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Today, several Kansas State Education board members are facing primary election challenges. The leading issue of debate has been changes to the science standard. These changes question the evolution theory with such statements as “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.” It also encourages students to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Opponents see this as an attempt to bring religion into the classroom over science, while supporters see it as inserting objectivity and removing the natural anti-religious bias found in evolution.

The New York Times, CNN, and most other media outlets are reporting on this story. The news should be in tonight whether the conservatives have weathered their first challenge. If they lose their seats, the newly elected education board will reverse the changes made to the science standard.

Paleontologists report a trove of plesiosaur fossils in Australia, some of which indicate two new species. One, Umoonasaurus demoscyllus, grew to seven feet or longer and had head crests. The other, named Opallionectes andamookaensis, may have grown to over 16 feet.

Plesiosaurs had flippers and are believed to have lived about 115 million years ago, according to evolutionary timescales. However, evolutionary geologists believe Australia was much colder then, which means these newly-found plesiosaurs would have been swimming in ice water, a harrowing test of endurance for reptiles. Consequently, BBC news reports that scientists "believe the creatures might have evolved mechanisms to cope with the harsh climate, such as a faster metabolic rate." Either that or these plesiosaurs were already dead and buried when the climate got cold.

A newly-discovered pterosaur skull indicates that only adult pterosaurs might have sported full crests. As a result, paleontologists think the crest might have been an indicator of sexual maturity to potential mates.

Paleontologists have also found gigantic sauropod vertebrae in Argentina, the largest of which measures an amazing 3.48 feet tall by 5.51 feet wide.  By extrapolating, the scientists guess the new-named Puertasaurus reuili  was between 115 and 131 feet long. Curry Rogers, speaking to National Geographic News, warns against being too dogmatic about size, however, explaining that when all you have are vertebrae or limb fossils, "You have to make this leap to imagine what [the dinosaurs] were like." Indeed. As in this artists' conception. Let's not forget that our beloved sauropod Seismosaurus was "chopped" down 35% when its vertebrae were reassessed, from 170 feet to 110.

LifeSiteNews has alerted me to an op-ed piece authored by David P. Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, who wants to see scientists produce human/chimp hybrids in the near future. Why? He thinks it will silence people who believe in the sanctity of human life (such as John Wesley Smith) and annoy creationists like me.

Some geneticists have postulated that ancient humans and chimps interbred, and Barash argues this proves even further that humans are not distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom, and therefore have no right to "dominate" the earth. He says:

Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism — as our ancient human and chimp ancestors appear to have done long ago — it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.

Barash seems to have a misunderstanding of sanctity-of-life principles.  We believe the "image of God" quality that makes humanity unique is a spiritual and perhaps mental one, rather than simply biological. Disgusting as it is, humans have been sexually involved with animals in the past (the Bible specifically condemns it), and the prospect of a hybrid is not far-fetched, though it would be morally wrong and wouldn't qualify under the "image of God" criteria.

However, Barash is not being irrational. He is consistent with his own worldview, an atheistic evolutionism that teaches all of life--indeed, some would say all of reality--is the freak offspring of blind chance. Barash has simply taken Neo-Darwinism to one of its natural conclusions.

From Barash's piece:

The latest tactic of creationists in the United States has been to accept "microevolutionary" events, such as drug resistance in bacteria, but to draw the line at the emergence of human beings from other, "lower" life forms, cloaking their religious agenda in a miasma of pseudoscience. It is a line that exists only in the minds of those who proclaim that the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.

Um, it's not the "latest tactic," folks. Creationists have believed that organisms can change for quite a long time now.

Meanwhile,even some Christian scientists are advocating the General Theory of Evolution, and criticising the Intelligent Design movement.  One such person is the recent author of The Language of God, Francis Collins (leader of the Human Genome Project), who at a recent conference sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation called the evidence for evolution "overwhelming," after performing hymns on a stage piano. A Washington post article published one week ago described Collins' position:

[Collins] tells fellow evangelicals that opposition to evolution -- whether based in the biblical literalism of creationists or "intelligent design" arguments -- undermines the credibility of faith. He finds the first line of thought "fundamentally flawed" and says the second builds upon gaps in evidence that scientists are likely to fill in.

Collins, who was once an "obnoxious atheist," began to reconsider his view of faith and God partly as a result of reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Two years of mind-wrestling later, Collins gave up his disbelief and invited Christ into his mind and heart.

He has not, however, given up his faith in evolution.   Again, from the WP article:

Collins writes that "it is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit," in which the dominant voices have belonged to narrow, anti-God materialists and believers who spurn orthodox science.

He says both approaches are "profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary."

What's ironic about this is that C.S. Lewis called evolutionism a "grand myth," and argued against its compatibility with Christianity in his essay Is Theology Poetry? If you are in doubt you can read his excerpt on evolution here. I reproduce the following quotes for convenience's sake.

I, who believe less than half of what it tells me about the past, and less than nothing of what it tells me about the future, am deeply moved when I contemplate [the General Theory of Evolution].

. . . .  

The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher, corresponds to nothing in my own experience.

That grand myth [the General Theory of Evolution]which I asked you to admire a few minutes ago is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; it is the one we touched on a fortnight ago. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought--laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory-in other words, unless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it.

. . . .

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are embedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science.

        --C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?
 

Geological stories in the news:  Ever wonder how those elevated, stair-step rock formations were formed at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park?  According to the New York Times, the patterns have stumped geologists for years, but now a group of physicists has created a computer model that seems to explain them.  The flow of the mineralized hot spring water is such that, according to the computer model, the minerals would deposit themselves to a surface, dam up, and redirect the circulation of water, creating the other-worldy pools characteristic of the Mammoth Hot Springs area.

A giant crack that opened up in the earth's surface in Ethiopia and Eritrea (northeast Africa, south of the Red Sea) last September is in the news, showing how satellite technology can help us understand rifts and tectonic plate movements as they occur.  The rift, which stretches nearly 40 miles and is 25 feet wide in places, is filling with hot magma from beneath the earth's crust, perhaps helping to push the fault apart. 

"It is clear that the rise of molten rock through the plate is enabling the breakup of Africa and Arabia," says Dr. Tim Wright, quoted at National Geographic News, who thinks that in about a million years the crack may grow wide enough reach the Red Sea, thus filling with ocean water and creating a new gulf. "It's the biggest rifting episode at least since the 1970s and possibly in hundreds of years," said Wright to BBC. "It's the first time we've been able to use satellite images to investigate the fundamental processes behind rifting."

Strangely, the National Geographic News story on the giant Ethiopian rift opens the with this clumsy and inexplicable sentence:

"Moses may have received some geological assistance when he parted the Red Sea to let the Israelites through, according to the Bible."  Whatever is meant by this vague statement, it is not supported or revisited by the rest of the news story, nor are Moses, the Israelites, or the Bible mentioned again.  What exactly is NG trying to imply?  Can anyone explain it?

Since about sixty lectures total were given over the course of the History of the World Mega-Conference, there was no way to hear them all, although they were recorded and made available in CD and MP3 format (I suspect I'll be listening to plenty more lectures over the coming months). I'll continue recapping some of those I heard.

Thursday morning Dr. Whitcomb spoke about the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of the nations. He mentioned Peleg, a man who is mentioned in Genesis 10:25. "And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan." (KJV) Probably most Bible scholars, and certainly Dr. Whitcomb, interpret this to mean the tribes and nations, distinguished by their own languages, were dispersed over the earth during Peleg's time. Some have interpreted the verse to mean the continents were divided during Peleg's life (creationists are more friendly to the idea of Pangaea--all the continents in one land mass--than you might think), but it is much more likely that any continental division happened during the Flood. Both would have been cataclysmic events, and if the rapid division of a hypothetical Pangaea occurred some time after the Flood, it seems unlikely that Peleg and all his buddies would have survived it. There is a third possible interpretation of Genesis 10:25. While Peleg is normally translated to mean division, there is a possibility that it means surveying, which would suggest that the earth was, to some extent, explored and mapped at this time. Just a hypothesis.

Click to read more ...

Dr Whitcomb and Dr. Morris both spoke on Wednesday night, the former about "The Long War Against God," and the latter about radioisotope dating and ICR's RATE project.  Whitcomb shared his testimony, which I found inspiring and insightful.  He was non-Christian Darwinist at Princeton, until he was led to Christ by a Bible study leader on campus, and was later introduced to young-earth creationism by Henry Morris.  Together they wrote the groundbreaking work, The Genesis Flood, which has since sold 275,000 copies.  He had some criticism for the Intelligent Design movement, arguing that it shuts out the Word of God and excludes the main point of creationism--Christ.  "In response to ID, we humbly believe it is essential to believe the Genesis record of origins," he said, and also emphasized it is necessary to believe the order of creation as given in Genesis.  An "ID argument" of origins, he said, should conclude with the gospel, or it will fail to bring people to Christ.  He also had criticism for Hugh Ross' old-earth position on Genesis.

John Morris shared a few of ICR's RATE project results with us, arguing that radioisotope dating isn't the fool-proof age tester it's advertised as.  (For starters, volcanic rocks that were laid recently have been radio dated to be millions of years old.)  I was unfamiliar with some of the technical details, but essentially, if I understand correctly, two different types of radio halos have been found in the same rocks, one indicating a young age, and one indicating an old age--meaning that past nuclear decay rates must have been faster than they are observed to be today.  In addition, the RATE project found carbon-14 in coal and diamonds, even though fossils older than a million years or so should have no C-14 at all left inside them.  Evidence that they were formed recently.

There is more info about the RATE results in the book Thousands . . . Not Billions, (a book I plan to read soon) and in the technical, two-volume set Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.

More History of the World Mega-Conference updates to come. . . 

I'm now at the first ever History of the World Mega-Conference in Hampton, Virginia.  The event is being hosted by Vision Forum, and features such speakers as Dr. John Morris, Dr. John C. Whitcomb, Dr. George Grant, and Douglas W. Phillips.  The event is especially unique in that it presents a biblical, young-earth view of history, starting with special creation and moving down through time under God's providential hand.  The first session was delivered by Doug Phillips, who prepped everyone for the rest of the week by showing both the incorrect and correct or biblical ways of conducting historiography.  Some myths he hopes the conference will deal with:

• Myth of Uniformitarian Earth Chronology -- The evolutionary perception of slow rates and long time periods as the molders of our present world.  In contrast, the presentations at this conference (at least most of them, I presume) will presuppose a global flood.
  
• Corridor of Time Myth -- The idea that God is not involved in all aspects of history, only certain, limited segments.
  
• Myth of Racial Anthropology -- In creationist thinking, all races are descended from Noah and his family, not from evolutionary phylogeny.
  
• Myth of Cultural Evolution -- If I'm not mistaken, this refers to the thinking that all cultures are in an evolutionary, time and chance process that from the beginning of time has randomly determined their outcomes.  In opposition to this, the conference will emphasize strongly the providence of God.
  
• Cultural Equality Myth -- Not all cultural manifestations are equally valid and right.
  
• Myth of Glorious Paganism -- Pagan cultures are not free and innocent, as some anthropologists would like us to believe.  (This is not to imply that our own particular culture is without the many of the same faults as pagan ones.)
  
• Myth that "The Present is the Key to the Past" -- Phillips brought out II Peter 3:3-10 as direction that we should not assume that everything in the past happened exactly as it does today.  This is good skepticism not only scientifically, but historically; we shouldn't always assume people would have acted or believed the same as we ourselves would have.

Phillips also pointed out some wrong extremes that the secular world, or we, as Christian historians (generally speaking), can fall into:

• The Conspiratorial View  is widely in vogue today, as evidenced by the success of The Da Vinci Code, the best-selling novel (best-selling in American history, if I'm not mistaken) which presents modern Christianity to be the product of a colossal cover-up.  Let's not be gullible.
  
• The Triumphalist View claims that 20th and 21st century culture is the apex of civilization.  Most creationists believe that the success of our generation owes much to the accomplishments of those who came before us.  We don't believe that we are superior in intellect or morality to many peoples that have come before us.  (Opportunity for anti-creationists to think up derogative puns here.)
• Phillips also mentioned The Cynycist View and the Cultural Relativist View, but their definition escapes me.  If I remember or find out later in the week I'll update.

He summed up with the "12 C's of History," 12 historical turning points that can help us understand world history in a biblical framework.  They are: Creation / Commission / Curse / Catastrophe / Confusion / Cultures / Covenant / Code / Christ / Cross / Church / Consumation

After Phillips, Dr. John Morris gave a presentation focusing on his many trips to Mount Ararat in search of Noah's Ark.  His conclusion: There is much evidence, and many reports of sightings, but simply no proof.  However, he still has hopes that the Ark will be found.

Morris is aware of at least two sites around Ararat that could date to Noachian days:  One is a bi-level cave hand-carved into a rock face, with reliefs of two figures and an animal on the entrance wall, suggesting a sacrificial scene.  The site is dated pre-Hittite, and could be a tomb.  Apparently no one has ever excavated the lower level, which is filled with silt.  The other site is a stone altar structure, with ancient pre-Sumerian script carved into nearby stone. Could this be where Noah offered sacrifices to God after exiting the ark?  We can only dream.

On his first trip to the mountain, Morris and two colleagues were struck by lightning and paralyzed for several hours (a snow-capped mountain isn't the best place for that to happen).  It's remarkable he's here to tell and joke about it.  Last week our dog was killed by a lightning strike.

Early in his presentation, Morris showed us an interesting slide of a human fossil he calls "The Limestone Cowboy," basically a fossilized leg and foot in a cowboy boot.  The specimen had been found in Texas during excavation of a road, and is apparently from a man who was murdered and buried.  The treated leather had not solidified, but the bone had, demonstrating how quickly fossils can form under the right conditions. 

Oh, and what does Morris think of the recent claim (by Robert Cornuke, a friend of Morris' from the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute) that the Ark is now a rectangular hunk of petrified wood on Iran's Mount Suleiman, which has been recently featured on National Geographic News?  "We just don't have the proof," he sighs.  Last year, when Cornuke's team asked Morris to look at the pictures they had taken, Morris told them he believed they had found only a funny-looking rock.  It's a fate that seems to haunt so many Ark sightings, unfortunately.  Morris is right, we still need the proof.

Well, Phillips' final exhortation was for us all to go to bed--something I didn't do in order to write this post, but will gladly do now.  I'll try to keep you all updated on the lectures I hear over the next few days.

The following story, written by John Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews.com, is over a copyright issue that is sure to be controversial.  What do you think?  Are private companies infringing on copyright when they edit and sell Hollywood films? 

Court Forbids Cutting Nudity, Profanity from Hollywood Films

By John Jalsevac

COLORADO, July 10, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the editing of Hollywood films by third-parties desiring to make them more family friendly infringes upon copyright laws.

The decision will affect a wide-ranging collection of companies and distributors that specialize in the increasingly booming business of offering values-conscious parents and families the option of enjoying big-name Hollywood films without having to worry about jumping on the fast-forward button on time.

Nearly all of the major Hollywood film studios involved themselves in the lawsuit in some measure, including MGM, Time Warner, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney, Dreamworks, and many others, as well as a formidable list of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors.

 “Their (studio and directors) objective…is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies,” wrote District Court Judge Richard P. Matsch in his decision. “There is a public interest in providing such protection.”

“Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” said Michael Apted, president of the Director’s Guild of America, in response to the decision.

One of the companies affected by the decision is CleanFlicks. The family-values conscious company edits major Hollywood films for offensive content, and then sells the edited version along with an accompanying copy of the original, untouched film. The original is purchased by Cleanflicks, ensuring that the film studio receives proper remuneration for each edited film CleanFlicks sells.

Cleanflicks’ slogan reads “It’s all about choice.” In the last number of years the distributor has found an increasing market for such "choice," with close to 90 video stores across the United States stocking their shelves with the edited films.

“We’re disappointed,” said CleanFlicks chief executive Ray Lines according to AP. “This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We’re going to continue to fight.”

The move towards the third-party editing of films began in 1998 when a small-town Utah video store edited the movie Titanic so as not to include a shot of a naked Kate Winslet. With the increasing dearth of family-friendly films coming out of Hollywood in recent years, other entrepreneurs quickly picked up on the idea, and an industry was born.

Many have complained that since Hollywood refuses to make cleaner versions of films available to the buying public—despite the fact that studios regularly and significantly edit their films for airline audiences—it has been necessary for third-parties to perform the service.

“Hollywood may claim that the underlying issue is one of artistic integrity, or the inviolable nature of the filmmaker’s vision,” complained film critic Michael Medved in March of 2000, “but how then can you explain the existence of the carefully altered airline versions – not to mention occasional edits for broadcast on network TV?”

“When a mighty industry purportedly dedicated to maximizing profit refuses to [make family-friendly versions available], pointlessly alienating family audiences from enjoying any version of their product, then the entertainment world has indeed been turned topsy turvy.”

Judge Matsch ordered that four of the larger distributors of such edited films turn all their product over within five days to be destroyed.

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