Robert (Bob) Wonderly

About Robert (Bob) Wonderly

Posts by Robert (Bob) Wonderly:

Change in the Seventh Day Adventist Church

/ /

Change in the SDA Church

Change? Why Not? What’s the Problem? Let’s discuss why there is no change in the SDA Church, even though it’s long over due.

The Nature of Entangled Doctrines 

Fact 1: The SDA church has a collection of rather entangled doctrines that it promulgates.

Fact 2: The SDA church clings tightly if not desperately to two of these doctrines, namely a short earth chronology and a global flood several thousand years ago.

Fact 3: The overwhelming — can’t ignore — weight of scientific evidence is that those two ideas can not possibly be historically correct.

Now surely most Adventist Alumni have made peace with these three Facts. This author suspects that many Adventist Alumni got nudged further along their alumni path because of Fact 2.

Change in the SDA Church What Does it Mean?

In this essay I will not make arguments for the truth of Fact 3. That issue has been and is being debated endlessly because those who do not want to believe Fact 3 simply choose to ignore the scientific evidence. Scientific reasoning does not apply to a decision made in the absence of such reasoning.

Church dogma does not apply to a decision made on the basis of scientific evidence.

So why Fact 2? The short answer is twofold: (1) “they” are afraid that their whole belief system will crumble and their church will cease to have a reason to exist; (2) Ellen White agreed with the young earth and global flood ideas.

Who are “they”? Those who are in positions of power and those who are believed when they promote the two Fact 2 doctrines.

What I would like to talk about here is (1) the question of whether the SDA church would necessarily fall apart if it allowed flexibility on the Fact 2 doctrines and (2) how could the church go about allowing flexibility.

What is the Answer to Change?

Let’s deal with (2) first: all that needs to happen is for them (the “they”) to quit talking about the Fact 2 issues and the matter will quietly (but not quickly) fade away. People will continue to do what they are already doing: namely believing what makes sense to them. Besides most people sitting in the pews each Sabbath are not thinking about Fact 2 anyway. And if someone raises the question of why the silence, simply promote the dearth of supporting scientific evidence, talk about belief system tolerance and unity in diversity. In other words promote the “big tent” approach to being a church. The “they” will not have problems deflecting questions about Fact 2 if they decide to quit talking about it.

Now let’s talk about (1). Will the church fall apart if the issue is allowed to quietly fade away? Of course not. The fading away would happen over an extended period of time. Writers for church papers could and should write material consistent with a plan to let these two contentious issues die a well deserved death. Statistically speaking, the majority of people in the pews do not get all worked up about issues that are not kept before them in the church media, which media includes, of course, Sabbath sermons. There are competent SDA theologians who can disentangle the Fact 2 doctrines from the SDA belief system without the church’s belief system falling apart.

What is the Result of SDA Stagnation?

Is a conscious decision to let the Fact 2 issues fade away likely to happen any time soon? No. What if it never happens? It will happen — the fading away — by default, but it will take a long time. Suppose all the members who do not need young earth and global flood beliefs leave the church under top-down pressure, then what? That’s easy: many of the remaining members will get educated and the church will be right back where it was before: more people to pressure to leave. Why is this true? Because even though untruths triumph for a time over truth, in the end they get exposed for what they are: untruths. Promoting an untruth can not change it into a truth.

Consider this. Does it really make sense to pressure people to leave the church, or make them uncomfortable so that they want to leave, at the same time that large sums of money are being spent to convince more people to join?

If freedom is important and the truth makes you free, then educating people to know the truth is important. And not educating them with untruths is even more important. Furthermore, people will get educated, with or without the church.

thoughts on assumptions

/ /

Thoughts on Assumptions: In The Beginning

The Fall 2010 issue of Adventist Today started me thinking about assumptions. Multiple authors in that issue were careful to spell out their underlying assumptions as they acknowledged how important assumptions are to keep in mind when one is articulating one’s position on a particular topic. It seems that sometimes where one ends up depends upon where one starts out. Assumptions have to do with starting out.

What is True?

Making Assumptions

It is not my intention here to critique those assumptions made by the authors, in Adventist Today, alluded to in the previous paragraph; rather my focus will be on the human phenomenon of making assumptions. Surely Adventist Today readers will agree that the making of assumptions is a human activity. Why do humans do that? Are there important assumptions humans operate under unawares? Do these assumptions affect us more than we realize? Does my western mindset drive me in certain directions without my realizing it?

I will make use of Genesis 1:1 (KJV) as my starting point:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Surely that is a sentence that is sufficiently specific yet sufficiently general that it can be interpreted meaningfully in times and places and cultures far removed from those of its origins. Any sentence that can do that is significant and deserves careful consideration. But there is no way that anyone today can interpret those words using the mindset of The Ancients who wrote them originally in another language. In fact, there is no originally. For all practical purposes, the ideas undergirding those words have been around forever. For more on on word meaning see Language and the Creation of Reality.

In the Beginning Assumptions

Now this brief essay is not about what that sentence meant to ancient cultures nor what it should or could mean to our modern culture. Rather, I am interested in reading between the words and analyzing what underlying assumptions might be lurking, perhaps subconsciously, in the minds of twenty-first century English speaking people who read them. Since I can’t read them without interpreting them, I will take them at face value—read them literally:

thoughts on assumptions-Genesis 1:1

“In the beginning…” Right away that says something important about how our minds work. It says that a basic (albeit subconscious but very fundamental and significant) assumption we make is that things must have a beginning. We need beginnings; our minds need beginnings. But just because we need them does not mean beginnings always actually exist; it does, however, mean that we will inevitably behave and arrange our thoughts as if they do. For that matter, we create our theologies and our sciences that way too. Humans in general are reasonably comfortable that once something has had its beginning it can go on forever. But the idea that something could already have gone on forever is anathema.

Unacknowledged Assumptions

“…God…” Another assumption, this one consciously made: God exists. No attempt is made to argue for the truth of this assumption. Just assume that God exists. Nothing is said about the attributes of this God that exists—with one important exception: this God creates. But this exception is also a conscious, deliberately made, assumption.

“…created the heaven and the earth.” There, that explains everything that is really important. There was a beginning before our human beginning, God was there at that earlier beginning, and while there God created, making for us a beginning and a place to exist. A consciously made assumption.

Thoughts on Creationism: Creationism is Not Science

Might there be yet another subconscious, unrecognized, and unacknowledged assumption? There is. Another fundamental property of how the western human mind works is hidden beneath my chosen sentence. That is the assumption that effects must have causes and vice versa. It is the primary business of scientists, historians, politicians, economists, for that matter anybody who explains and plans accordingly, to study causes and effects. They assume there is always a correspondence. A cause must eventually have an effect.

An effect must have already had a cause. But is this really really true? Probably not, whether or not we are able to decide what the question really means [we can’t]. That there is a tight relationship between causes and effects we very much believe; and we act accordingly, usually without being aware that we do so. The problem is, as quantum physicists tell us, the relationship between cause and effect is much more tenuous than we would like it to be. Thus, while most effects have causes it would be wise that we not insist that this is always the case.

How to spot Cause and Effect

Creating Causes

So, we see in this brief sentence: (1) that humans recognized an effect: their existence and their domain of existence – the heavens and the earth; (2) they needed a cause for that effect; and (3) that cause must satisfy their need for all things to have beginnings.

But the existence of this verse is itself an effect looking for a cause. That cause is that humans are driven to explain. In the process of explaining they work backwards along the chain of effects having causes until they get stuck without a cause, without a beginning. Then they make more assumptions, often oblivious to the ones they are already working under. They create causes and assume them to be true without trying to prove their truth. This becomes their explanation. And there is nothing inherently wrong with doing this. Obviously if they could prove their assumed cause to be true it would then cease to be an assumption. The point is that sooner or later even philosophers have to give up chasing the effect-to-cause chain and agree to an assumed starting point.

The reader should understand that I am talking about basic assumptions that affect how one lives their life; assumptions that determine to a large extent one’s world view. How about assumptions that control an entire very large group of people like a nation, a religion, a political organization?

I am not talking about technical assumptions made by mathematicians (usually referred to in this case as postulates), statisticians, and scientists as part of their work.

Cause and Effect – Things Unknown

Effect-to-Cause Chain

For all humans and groups of humans, assumptions act as shortcuts that eliminate the need for endless chasing of the effect-to-cause chain backwards to nowhere. Psychologists talk about basic human needs. They should add assumptions to that list because we wake up and face life each morning on the basis of subconsciously made assumptions. For one example, we all assume—unwittingly [“unwittingly” is not bad]—that there is an underlying rationality to the behavior of our domain of existence. Almost all of us wake up believing, assuming, that we are smart, that we can and will cope. That assumption is one of the forces that makes the world go around.

Any bad news in the above? No, a thousand times no. It’s okay to be human. Well, it’s more than okay. Being human is the best game in town. Woe unto those who would become dissatisfied with being human. Even The Ancients figured that out—as they vividly demonstrated in their story of The Garden and The Tree.

Sometimes, assumptions cause more problems than they solve. This is true when the assumption is wrong. Wrong? How can an assumption be wrong? Aren’t we supposed to make assumptions only when we run out of facts, when no data is available, when we have chased the effect-cause chain as far back as we can and an explanation is required?

Nobody knows who said it first but: Timing is everything. We must be careful to not decide, not choose, our assumptions too soon; or too late. This is especially true when we need broad agreement because the resulting assumption will affect a large group of people and will be controversial.

What Next? To Assume or Not to Assume?

Now here’s another thing to think about: if we have truly worked our way back along the effect-to-cause chain, past all the facts, then there is a certain amount of arbitrariness inherent in the assumption selection process. Hence a bit of humility might be appropriate. In this case, we must carefully consider the downstream effects of each of the candidate assumptions. And we must ask ourselves if it is really necessary to make a choice. Are we being forced to do that? If so, then those forces are effects that themselves have causes which must be examined to see if they are worthy of a response. Here, of course, I am talking about big assumptions that will have big effects. In this case, the need for individuals to make an assumption choice does not automatically imply a need for the group to also do that.

In conclusion, consider this application of the foregoing ideas: Common sense tells us that the Bible is long on enduring wisdom and short on twenty-first century knowledge. Organizations that get that backwards by assuming it is the other way around have a major problem on their hands.

Faith on Ice

/ /

Faith On Ice: Great Ice Fields of Greenland

Ice core research steps back in time and makes guesses at the future. Using ice penetrating radar and satellite mapping technology, oceanographers and other earth scientists have determined that the great ice fields of Greenland and Antarctica currently contain enough ice to raise sea level approximately 200 feet above where it is today, if all that ice were to melt.

Understanding Past Environmental Conditions

Roughly 80% of the world’s ice is in Antarctica and almost all of the remainder is in Greenland. The other ice fields and glaciers around the world contain less than 1.0% of the earth’s current total ice mass. From extensive study of sea floor sediment cores and coral cores, it has been determined that at several times during geological time, the sea level was as much as 400 feet lower than it is today. Where did all of that water in the oceans go? During significant periods of time, referred to as ice ages, this water was locked up in large continental glaciers containing approximately three times the mass of the current Greenland and Antarctic ice fields combined.

The most important part of this discovery was that contained in the ice of Greenland and Antarctica are physical records–sometimes called proxy records–of past environmental conditions on earth. We use proxies all the time. For example, before mercury was banned, the expansion of mercury in a thermometer was used as a proxy for the concept of temperature.

Many types of events occurring over geologically recent times are recorded in the ice. From the oxygen isotope ratios in the water of the ice, scientists can deduce a history of temperature changes. From air bubbles trapped in the ice, which contain samples of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane, it is possible to infer ocean chemistry and earth biomass history, and, of course, air quality history.

Faith on Ice

Examining the Ice Fields

After preliminary studies, scientists picked two locations 18 miles apart in the center of Greenland where they would core into the ice to bedrock. The idea was to drill where the movement of the ice over time would be minimized and to have two parallel cores for a double check that the correct story was being deduced from the ice. Taken as a whole, the data from the two cores is very similar. Because of this, the discussion here will focus primarily on the core designated GISP2 (Greenland Ice Sheet Project II), drilled by a team of Americans.

The core is basically 5 inches in diameter, coming out in sections several feet long. The sections are carefully logged, weighed and measured then sawn in two lengthwise for further analysis. It is important to understand that separate annual layers can be detected by the naked eye for most of the distance down the GISP2 core. The summer and winter ice look different so the layers can be resolved sub-annually. The summer sun and winter darkness generate atmospheric reactions, the differing signatures of which get trapped in the ice. The spray that blows up onto the

ice from the shore, in spring storms after the ice pack has broken up, has a stronger salt signature than in winter when the sea is frozen over for a long distance out from land. The ice layers also have a significant signature of dust that blows in from the deserts of Asia, carried high aloft around the world by the wind. The dust layer signature is strongest in the winter ice.

An acquaintance who has seen a section of the GISP2 core (which is stored near Denver, Colorado) from about 20,000 years ago reported that he could clearly distinguish the annual layers and resolve the summer/winter ice difference.

Matching History to Facts

Examples of ancient and modern records of materials and events recorded in Greenland ice cores include pollen, micro-meteorites, lead, copper smelting dust, freon, chemicals from the trees that make the bluish haze over the forests in the Appalachian Mountains, along with acid rain and acid snow–with summer and winter levels being different. Volcanoes make a strong sulfuric acid signature, easily detected by instrumentation.

The story that the ice cores tell may be of interest to Seventh-day Adventists because of what it says about geochronology. One reason scientists sought data from the ice is because of the long-term climate information it carries. To maximize the information that can be recovered from the ice record, it was important to determine as accurately as possible the chronology of the ice layers.

This included carefully synchronizing the dating of the layers with events that could be well-dated from known history. For example, in the early years of working on the ice studies, scientists knew they were on the right track when their layer counting was synchronized to the exact year of an accurately dated volcanic eruption that occurred in Iceland in 1783.

Faith on Ice - volcanic eruption - Iceland in 1783

The sulfuric acid level shot way up in the corresponding layer. They also found ash shards there that chemically matched with ash known to be from the volcano in Iceland. All the other well dated volcanoes synchronized with their layer chronology, including Vesuvius in 79 AD. The lead signature (measured in an earlier core) showed up when the ancient Romans started using lead in their plumbing technology; it started climbing during the industrial revolution; shot up during the use of leaded gasoline and dropped steeply down when leaded gasoline was phased out.

The freon signature matches the known history of its use. The copper smelting dust signature jumped significantly in synchronization with what archaeologists know about the time that humans have been smelting copper. The sulfuric acid and ash shard signature of the volcano (Mount Mazama) which made Crater Lake in Oregon shows up in the ice core at level 7,676. Multiple radiocarbon dates had previously dated one major eruption of this volcano at 7,680±10 years ago.

Counting the Years

At 10,016 feet the drillers hit bedrock. By this time, the scientific teams working on the core had counted 120,000 annual layers. The layers can be counted by eye for 50,000 years then, as expected, it becomes easier to resolve them with instruments. Even so, the bottom most layers, rather than being paper thin, average a few millimeters thick. Using laser technology and sensitive instruments, the atmospheric dust level was recorded for the entire 120,000 years. This data is resolved sub-annually, a ziz-zag line cycling up and down each year. More importantly, when a four-year running average smoothing protocol is applied to the data, the dust shows a periodic significantly strong intensity, with a period that synchronizes with the 11-year sun spot cycle. This is a very strong argument that refutes claims that the layers below where consequences of historical events can be detected are not annual, orbital, layers, but correspond to cyclic storm activity. (See the Data Graph) 

The GISP2 core from Greenland is a kind of “gold standard” for ice core dating. When the temperature data based upon the oxygen isotope proxy is plotted it clearly shows one ice age cycle which consists of about ninety thousand years of cold followed by about ten thousand years of warm. Here the difference between cold and warm is but a few degrees centigrade. We are now a dozen or so thousand years into the warm cycle.

The Dome-C ice Field in Antarctica

As of 2007, scientists working with data from the Dome-C core in Antarctica had an ice chronology going back 801,000 years (eight complete ice-age cycles). Before Dome-C there was Vostok. The four kilometer ice core brought up there had four complete ice age cycles. I have a personal friend who has been on the ice in Antarctica at Vostok. Upon his request he was shown the section of core in which the dust from Mount Mazama (Crater Lake in Oregon) appears. He could see the dust layer with his unaided eye. That layer appears only about one fourth of a kilometer down the core. It is important that I point out that dating the cores from Antarctica is, because of its much lower rate of precipitation than in Greenland, more complex than unaided-eye annual layer counting.

A natural question that arises is whether or not there is any perturbation detectable in the ice consistent with a recent global flood. The answer is no, none at all. However knowing that sea level at the height of the most recent cold period was 400 feet lower than today tells us why so many ancient cultures had flood stories integrated in with their world views. Save for Greenland and Antarctica, the great continental ice sheets are gone. Nevertheless geologists find not only their footprints but can identify approximately when and where their major collapses took place, collapses that raised the level of the sea significantly in a very short time frame. Four obvious escape routes for the water from major collapses in North America are the Columbia River (west to the Pacific), the Mackenzie River (north to the Arctic), the Saint Lawrence River and the Hudson Bay (both dumping into the Atlantic).

Faith on Ice

Signs of Life? 

When sea level rose sufficiently the ancient land bridge at the Bosporus Strait collapsed. Enough salt water from the Mediterranean Sea poured in on top of the once freshwater lake now called the Black Sea to raise its level four hundred feet. Robert Ballard has found human artifacts along what was the shoreline of this lake before it was inundated at about the same time that Mount Mazama blew its top.

What about life? Any signs of life deep within these cores? As a matter of fact, there is. Near the top of the third ice age down in the Vostok core the scientists found microscopic life. And I already mentioned pollen in the GISP2 core.

My thanks to Bonnie Dwyer (circa 2002) for the title.

ice cores graphs

/ , /

Ice Core Graph in Greenland

The ice core graph story is relevant to Adventist-Alumni because of its geochronological implications.

Graph Analysis

The three curves converge at the left because they all start “at the top” — which is taken to be where the top was in 1950. The horizontal axis is depth in meters, which of course, correlates in a non-linear fashion with the age of the ice which is the vertical axis.

Ice Core Age Depth

  1. Blue curve — Greenland GISP2 — goes up (gets deeper) slowly compared to the red and green curves because Greenland receives much more snow each year than does Antarctica.
  2. Green curve — Vostok — is the deepest core but not the oldest.
  3. Red curve — Dome-C — is the oldest core. GISP2 covers one complete ice-age; Vostok four ice ages; and Dome-C eight complete ice-ages.

The ice ages can be clearly seen on temperature versus age/depth graphs which I do not yet have here.

ice cores graphs

About the Ice Core Graph Data

I must stop this otherwise I will be writing the promised expanded paper which I can’t do right now.

The data used in the plots is in the public domain and it is the purpose of this page to acknowledge and provide the web sites from which the data was obtained. I do not claim copyright on the graph itself. Permission is hereby granted for it to be used as is without changing it.

This graph was constructed by Bob Wonderly using gnu plot running on Mac OS-X. The data comes from official NOAA and related web sites. It is the point of this document to give the web locations for the data used.

Book Review

/ /

Is God a Mathematician?: Book Review

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio © 2009, Simon & Schuster

There are many ways one can describe the doing of mathematics. Here is one. Start with a mixture of ideas that you already know, then create a related but new idea, add it to the mix, stir and discover the consequences.

In other words, mathematics is neither all creativity nor all discovery but a recursive application of both. The created becomes the vector to the discovered. And, metaphorically speaking, the sum of the vectors rarely leads one on a great circle route for the reason that the destination itself must be both discovered and created. There you have this reviewer’s first vector for the journey to an answer to the book’s question.

Book Review - Is God a Mathematician

God a Mathematician?

Reader Prerequisites

Let me put at ease any readers who tremble at the very thought of math. This is not a mathematics book. There are no mathematical prerequisites for reading the book. If you have wondered what sorts of things mathematicians think about, why they think about them, and the consequences of their having done so, this book is a good place to go for illumination. The book can be read as a history of the most significant mathematical ideas of the last 2500 years—without the reader necessarily having to understand those ideas.

How we understand and answer the book’s question has theological implications. But the book is neither about theology nor about God.

Why pose the question at all?

The answer lies in the uncanny efficacy of mathematics. It is this topic that occupies a great deal of the author’s attention. That attention alone is sufficient justification for reading this book. What is meant by uncanny efficacy? Why is it so important to humanity? Why is mathematics so uncannily efficacious? Perhaps because God is a mathematician?

For those not philosophically inclined, the historical evidence given for the efficacy is adequate reason to read the book. Philosophically oriented readers will surely enjoy walking in the footsteps of those who—since the time of Plato and Pythagoras—have given serious consideration to, and proposed answers to, the question and its ramifications.

The author is a cosmologist. This quote from his preface gives us his intentions in writing the book:

In this book I humbly try to clarify both some aspects of the essence of mathematics and, in particular, the nature of the relation between mathematics and the world we observe.

That he achieves his objective very well is adequate justification for recommending the book.

Archives

Categories

Back to Top

© Adventist Alumni 2024
Reimagining The Adventisms of the 21st Century | Privacy Policy
Bob Wonderly, founder of adventistalumni.com is a retired mathematician, computer scientist, and former faculty of Andrews University.  Joe Greig assumed responsibility for continuing the spirit of the site in 2018.