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.

William Reville on Religion and Science

The Irish Times has a good post by William Reville on the nature of science and what science does to answer questions. In it, he tackles a section that is persistently misinterpreted and misunderstood by modern-day creationism: historical science. After discussing what is understood to be popular science involving experimentation and replication, He writes:

However, not all aspects of the natural world are amenable to investigation by the form of the scientific method just described. For example, phenomena and processes that have developed over historical time, such as the origin and evolution of life or the origin and evolution of the universe, must be investigated in a different manner. Here you must use numerous lines of enquiry, and conclusions can only be drawn after these converge to produce an unmistakeable conclusion. Thus, the theory of evolution through natural selection rests on the converging evidence of the history of life on earth gleaned from palaeontology, geology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, biogeography, molecular genetics, physiology, and so on.

This is what many creationists fail to understand—it is not just the fossil record or just genetics or just anything that supports evolution. It is the whole kit 'n kaboodle. He also rightly questions whether or not the existence of God could ever be shown by using science. This is something I have argued for years. Read the whole thing.

Dissent From Darwin: So, Who Are These Geologists?

The Dissent from Darwin list, which has been hawked ad nauseum by the Discovery Institute has one lone palaeontologist on it. It does, however, have nine geologists on the list. Who are they?

Fred Schroeder - Columbia University. Columbia University has no listing of such a person. No published record since 1993, when he was working for Exxon as a petroleum geologist.
Seth Edwards - Associate Faculty at the University of Texas El Paso - UTEP has no listing of such a person - whereabouts unknown. Checks of Google Scholar and Web of Science turned up no papers by a Seth Edwards.
WJ Hedden - Missouri University of Science & Technology - There is is no faculty listing at this university for a WJ Hedden. A check of Google Scholar and Web of Science turned up one paper, written in 1980.
Richard Erdlac - He is a structural geologist with a specialization in geothermal energy. He has had most of his experience in the private sector and with government contracts, especially with the Department of Energy. Web of Science and Google Scholar list twelve publications in the last thirty years, with the most recent in 1994. The Clean Technology Conference and Expo lists him as a an energy consultant and the University of Texas at Austin no longer has a listing for him.
Susan L.M. Huck - Clark University. She is listed as a geologist although she has taught in geography and sociology. Neither Google Scholar or Web of Science lists papers by this person, although several papers in political activism can be found. Clark University has no listing for her and I cannot find her at another university.
Scott T. Dreher - listed as being at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, is now at the University of Durham in the UK. He is a specialist in isotopic geology and petrology. Web of Science lists nine papers dating back to 2000, with the bulk of them coming in the last five years.
Peter William Holyland - University of Queensland (Australia) - His speciality is mineral exploration. No papers found in Google Scholar, three papers found in Web of Science, most recent being 2000. By this time, he was working for Terra Sancta Inc. in Western Australia. Worked at one time for the Center for Strategic Mineral Deposits in Western Australia.
John H. Whitmore - Listed as being at Cedarville University, is now at the University of Minnesota's Department of Forest Resources after a short stint at the University of Ottawa. By 2006 was publishing in The Journal of Creation. It is clear from his writings (here for example) that he accepts the biblical flood model. To paraphrase Bill Murray, that's a big no.
Terry W. Spencer - Dr. Spencer is a seismologist, dealing mostly with wave propogation and compressive strength of rock. As such, this would not take him into the fossil record much, if at all. He does, however, seem to be a bona fide scientist.

So, what can we conclude from the above list and the relevance of each signatory to evolution? Only two are active, practicing geologists (one could say the same thing about me based on my output, though) but none have a specialty even close to palaeontology and one is a practicing creationist (and hence, not a practicing geologist). Therefore, like the physicists and medical doctors, their signatures are meaningless because they have little to no familiarity with the fossil record or evolutionary theory.

Once again, the Discovery Institute is blowing smoke in the hopes that no one will notice that there is nothing behind it. As with the new Zogby Poll, they can't go out and try to get palaeontologists and biologists to sign the Dissent from Darwin statement because they know good and well that very few will.
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Science, Ken Ham and Common Ground

Shelly Emling of the Atlanta Journal Constitution profiles Ken Ham of the Creation Museum in Kentucky as part of a larger article on the gap between science and creationism. Of Ham, she says this:

Ken Ham, whose Creation Museum in Kentucky just celebrated its second anniversary this weekend, has never been more sure that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that God created everything in six divinely ordered 24-hour time slots.

To Ham, it doesn’t matter that scientists have recently unveiled Ida —- the 47-million-year-old fossil hailed as the evolutionary link between modern primates and more distant species —- the latest in a string of significant fossils to be hyped by the media.

“No other book gives an account of origins as specifically as the Bible,” said Ham, whose museum just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati has attracted 720,000 visitors since opening in 2007.

Herein lies part of the problem, of course. It should matter. How much evidence does Ken Ham just ignore or dismiss out of hand? Here we have a primate fossil that is 95% complete, represents a primate that doesn't exist today, has not existed in the last two thousand years and is unlike any living primate. Is the thinking here that this simply represents yet another fossil that was resident on the Ark? How many species does that make, now?

The article continues with a discussion of different approaches to the problem, including the views of Francisco Ayala and Simon Conway-Morris but then ends with this howler:

Perhaps one day the debate over evolution and creationism will be settled. But I doubt it. The arguments on both sides are too persuasive. Still, one can hope.

The arguments on the creationism side are persuasive only if one knows absolutely nothing about geology, palaeontology or biology. That's what they're counting on.