American Scientific Affiliation
1997 Annual Meeting

CREATION'S TESTIMONY IN NATURAL HISTORY

Plenary Speakers and Topics

Dr. Hugh Ross is an astrophysicist and the Executive Director of Reasons to Believe. He is a much sought-after speaker, and writer of several widely read books including "The Fingerprint of God," "Creator and the Cosmos," "Creation and Time," and "Beyond the Cosmos."
Dr. John Suppe is professor of geosciences at Princeton University. His research specialty is structural geology and regional tectonics, and he has authored and co-authored numerous articles on the deformational history of western North America, and other areas including Taiwan. He is the author of the text "Principles of Structural Geology."
Dr. Dawn Wright obtained her doctorate as a Presidential Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara in geology and geography. She has extensive ocean exploration experience as a ship-board member of Deep Sea Drilling Project voyages. After serving as a post-doctoral fellow with NOAA, Dawn was hired onto the faculty of Oregon State University's Geoscience Department. Much of her research involves the analysis of the ocean floor from remote sensing data.

DISCOVERIES OF SEAFLOOR EXPLORATION
Dawn Wright

Please join me in marveling and rejoicing over a God who is the author of both creation and science. This talk will reflect on the many wonders that God has created in the deepsea realm, wonders that have only recently been discovered by marine geologists in the last 10-20 years. The deep ocean remains a largely unexplored frontier. NASA's Magellan spacecraft has imaged and mapped 99% of the surface of Venus in enough detail to reveal topographic features on the order of 50 m in height. However, ~90% of the Earth's deep ocean floor has yet to be surveyed in the same detail. However, rapidly developing technologies such as swath mapping, satellite altimetry and global positioning systems now provide an ability to map that remaining 90% over a broad spectrum of scales. Today's technological wonders are indeed impressive.

One of the greatest intellectual developments to come along in recent years has been the theory of plate tectonics, which has focused much of its attention on a 70,000 km-long chain of underwater mountains which "wraps itself around the globe like the seam on a baseball." This feature is often referred to as the global mid-ocean ridge, and it is easily the largest geological feature on the face of the Earth. Over the past 200 million years, if not throughout most of geologic time, the ocean floor has been torn apart and created anew along the mid-ocean ridge at spreading rates of 1 to 17 cm/yr. As a result, the mid-ocean ridge is the site of numerous volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and hydrothermal vents (the deep-sea equivalent of terrestrial hot springs). I will take you on a slide show tour of this region of God's creation highlighting recent discoveries made on the East Pacific Rise at depths of 2500-3000 m.



THE FUTURE INTERFACE OF SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY
John Suppe

Predicting what the future holds 50, 100 or even 200 years in advance is not our normal preoccupation as scientists. However, some of us are called to bring science into the forecasting arena when concerns arise over the future human impact of fossil fuels, mineral resources, water, waste, natural hazards, and disease. For example, legitimate fears of global warming are driving serious international attempts at understanding the global cycle in order to predict quantitatively the climatic effects of increased CO2 emissions over the next 100 or 200 years. The goal is informing and guiding the public policy in such a way that we avoid future disasters. Similarly, predicting the next 100-200 years of science, Christianity and their common interface is not our normal preoccupation as Christians in science. But the disastrous historic controversies surrounding science and Christianity suggest that we in the Church would do well to collectively consider with similar rigor what the future may hold, with the goal of avoiding future disasters.

The issue of global warming is a good analogy, in that it is not just a complex issue in science; it also involves predicting future human behavior, including technology, economics, and politics. Furthermore, being right on the technical details is not sufficient to shape public policy, a technical consensus must be arrived at and be made acceptable in a politically effective way. By analogy, if the members of the ASA and other Christians in science had had a clearer understanding in 1947 of what the future would hold and why, vis-a-vis the interface of science and Christianity, could they have effectively steered the future in a somewhat different course? It seems probable that Larry Kulp's understanding of the technical issues of radiometric dating, but the lack of understanding of the dynamics of conservative Christianity, directly contributed to the rise of Creation Science. A godly consensus was not built among conservative Christians.

There is a question as to whether or not the creationist controversies of the late 20th century were merely a flash in the pan, dying out with this generation of protagonists, or will such conflicts be the norm for the next 200 years? A significant potential for continued conflict in some form exists for the fundamental reasons that the modernist controversy has never been satisfactorily resolved within the Church. For example, there is no widely accepted Biblical theology of Nature -- acceptable at the pastoral level -- that this is simultaneously fully orthodox science and fully orthodox Christianity. Liberal Christianity has embraced science at the cost of orthodoxy, whereas the orthodox have tended to embrace unorthodox views of Nature.

If orthodox Christian intellectuals could craft with some wisdom a clear statement or vision of what the future (say, the next 100 to 200 years) holds and why -- vis-a-vis science, Christianity and their common interface -- it may be useful, and not just as an exercise, because if done with godly collectivism it may shape that future purposefully. Surely such an exercise would modify and clarify our collective vision of present and past conflicts and cause us to probe more deeply into the nature of science and the Universe on the one hand and into the nature of the Church, history and Christian knowledge and experience on the other. Such an exercise is very difficult; for example looking over our shoulder at the events since 1797 warns us of the enormous changes two centuries can bring. Geology was born just 200 years ago. Nevertheless, such a cross-disciplinary project need not degenerate into unbounded speculation nor produce conclusions that solely depend on value-laden presuppositions. Correct conclusions must mirror reality. The future of science and Christianity is broadly constrained by very basic contingent properties of the Universe and how we are able to learn about it on the one hand and of God and how we can know him and his purposes and activities on the other. This paper attempts to sketch a few of the more important constraints on the probable future of science and the Church on the 100 to 200 year time scale and offers several end-member scenarios on where the interface of science and Christianity may be headed.