This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book that launched the modern creationist movement: The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris. To celebrate this important anniversary, Paul Garner has written an article on the history and impact of The Genesis Flood which is now available on the Biblical Creation Society (BCS) website. You can download a copy here.

Creation biologist Dr Gordon Wilson (New Saint Andrews College, Idaho) will be visiting the UK in March and speaking at a meeting hosted by The Genesis Agendum in Coventry. Dr Wilson is a member of the Creation Biology Study Group (BSG) and we warmly commend his lecture to BCM supporters. Details of both the lecture and the speaker follow.

Predators, Parasites, and Pathogens
A creationist’s perspective on biological bad guys

The Genesis Agendum Spring Lecture
6.30 pm (Light Refreshments from 6.00 pm)
12 March 2011
Lower Ford Street Baptist Church, Coventry CV1 5QJ
(Opposite Brandish’s Garage and across car park from bus and coach station)
Admission free

When studying the diversity of life it is obvious that a vast number of species spanning most kingdoms and phyla have features that are designed to deal out disease and/or death. Many pathogens, parasites, and predators have sophisticated genetic, morphological, and behavioural arsenals (natural evil) which clearly testify to God’s eternal power and divine nature (Romans 1:20).

Were deadly designs created in their present form or are they degenerations (via mutation and natural selection) of benign designs? Examples range from the bacterial type III secretion systems, the cnidarian nematocysts (jellyfish/anemone stingers), the harpoon-like radula and injection system of cone snails, and the solenoglyphous skull, pit organs, and venom apparatus of pit vipers.

Scripture states that every green plant was given for food (Genesis 1:30), death and disease are a consequence of sin (Genesis 2:17), creation was completed on the sixth day and God considered it ‘very good’ (Genesis 2:1; 1:31).

Several scenarios will be discussed that attempt to account for the presence of natural evil in the biological world from a young earth creationist framework with an assessment of them in the light of these biblical truths.

DR GORDON WILSON is Senior Fellow of Natural History at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, USA. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Education (Secondary Education-Biology) and a Master of Science in Entomology from the University of Idaho. He received his PhD from George Mason University in Environmental Science and Public Policy in 2003.

Dr Wilson was a Scientific Aide in molecular biology (under Dr Scott Minnich) at the University of Idaho before taking a faculty position in the Department of Biology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has been on faculty at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow , Idaho since 2003.

Dr Wilson’s dissertation research focused on the reproductive ecology of the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina). He has published his research in Southeastern Naturalist and Herpetological Bulletin. He is a frequent contributor to Answers magazine. Recent articles published in the magazine include Lightning Bugs: The Beetle Beacons (March 2009), Divinely Designed Defenses (May 2009), and Fungus Firearms (April 2010). In Answers in Depth he published Classic Multidimensional Scaling isn’t the Sine Qua Non of Baraminology (September 2010).

We are belatedly posting this review of Paul Garner’s book, The New Creationism, because it has only just come to our attention. It appeared in The English Churchman (No. 7773, 14-21 August 2009, p.8). The reviewer is Rev. John Dunn.

This book is in the Young earth creationists (YEC) camp and presents overviews: Part I deals with cosmology; in Part II the author argues for a literal understanding of Genesis 1, and in Part III the science of biology is covered. The conclusion, Part IV, looks at the flood and the aftermath. The writer is clearly very able and covers his chosen subjects with clarity.

This is a standard YEC, Whitcomb and Morris approach, although updating the material certainly and giving corrections to the W&M view whilst at the same time including much new data. The 6 pages of bibliography point the reader only to that literature which supports the YEC position. Anyone wishing to get a handle on the overall debate will not find this helpful. As this book is an introduction to the topics covered then the wise and discerning reader seeking to be more widely informed will want to read around the subject and also examine other points of view, particularly regarding matters of interpretation of Genesis, otherwise this book will remain only club chit-chat and the reader will not be aware of the range and depth of the problems. Nonetheless, for those who hold to a YEC position then this book is as good as it gets. The author is to be commended for his breadth of reading and his fine ability to present difficult material in a readable and compelling manner. There are many commendatory comments by names well known in the YEC camp, but despite the strings of degrees attached to the many names it is over the interpretation of the data that the essential differences are to be found. Again, one needs to beware of the statement, Peer Reviewed; after all, if one wants the ooohs! and aaahs!, only friends are invited to look at the wedding photos.

Report by Paul Garner

In October I was in Poland again for a series of creation meetings in the cities of Gdańsk, Toruń and Poznań. In each place, the topic under discussion was ‘The Ice Age and the Genesis Flood’. My talk addressed the evidence for recent glaciation, the challenge of explaining the initiation of widespread ice sheets, and the role played by the Genesis Flood in a creationist understanding of the ice age.

The first meeting was in Gdańsk where I spoke to about 60-80 people in a packed student club. There was a good spirited question time afterwards, with a number of people probably being exposed to creationism for the first time.

In Toruń the organisers had booked a room in the university, only for the room to be withdrawn when local atheists protested. Fortunately another venue was found at short notice and people were redirected there. In the event, ours was the first public meeting to take place in a brand new lecture theatre in the city’s Hebrew Institute, and it proved to be an excellent venue. We were warmly welcomed by the institute’s director and I also had the opportunity to speak to a reporter from a local radio station.

In Poznań I spoke at a public meeting in one of the city’s university lecture halls. Many students attended as well as local Christians. One group of young sceptics asked many questions, leading into a discussion about radiometric dating. Afterwards, one of them came to ask for my email address so we could continue our dialogue. A Christian student thanked me for being willing to engage publicly with sceptics in this way.

Dr Geoff Barnard was also in Poland at the same time, speaking in a number of cities including Zielona Góra. Our itineraries were coordinated so that we could cover a lot of ground in a short time, although unfortunately we didn’t have an opportunity to meet up during the tour.

Once again we are grateful to our translators and hosts for making these meetings possible. Those of us that have taken part in these tours over the last few years have come to love the country of Poland and its people and we pray for lasting fruit and spiritual blessing to follow.

Photos: Preparing to speak in the student club in Gdańsk (top right) and answering questions after the lecture in Poznań (bottom left). Left click on images for larger versions.

On 30 September, Paul Garner led members of the Mumbles Creation Society on a field trip to the Vale of Glamorgan coast. In the morning, the party visited the famous unconformity between the Carboniferous Limestone and the overlying Jurassic rocks at Ogmore-by-Sea. The Sutton Stone member at the base of the Jurassic sequence has generally been regarded as a shoreline-beach deposit laid down over a period of several million years. However, it was controversially reinterpreted by the late Derek Ager (University College, Swansea) as a mass-flow unit deposited rapidly during a single, major storm. The party examined the evidence supporting this catastrophic hypothesis and noted that much could be said in its favour.

After lunch the group examined the Triassic breccias seen filling fissures in the Carboniferous Limestone a little further west along the shore. Again, evidences of rapid erosion and deposition were noted. In the evening, Paul spoke to a public meeting organised by the Mumbles Creation Society at Castleton Chapel. His talk described recent research which challenges the idea that the Coconino Sandstone of central and northern Arizona is a windblown desert deposit. Instead, Paul argued that the Coconino Sandstone was deposited by rapidly migrating sand waves during the global Flood.

The photographs show (top) the Jurassic cliffs at Ogmore-by-Sea and (bottom) the Triassic breccias containing angular clasts of Carboniferous Limestone. Left click on the images for larger versions.

Paul Garner’s book, The New Creationism, has been reviewed in the latest edition of Origins magazine (July 2010, Number 53, p.23) published by our sister organization, the Biblical Creation Society (BCS). The reviewer is Professor Colin Reeves. You can find out more about BCS, including how to become a member, here.

There is certainly no shortage of books on creation and evolution, but most are sadly rather predictable, contenting themselves with a tour through the manifest flaws of Darwinism. In some cases this may be coupled with an analysis of Genesis 1-11, leading to conclusions that reflect the writer’s stance on the meaning of the word ‘day’ (Hebrew: yôm) in Genesis one, the status of Adam and Eve, the purpose of the genealogies etc.

Paul Garner’s book does all this, extremely competently and very readably, but it also does something more. He sets out his case for a 6 (24-hour) day creation week and for reading the genealogies as actual history, so that he stands unequivocally for a ‘young earth’ position. But thereafter he does not leave matters at the level of a critique. Rather he is concerned to build scientific models on the basis that the early chapters of Genesis are true history. In this he is not alone, of course, and much of the work he reports has been done by others. (Not all, I hasten to add, since Garner is a scientist who is prepared to get his hands dirty – literally so in the case of his geological research). What is impressive, though, is the way he has been able to synthesize and explain some of this technical work with great clarity and lucidity.

The areas of science covered in this work concentrate on cosmology, biology and geology. The degree to which progress in scientific model-building has been made by creationists varies quite substantially, but Garner describes several cases where it is nevertheless significant. Indeed, scientific models have been developed to such an extent that it is impossible to give more than a flavour of what are quite specialized theories, requiring graduate-level physics, biology, geology etc. But whether it is Humphreys’ time-dilation model of cosmology, the implications of the RATE¹ project’s work on radiometric dating, Oard’s ice-age model or the relevance of catastrophic plate tectonics, Garner manages to help the reader understand the principles of some advanced technical ideas. There is also a handy glossary of most of the necessary technical terms in case readers get lost. Other topics covered include the origins of life, language and culture, some novel ideas on speciation and understanding the fossil record in the context of the Genesis Cataclysm. Where scientists differ in their theories, he gives a fair and balanced account of their reasons for this.

There is very little to criticise here; some might complain that the title is not very informative – but the subtitle deals with that problem. It is questionable whether biblical quotations should have uniformly been taken from the King James Version, since this slightly obscures the argument for universal animal vegetarianism before the Fall (p.158), for example. A more comprehensive bibliography would also have been useful – it is limited to major works – as it can be hard work tracking down the complete reference for a citation that has been made more than once (e.g., try finding the original citation for note 4 on p.212). And some of the references are rather cryptic – does everyone understand what TJ means, for example?

Despite these slight – and mainly editorial – blemishes, they cannot hide the fact that this book is a tremendous achievement. It is very accessible to non-scientists, and it should encourage the Christian layman that it is possible to do origins science on the basis of a creation model, rather than trying to accommodate the assumptions of neo-Darwinism in some form of ‘theistic evolution’. For those readers who are scientists (and especially students who plan to follow a scientific career), it should arouse an interest in scientific research that operates on the assumption that Genesis is valid history. There is clearly much more to be inferred and revised, as Garner is also concerned to acknowledge that scientific models cannot have the status of the Bible. They are always provisional, and open to correction or even complete overthrow, even when they are built on biblical foundations. So this book manages to be both a satisfying survey of current creationist research, and a stimulus towards future developments. It is highly recommended.

Footnotes

1. RATE stands for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth.

On Saturday 15 May, Calvary Evangelical Church in Brighton hosted a debate between Dr Steve Lloyd of BCM and Dr Ard Louis of the University of Oxford on the question ‘Creation or evolution: do we have to choose?’

The discussion was chaired by Professor Richard Vincent, Associate Dean of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School until his retirement in 2008. Each speaker gave an opening presentation with Dr Lloyd going first. There was then an opportunity for the participants to respond to one another’s opening remarks. Finally, questions were invited from the audience.

You can now listen to a recording of the debate on the UCCF’s ‘Be Thinking’ website.

The annual joint meeting of the Creation Biology Study Group (BSG) and the Creation Geology Society (CGS) took place at Truett-McConnell College, Cleveland, Georgia, on 29 and 30 July 2010. Twenty two talks were packed into two days. The biology abstracts from this year’s conference can be found on the BSG website (see Occasional Paper 17) and the geology abstracts will shortly be available on the Cedarville University website. Here are some brief summaries of the presentations.

Biology talks:

I. Demme presented an intriguing study of Genesis 2:5, arguing that the Hebrew text refers to the absence of thorny plants and cultivated crops in the pre-Fall world.

K. P. Wise expounded the biblical concept of man’s ‘dominion’, suggesting a plethora of practical implications for bioethics and environmentalism.

J. Bartlett offered some thoughts on how creationists can develop an approach to biological causation that goes beyond the merely physical.

G. Wilson cautioned against the premature ‘lumping’ of species into holobaramins in the absence of clear synapomorphies uniting them.

R. W. Sanders presented a statistical analysis suggesting that the Verbena family is a holobaramin.

T. C. Wood explained that new baraminological studies using cranial and postcranial characters did not falsify his original hypothesis that Australopithecus sediba was a member of the human holobaramin.

T. C. Wood also argued from species and genus counts that that there has been a lack of speciation in most terrestrial mammal families, but spectacular speciation in a few, concluding that any theory of speciation must account for this fact.

J. Bartlett suggested a quantitative approach to discriminating between genetic changes that are part of an organism’s overall design and those that are a result of the curse.

J. W. Francis described his experiences using halobacteria in the undergraduate research setting, and suggested that they might provide a good model for investigating the origin of natural evil.

Geology talks:

A. A. Snelling reported radiocarbon dates of ~30-50 ka from the Permian coals of the Sydney Basin, Australia, consistent with dates obtained from US coal beds of various conventional ages.

S. A. Austin proposed that submarine liquefied sediment gravity currents, such as the one that formed the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed within the Redwall Limestone, were a major mechanism for the transport and deposition of sediments during the Flood.

D. D. Stansbury complemented Steven Austin’s talk by discussing field evidence for flow transformation within the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed as it is traced into southern Nevada.

A. Hutchison described some potential mechanisms for rapidly precipitating salts in near-critical and supercritical submarine environments, which may provide alternatives to the conventional ‘evaporite’ hypothesis.

A. A. Snelling documented the occurrence of polonium radiohalos in multiple, sequentially intruded phases of the Bathurst Batholith, New South Wales, Australia, suggesting that the entire complex was intruded and cooled within days to weeks.

M. J. Oard suggested that dinosaur tracks and eggs could be explained by animals seeking refuge on surfaces briefly exposed by short-lived sea level oscillations early in the Flood.

M. R. Ross critically reviewed a number of materials available for teaching young age geology in the classroom, and outlined a coordinated plan for the development of more suitable resources.

S. Gollmer presented results from climate modelling efforts which were aimed at better understanding the rapid build up of ice sheets after the global Flood.

S. Cheung explained that the conventional eolian interpretation of the Coconino Sandstone is being challenged by the persistent presence of dolomite at multiple localities in central and northern Arizona.

J. H. Whitmore argued that clay content is a critical factor in the formation of desiccation cracks, and that the sand-filled cracks in the Hermit Formation (below the Coconino Sandstone) cannot be the result of desiccation because the Hermit does not contain enough clay-sized material.

J. H. Whitmore presented data on grain size sorting from >500 modern windblown sand samples. Fine to very fine modern dune sands tend to be well sorted and this feature ought to be observed in ancient eolian sands too.

J. H. Whitmore described preliminary data on grain size sorting and rounding in the Coconino Sandstone based on almost 60 thin sections from eight locations. The sand grains in the Coconino tend to be moderately to poorly sorted and subangular to subrounded.

P. Garner summarised many features of the Coconino Sandstone that are difficult to reconcile with an eolian origin, and suggested that these are typical of Permian cross-bedded sandstones generally. He proposed that these units were formed by rapidly migrating subaqueous sand waves during the Flood.

Next year’s conference – under the title Origins 2011 – will be held in Rapid City, South Dakota, on 27-30 July. It will be a special event to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Genesis Flood. However, there will probably be at least one field trip and some special meetings for the general public as well, so the whole thing may run from 26-31 July. Mark your diaries now!

Photos courtesy of Todd Wood: (left) Paul Garner delivering his talk about Permian cross-bedded sandstones and (right) Todd Wood speaking about Australopithecus sediba. Left click on the images for larger versions.

In July, Paul Garner was in the USA for another season of fieldwork with his colleagues, Dr John Whitmore (Cedarville University) and Ray Strom (Calgary Rock and Materials). For the last four years the team has been studying the Coconino Sandstone of central and northern Arizona, a rock unit that most geologists think was deposited slowly in an ancient desert. However, Paul and his colleagues think that it was laid down rapidly in an underwater environment, consistent with the Genesis Flood.

During their latest trip, the team studied the Coconino Sandstone at Buckskin Gulch in southern Utah, around Holbrook, Sedona and Chino Wash in Arizona, and along the Hermit Trail and the New Hance Trail in Grand Canyon. For the last three days of their fieldwork, they were joined by Dr Leonard Brand (Loma Linda University) and two students studying with him over the summer. Dr Brand is well known for his field and laboratory studies (e.g. Brand 1979) suggesting that the fossil trackways in the Coconino were made by animals moving around underwater.

The team also had the opportunity to sample modern windblown sand dunes in Wyoming for comparison with the Coconino, as well as a number of other putatively ‘windblown’ sandstones in the geological record. These included the Weber Sandstone (Pennsylvanian-Permian), the Cedar Mesa Sandstone (Permian), the White Rim Sandstone (Permian) and the Navajo Sandstone (Jurassic).

The team had a close encounter with a rattlesnake in Capitol Reef National Park and were caught in a thunderstorm while hiking in Grand Canyon. However, they managed to complete their field studies without mishap. Many samples were collected and field measurements taken, adding significantly to the growing evidence that the Coconino Sandstone – and by extension other similar ‘windblown’ sandstones – was laid down rapidly underwater and not in an ancient desert.

The photographs show (from top to bottom): (1) Paul Garner (right) and John Whitmore (left) recording strike and dip measurements; (2) The contact between the Coconino Sandstone (above) and the Hermit Formation (below) in Buckskin Gulch; and (3) The rattlesnake encountered in Capitol Reef National Park. Left click on the images for larger versions.

Paul Garner is currently in the USA for another season of fieldwork on the Coconino Sandstone project, taking in the Coconino and other Permian sandstones in Arizona and Utah, and modern windblown sand dunes in Wyoming. After that, he’ll be attending the Creation Biology Study Group/Creation Geology Society annual conference at Truett-McConnell College in Cleveland, Georgia. While he is away he will be blogging about his trip and uploading a few photographs at The New Creationism. The first three entries can be read here, here and here.