would not be so jarring for the average Christian who takes a class in geology. I wonder how many people who are "jarred" by information like this never find their way back to their faith.