>My personal experience of being taught biological evolutionary theory
> at a public (state government) school in Australia in the early 70's is
>not consistent with this claim. Religious and philosophical issues simply
> were not raised in any part of my pre-university science education.
>
and Steve Clark agreed:
>This was my experience as well.
That is not going to be the experience in the geosciences. At least as
far as the concept of a global flood is concerned, it is ridiculed often
and with good observational reasons. I have been on numerous geological
field trips where the issue of a global flood, Noah etc. came up. When it
has brought up it was always given a raucous set of raspberries by
everyone. Anyone going into such a situation with a YEC/global flood view
is in for a lot of trouble. The problem is that the YEC geological student
is right then staring at data which can not possibly fit into the concept
of a global flood. He will KNOW that the data fits what they are saying.
His text books will have statements like,
"Combat still continued with the deluge enthusiats, coming to be known as
diluvialists, who held such interesting ideas as the suggestion that the
Flood had first dissolved all antediluvian matter, except fossils, and
then reprecipitated the sediments in which the fossils became encased as
they settled out of the turbuletn waters. But where were the remains of
men killed by the Flood? This questin was of sufficient moment that a
Swiss diluvialist (J. Scheuchzer) in 1709 excitedly intepreted a giant
salamander skeleton as the fossil remains of a man drowned by the deluge.
First things first--clearly science was not yet ready to use fossils! By
about 1830, it was regarded as too brief to have altered the earth's
surface significantly..."~Robert H. Dott, Jr. and Roger L. Batten,
Evolution of the Earth Mcgraw-Hill, 1971, p. 26
"Almost singlehandedly, Lyell established uniformitarianism, at the
expense of catastrophism, as the accepted philosophy for interpreting the
history of the Earth. In so doing, he founded modern historical geology
and he reintroduced, with profound impact, the concept of unlimited time.
Geological problems could now be solved by reference to natural laws still
active and available for study in the real worldabout us instead of by
reference to former, shadowy, mythical, or supernatural events. About the
stifling nature of the catastrophic philosophy he sought to replace, Lyell
commented,'Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence,
and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than this assumption of the
discordance between former and the existing causes of change."~Don L.
Eicher, Geologic Time, Prentice-Hall, 1976, p. 7
There is no doubt in the student's mind that they are talking about the
biblical flood.
"Neptunists and catastrophists set themselves a task which ultimately
proved self-contradictory. They accorded complete philosophic validity to
whatever result Baconian induction might bring them; and they also
required these results to display the structure and development of the
material world as the history of an intending Providence with a moral
purpose, as physical evidence not only of God;s power but of His will and
His immediacy. However firmly they might insist that Genesis was not
designed to teach the truths of science, or the Geological Society to
teach the truths of morality, still truth, as Sedgewick felt, could not be
inconsistent with itself. The central thread of interpretation became
finer and finer. One by one its strands were broken and the weight of
demonstration put upon those remaning--the six days of creation, the
six-thousand-year span of earth history, the birth of our present globe in
a primeval diluvium, the antiquity and original parentage of species, the
dynamical efficacy of divinely ordained cataclysms, the flood itself.
Finally, the conception of a divinity who must continually interfere with
his arrangements in order to prove himself a governing force depended upon
the immutability of different manifestations of life. This was the one
remaining strand."Charles Coulston Gillispie, "The Uniformity of Nature,"
in J.F. White, _Study of the Earth_, Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 37
Mighty interesting theology for a geology text.
Lest those who don't know me think I am saying that there is a huge
conspiacy on the part of geology profs, I am not saying that. In fact, I
agree that the geological evidence rules out a global flood. I am merely
pointing out that the Christian failure to incorporate the data of geology
into a consistent apologetic leaves the YEC student of geology at the
mercy of those who do not like Christianity. Because the data IS on their
side!
My main gripe is with those who know nothing of geology who promulgate the
global flood view when all they are doing is setting their followers up
for devastation when they finally do learn some geology.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm