The CBS/CGS conference began Friday. The first speaker was Doug Smith. Doug spoke on the vowels, accents, and paragraph construction of the Hebrew for Genesis 1:1. His lecture was a lesson in the subtlety of Hebrew phrases. The following phrases are potentially similar, depending on subtle differences:
In the beginning God created…
In a beginning God created…
In the beginning of God’s creation…
In the beginning of God’s creating…
When God began to create…
I was surprised by how nuanced these constructions were. Also unexpected was the fact that the Hebrew text was often sung (called “cantillation”). Doug’s talk provided some much needed education on the biblical texts and language.
The Talk on the Imago Dei was an application of principles found in Kurt Wise’s Devotional Biology. Johansen traced nutrient metabolism of ethanol to individual DNA, mentioning epigenetic links. This implied a strong link between human behavior, our biology, and our spiritual environment. A very interesting talk.
One area that, in my opinion, needs strengthening is our theology of pre-Fall death. The talks on Psalm 104 and “Biblical Death as Cessation of Function” underscored my concerns. A number of strong theological commentators (e.g., Collins, Poythress) support the contention that Psalm 104 describes animal death and suffering as part of God’s good creation. Radmacher provided a good response: Psalm 104 appeared post-Fall since it ends with God’s eradication of sinners from the earth (hence, Psalm 104 shows a less than ideal world). Likewise, the discussion on biblical death as a cessation of function raised good points. At the same time, I was not convinced that all usages of the words “death” and “life” in Scripture are used in exactly the same way. Nor was it convincing that Scripture never regards plant life as “living” (e.g., the Tree of Life was not alive?). Without more trained biblical scholars we risk confusion in these areas.
Ken Coulson addressed the apparent history in the Precambrian record. His solution was tempus elapso, or a time-lapsed creation of the early earth. The Precambrian is 90% of earth time and records an extensive history—including tectonic movements, volcanism, stromatolites (bacterial/algal mats), and magnetic reversals. A lot of exciting theological, philosophical and scientific work lies ahead in this area.
Randy Guiluzza spoke on another facet of his Continuous Environmental Tracking (CET) model. CET proposes that living things have environmental-tracking mechanisms that parallel human engineered systems. In one example, tomato plants can chemically detect the presence of snails and enact internal chemical changes to fend off the predator. This is an encouraging observation. My only objection was the implication that these biological systems were inexplicable in evolutionary theory. An evolutionary theorist would simply say organisms that can prepare for future challenges will be more reproductively successful than their competitors; these are amazing features, but not inexplicable in an evolutionary model.
The highlights of the conference—at least for me—were the numeric and empirical analyses of long-standing questions. The first was Matt McLain dealing with the mammal transitional series: the difficult question of cynodont to mammals. In a nutshell, the basic story is that mammals have a joint between the jaw (dentary) and rear skull region (squamosal). However, early synapsids had a jaw joint connected by two other tiny bones—the articular and quadrate. These two bones have been traced to the inner ear bones of modern mammals, and the current articulation between the dentary and squamosal in mammals. Additionally, the fossil record places the transition in the proper sequence (a powerful argument). Matt’s research used a “big data” approach looking at phylogenies, biogeography, baraminic measures, and other metrics. In the end, the story is still difficult for creationism (honesty is a virtue). But Matt proposed that these lineages co-existed in a resource partitioning fashion, hence the subtle similarities and differences.
The second highlight was John Whitmore’s work on the Coconino Sandstone. The Coconino is a famous example of a desert (eolian) deposit. John has worked on this for years and his presentation focused on a correlation across 60 stratigraphic columns across the western United States. The area covered was in excess of a million square kilometers. The mapping revealed the connection of many sandstone units in the western US and that large units (e.g., the Hermit Formation of Grand Canyon) exist as lenses within some of these sands. One map showed that, if the Coconino was wind-deposited, the wind direction would have to be remarkably uniform (with 20-degree angle layers, consistent with subaqueous deposition). In contrast for a modern analogue, the wind direction of the Sahara desert is a nearly 270 degree range of directions (with 30-degree layering, consistent with deserts).
Faith and Reason-25 