Who Is Banning Books Now?

CNN reported, “A new book offering a non-evolutionist view of how the Grand Canyon was formed, featuring essays from 23 scientists (most with PhD's, many having conducted serious geological scientific research at the Canyon), is the object of an intense book-banning effort by leading evolutionists. They have demanded that Grand Canyon National Park remove the book, Grand Canyon: A Different View, from bookstores within the Park.

The book, which claims the famous area can be no older than a few thousand years (contrary to the claims of traditional secular science, which contends the canyon is millions of years old), was unanimously approved by a panel of park and gift shop personnel, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

CNN reported that the National Park Service (NPS) in Washington, D.C. is “preparing to draft a letter telling Grand Canyon administrators the book makes claims that fall outside accepted science... so it likely won’t be restocked.” Meanwhile, an NPS spokesman has confirmed that the book has been moved from the natural sciences section of the bookstore to an ‘inspirational’ one (which would thus downplay the book’s legitimate scientific message).

What is this if it is not blatant censorship? The Evolutionists have formed what amounts to a ‘cartel’ of influential liberals and agnostics who are bent upon silencing all challenges.

On the basis of elaborate non-proven theories, the Evolution Cartel now protects itself from scientific challenge by banning all books that don’t agree with their arrogant claims, which are fundamentally based on enormous assumptions that are then supported by circular reasoning.

According to recent poles, at least half of Americans believe in a recent “creation” of no more than 10,000 years. Some of the greatest names in science are among those who believe in recent creation.

In the 1960’s, I had the privilege of leading a scientist from the Rocketdyne Propulsion Laboratories to faith in Jesus Christ. Charles Morse then spent the rest of his life studying the Biblical account of creation and the universal flood.

Using some the world's most sophisticated computers, he set up models from scientific information that established a global flood had to have taken place.

From these models, he was able to interpret the geological records in scientific terms so that they supported a recent creation.

Since Morse had been a naval officer in WW2, he had studied and had access to scientific oceanography data. This included the ‘mid-oceanic ridges’ with deep trenches traversing their length. These ridges extend along the length of all earth’s ocean. He also learned about the ‘river cones’, which are underwater river channels that extend along the ocean floor for over a hundred miles out from the mouth of every great river in the world.

Morse found that the Evolutionist’s explanation of the ‘river cones’ could never work. Evolutionists contend that the ‘river cones’ were etched into the ocean floor by slow moving currents that etched them out over ‘millions of years’.

(Whenever evolutionists are stuck for an explanation, they always seem to think that adding a few million more years solves everything.) But this could not explain how the underwater channels were formed.

These so called river cones are literally extensions of the rivers on the ocean floor. Only water moving at tremendous velocity would have the ability to carry the large rocks necessary to etch out such deep trenches on a line continuing out from the river on the ocean floor.

The same thing is true concerning the phenomenon of the Grand Canyon. If these were formed by slow moving currents over millions of years, why has this not taken place in other places where the rivers are about the same age?

Rivers such as Mississippi, Nile, Amazon, Euphrates, etc., should have produced similar phenomena. If the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, why has there not been more erosion of the steep cliffs?

The Biblical account of a universal flood better explains the geological phenomena of the Grand Canyon than does the evolutionist theory. If there was a universal flood, and it was caused to drain of the land rapidly as the Biblical account declares, then there would have been enormous amounts of water draining off at terrific velocity.

This would easily form the rivers and canyons we see today. And most important, it would also explain how the river cones were formed out from the mouth of every river into the ocean floor.

The fossil record is also explained best this way. Why do we find fossilized fish at the top of mountains all over the world? Why do we find evidence of sea life on land areas the world over?

Morse also dealt with the question of where the tremendous volume of water came from that would be needed to cover all the land mass of the planet.

The Bible says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.” (Genesis 7:11-12 NIV)

Morse observed that there could not have been enough water stored in the atmosphere to cover the whole earth. Most of the water came from what the Bible called “the springs of the great deep…” This is where the “mid-oceanic trenches” come in.

There is evidence that there were tremendously violent eruptions that took place in these Great fractures of the earth’s tectonic plates. There is also radioactivity coming from these areas. Morse reasons from the evidence that God used some kind of nuclear reaction to burst open the great fountains of the deep and release the water stored there.

Then Morse dealt with the problem of how that much water could be removed from the land masses of the earth. The geological evidence supports that God caused enormous forces under the continental plates to erupt and force them to rise upward. This caused the water to drain off with violent velocity.

This gives the best explanation of the evidence as to how the rivers, mountains and canyons were formed. The water velocity had the carrying power and force to move great rocks so as to quickly etch out what we see today.

In the final analysis, whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist, it takes faith to come to a conclusion about how the earth was created and formed.

I believe in creation because the God I worship has the power to do any of these things. And it explains the scientifically available fact better than the evolutionist theory.

As a matter of fact, even Charles Darwin came to that conclusion before he died. According to Frank Charles Thompson, God used the wife of the First Admiral of the British fleet to reach Charles Darwin with the Gospel. Here is what he reported:

“God used Lady Hope, wife of the first admiral of the British Fleet, to reach Charles Darwin with the Gospel during the last years of his life. He was bedridden, and she would often visit him. One afternoon, as he was reading this Bible, she asked, “What are you studying now?” “Still Hebrews,” he replied. “I call it the royal book. Isn’t it grand?”

When she mentioned how popular his theory of evolution had become he gave her an anguished look and said, “I was a young man then, with uninformed ideas. I thought out queries and suggestions, wondering all the time … and to my astonishment, those ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion out of them."

Later Darwin asked Lady Hope if she would share the Word of God with some of his friends in his summerhouse. She asked, “What shall I speak about?” He replied, “Jesus Christ and His salvation. Is that not the best theme?”

Dr. Victor Pierce, an Oxford scholar, says, “When some one tells you evolution explains everything, tell them that Darwin discovered a better theme — “Jesus Christ and His salvation.”

Only one problem. The Bible never said that and therefore wasn't wrong. That was the Roman Catholic priesthood that in their arrogance didn't check to make sure that what they were teaching matched the scriptures.

Only problem with your position is that you can't determine what the Bible really means until you have an outside verification of the facts. No one saw any problem with an earth centered cosmology until an alternative became indisputable.

In another eyeblink (200 years or so) evolution will have the same factual support as Copernican cosmology, and the scriptures will be interpreted accordingly.

> Only problem with your position is that you can't determine what the Bible really means until you have an outside verification of the facts. No one saw any problem with an earth centered cosmology until an alternative became indisputable.

There's some room for agreement here. But I would maintain that the nature of these two issues (evolution and the very nature of what a human is, versus what mathematical framework is utilized to describe planetary motion) is different. I can't argue this further right now, but it's not something you should reject out of hand.

> In another eyeblink (200 years or so) evolution will have the same factual support as Copernican cosmology, and the scriptures will be interpreted accordingly.

Or not. Guess we have to wait and see. I do think that Christian believers often come up with the wrong scientific interpretation of Scripture, but I also think that the "proofs" that Scripture is wrong tend to be debunked as history flows on and more discoveries are made.

You don't need to assert that scripture is wrong to say that it doesn't correspond to a scientific description of history. This is just my opinion, but I see in people who demand literal inerrancy in the Bible the same kind of legalistic mind that Jesus preached against -- the demand for perfection in the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. The notion that if we just do and say everything right, then we'll be saved.

Misses the point in my opinion.

> The notion that if we just do and say everything right, then we'll be saved.

> Misses the point in my opinion.

I agree; that notion definitely misses the point. Christians believe that they are saved only by God's grace in Jesus Christ, though faith, which itself is a work of God.

The only source of salvation is Christ. The only source of totally objective knowledge about Christ is Scripture. Scripture says it is true. If we start thinking it has errors, we unravel it to where we have no objective reason to believe anything (I'd refer to monstrosities such as the Jesus Seminar here). So we hold the line on Biblical inerrancy.

Some truths in Scripture are literal and there is some science in Scripture. For each passage, we try a literal approach first. If that cannot be made to work against the remainder of Scripture, we try other approaches that still can transmit absolute truth. We don't descend into an ad-hoc and personal reduction of Scripture to a bunch of metaphors, but metaphors can be true, and Scripture does contain some metaphors.

When it looks like there's no way to escape seeing a text as making a scientific statement, Christians will accept the text.

There might be some kind of proof of evolution if scientists were to forcibly guide some organisms through a sequence of positive mutations. The unguided kind of evolution has no proof yet, since what we are to believe happened, happened some other distant time. So at this time, Christians do not have to prove much against "macro" evolution and the changing of inert chemicals to lively slime, slime to animals, animals to humans. The doctrine "with enough time, anything can happen" as espoused by people like Sally Ride is pretty naive and totally unprovable. It's a pure belief; a religion.

> But evolution is guided. That's the very heart of what Darwin discovered.

I'm sorry. I have at least two problems with this. First, survival of the fittest is a very trivial concept and can be completely circularly defined such that "fittest" is defined in terms of who survived! If it's not that circular, then it depends on an objective, even metaphysical or platonic idea of "fitness".

And: there's a huge jump from the demonstrable winning out of some genetic traits over several generations due to environmental condition, to the idea that at least statistically impossible sequences of positive mutations somehow win out over the overwhelming preponderance of bad mutations (that might not at all affect the ability to survive and reproduce, but are "bad" anyway).

Not even to mention the further assertion that humans came from animals (easily contestable on the very few purported fossil examples), that animals came from slime, and that slime came from chemicals + energy. Sure.

Ultimately, it does get down to religion, because the matter had to come from somewhere. Humans, at least, as a kind of being, are able to think about a "meta being" that's higher than them in every way. Being able to think this can easily be taken to imply the possibility that it's true, if you are optimistic at all. The fact that we can think this way certainly does not prove that we invented God. Rather the assumption must go the other way; that being able to think this way must have some purpose (else, evolutionists, why would we able to think this way?).

One current trend of unbelievers seems to be a kind of new-age / eastern / Hindu idea that there's some endless cycle of being to non-being -- before the big bang there was just another universe that collapsed. But you know, if you dig into this stuff, it gets very religious!

>> The point of those scriptures [about the geocentric universe] is that God did those things, not how he did them. Reading into those scriptures "how" is error.

Patrick - The quote above is not from me! And I can't find it in this thread. Who said this?

> Yes. You've got it! Now if you could just apply that notion to the passages that prevent you from even considering evolution ...

I was brought up to believe evolution. And I will say I knew and understood more science at age 12 than the 99th percentile of adults do right now (though that's not saying much!) I have already been taught evolution, and have rejected it. A lot of hardened evolutionists have been taught Christianity (or a perversion thereof) and rejected it.

survival of the fittest is a very trivial concept and can be completely circularly defined

Could be, but isn't. Give me an actual example from a scientific journal where the concept has been used in a trivial or circular manner. The concept is indeed simple: many, if not most individuals differ from their parents due to mutations inclusions of viral DNA, and errors in replication. Some of these changes will confer a reproductive advantage. That's it. The only additional concept needed is that environments change, either because the earth undergoes physical change, or because a species spreads beyond its optimal habitat.

There is nothing circular in this description. It is a historical description and it can be observed as it happens. In fact there are living species caught in the middle of this process. They are called ring species. All the intermediate varieties are alive right now, at the same time.

JS -
I like your simple definition of Darwinian evolution.
Here's what I propose though:
- In matters of science, stick to what can be physically observed right now or well within a human lifetime. The science does not have to be simple, but there has to be a simple physical proof. For example, hardly anybody understands how 50kbps of data are encoded on to your analog phone line, but everybody's uncle uses it and knows that it works.
- Everything else is speculation, or philosophy, or religion.

In matters of science, stick to what can be physically observed right now or well within a human lifetime.

Totally absurd. Rules out all of history; rules out the forensic processes in criminal investigation, because they require making inferences; rules out geology; rules out astronomy.

In fact it rules out the processes of science completely, because science involves making inferences, educated guesses, and testing them against new evidence as it accumulates. Science is a process of continuously improving the confidence in guesses.

In 1860, natural selection was an educated guess. After 144 years of evidence accumulated by tens of thousands of researchers, after withstanding thousands of challenges, it is one of the most confidently held propositions in science.

> Totally absurd.

Speculation is part of the scientific process, everybody would agree. Fewer admit that philosophy and religion always play a part too, even if only because humans are not very objective critters.

It's reasonable to distinguish theories than have not been physically proven from ones that have. It's even more reasonable to separate theories that cannot be physically proven from those that can.

There is absolutely a difference between a current working theory that fits observable facts "well enough" for some, versus a theory that can and has been physically proven by experimentation and observation.

Proving a small case that requires a large amount of extrapolation on any dimension won't do. Ask a cosmologist what dimension or quality he is sure is linear at extreme values. Extrapolations that require millions or more years are a joke. Is "time" itself even "linear"?

It's reasonable to distinguish theories than have not been physically proven from ones that have. It's even more reasonable to separate theories that cannot be physically proven from those that can.

There's no such thing as a physical theory that can be proven. Evolution is supported my more accumulated evidence than any other historical physical theory. It is impossible to accept geology without accepting evolution. It is impossible to deny geology without denying physics. All the physical sciences are co-joined.

In the church, "ban" is a word used specifically to mean exclusion from Holy Communion and possibly from other fellowship. That's how I took the word. If it meant physically banning him from publishing, then I would need to revise my comment.

Ah, OK. I don't know the exact context of that quote either. I couldn't find a reference to where it comes from from Google. It would be very interesting to find out.

Also, now that I think about it, in Linnaeus' time in many countries the Catholic Church was still a quasi-governmental institution. If it wasn't explicitly part of the government, in many cases it had a lot of power over the government. So a ruling by the Church often had as much coercive power as a law passed by the King.

So I doubt that a "banning" by the Church meant soley that Linnaeus would be barred from taking communion, or some similarly narrowly defined proscription.

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