I have more thoroughly skimmed G.M. Grena’s “Evolution Science”. Overall, my first impression of the book has not changed; I have found it to be utterly insipid, largely witless, and horrendously shallow. It is filled with real questions posing as rhetorical questions, demonstrating a horrific lack of intellectual curiosity, painfully demonstrates the author’s lack of credentials (which shouldn’t be a barrier to the author writing something worthwhile, as demonstrated by the existence of the very important LMLK research website, created by the author, who is, like me, no archaeologist). It reads not even as well as a typical G.M. Grena blogpost, does not read anything like a good book, and has the same writing style as a rant such as the one found on the Time Cube website. I have finally found the origin of the snake logo on the back cover. The candle on the back cover is to point out that the viewer of the photograph of the candle cannot know when the candle was lit.
Needless to say, hilarities are promised here, and they shall be presented:
The Great Pyramid of Giza is probably the only manmade structure that survived the Flood; however, a detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this book (cf. Isaiah 19:19-20 & Josephus in “Antiquities of the Jews” book 1, chap. 2, par. 3). Suffice it to say it was obviously not built by the same people for the same reason as all the other Egyptian pyramids.
–Evolution Science, p. 265
-I don’t see why G.M. Grena thinks this is the case. There is no evidence the Great Pyramid was ever covered with seawater. The Great Pyramid is a clear descendent of Sneferu’s smooth-pyramid building attempts at Dahshur. Yahweh is not mentioned inside the Great Pyramid relieving chambers; Khufu and Khnum are. See also this post by Irna, French-speaking foe of pyramidiocy everywhere. G.M. Grena’s other comment on the Great Pyramid is here. Apparently, Grena rejects Khufu’s association with it [quadruple facepalm] and believes it to be the stone pillar mentioned as being seen in Josephus’s time in the land of Egypt (i.e., the Siriad) which Josephus considered to have been made by astronomers/astrologers before the flood.
Perhaps the most ridiculous two contiguous blocks of text from the book are these:
Also notice the following:
1) Bones decay to dust in a few centuries in very dry regions & in a few years in damp regions (Indonesia, China, & England). How could any of them last for hundreds of thousands, or millions, or tens of millions of years?
2) When an “evolutionary descendant” is found, it’s usually a single group of bones in a limited locale (like es-Skhul in the previous chapter). They sure must’ve been lonely! Where are the billions of transitional bones expected over millions of years spanning a wide region?
–Evolution Science, p. 311
[Triple facepalm]. Doesn’t “1)” fully explain “2)”?*
I have, while typing this post, discovered one important disadvantage of the paperback: it seems impossible to keep a thick one open without the use of a hand, thus preventing easy typing while having the book open. I also note plenty of the links on the “Evolution Science” webpage are broken.
*Yes, kids, it does.
Against Jebel al-Lawz 
First, thank you for purchasing a copy (assuming you did, or whoever bought it for you). Second, thanks for the compliment on LRW.
Third, it’s unfortunate that you missed the book’s (recurring) point. I don’t state it in any single sentence of the book, but chose to communicate it via multiple vignettes (the back cover bears the most succinct & colorful version). You, yourself, contributed one of your own in your recent comments at the BiblePlaces blog:
“So far as I know, people don’t rise from the dead, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and inconsistencies in major matters do not seem to concern the religious. … It is also a mystery why anyone would believe that a crucified man came back to life after having died.”
So far as I know, life doesn’t come from non-life, but you don’t apply the same standard of requiring extraordinary (i.e., not just, “oh, it makes sense that it could happen in my imagination”) evidence for this major-matter inconsistency with New Atheism (which you sadly don’t even recognize as a dogmatic religious bias on a path to eternal damnation). In terms of statistical probability, which is more likely, that a dead person full of complex DNA code for healing & living would come back to life, or that non-living, disorganized materials would randomly arrange to form a complex machine capable of reproducing, & actually begin doing so?
Well, we don’t actually have enough information to answer that question because we don’t know how to replicate either scenario, so why do you choose one position over another? In my book (composed 7 years ago), I ignored that question, assumed (unwittingly) that the respective philosophical foundations were equal, & simply contrasted the positions in ways that had not been taught to me in Catholic elementary school, public high school, or a major state university.
Were I to write another book (which I have no intention of doing), I would next compare those philosophical foundations (as I’ve successfully done via numerous blog debates) & show that my Christian position is rational, while all others are irrational (they ultimately rest upon an arbitrary choice leading to inconsistent beliefs).
But getting to the specific vignettes you reviewed, I just posted a rebuttal to your January 19th post, & will now resume with your new ones.
Thank you for noticing that the Great Pyramid was so well designed by the descendants of Seth to withstand the Flood that there is no evidence it was ever covered by seawater! As I said in my book, a detailed discussion is out of scope; however, by believing Khufu & Khnum were “mentioned” in the original construction, you’re simply illuminating the theme of my book.
Regarding your p. 311 quotation, context is king (yes, kids, it is). #1 & #2 look contradictory when viewed in isolation, but were written with a mutually exclusive intent. #1 refers to bones left to non-catastrophic natural processes over long periods of time as taught in mainstream science classrooms (a recurring theme in my book that you merely “thoroughly skimmed” with your atheistic religious bias); #2 refers to bones buried suddenly by a catastrophe such as a flood or volcano or by humans ritually, not subject to the same processes as #1 (i.e., all the actual examples, not theoretical scenarios, I was able to find). If this was the most ridiculous section to you, why did it only get a triple facepalm instead of a quintuple?
I preserved local copies of all the web pages I linked for reference documents, so if there are any in particular you need to help you understand the main concept of “Evolution Science” that you obviously missed, I can be motivated to send them to you directly if you first explain the context of your query & the information you hope you’ll acquire from the document(s). Since only 3 people bought the book over the last 6 years, I haven’t been motivated to check/update the links.
-Is your point that Biblical inerrantism and conventional science have equal explanatory power? They don’t. One explains deserts in the fossil record, the Green River Formation, the fact that there are no fossil rabbits in the Precambrian, and dinosaur nests, coprolites, and trackways in the fossil record. The other views Neanderthals as living for a mere two generations, leaves no room for any notable signs of human civilization before the 4.2 kiloyear event, does not explain the existence of freshwater fish, sees a major climate shift each decade for over two hundred years, sees the White Cliffs of Dover as being formed in under a year, and sees the origin and disappearance of vast forests within a lifetime. These two sets of ideas are not equal in their explanatory power. One makes more extraordinary claims without the extraordinary evidence needed to back those claims.
There has never been a person who came to Young-Earth Creationism without first becoming a Christian. There have been many religionists who have come to conventional science without first becoming atheists. This should tell you something.
-The probability life (I use that term as most people normally use it; unless the elohim you believe in are made of cells, they are not defined by me as alive) originated from nonlife is 100% (unless the universe is eternal and life has always existed in it). Firstly, as the universe had a beginning, there was a time when life didn’t exist. Secondly, as life exists today, life must have come from something that wasn’t life. The question is, which hypothesis best explains the origin of life from non-life? I declare that life formed from regular chemicals in a natural, terrestrial environment without intention. As I am no biochemist, I cannot be specific about possible processes of non-artificial abiogenesis. However, as the first organisms found in the fossil record are cyanobacteria in (possibly) the Dresser Formation and (certainly) the Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia, and more complex organisms such as Charnia only appear in the fossil record millions of years later, it makes sense that life started off as very simple marine organisms that evolved into more complex forms. Indeed, by Occam’s Razor, the origin of life from intentionless, lifeless chemicals is the least extraordinary explanation of the origin of life from non-life, as lifeless chemicals clearly exist, and, indeed, chemistry, unlike theology, is an empirical science. The claim of naturalistic abiogenesis is, thus, not an extraordinary claim and does not require extraordinary evidence to back it.
You, however, declare that “YHWH God formed the man from dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). Not only is this assertion a curiosity stopper, as this event is supposedly irrepeatable, it is based on a vision of the nature of life almost no relevant scientists hold and could only be held by people as uninformed as the fictional Israelite in this transcript of a fictional TED talk. Life is not a property that can be magically transferred from an ethereal being to dirt. No entity before life, especially an ethereal one, is known of by science. The extraordinary evidence needed to conclude that any god, especially one as specific as YHWH, exists, has never been provided.
-The latter. In the first scenario, the vast majority of the body must be animated; in the second scenario, hypothetically, only a single proto-cell must be animated. In the first scenario, one is limited to the materials found in the human body, while in the second, one is limited to any “non-living, disorganized materials”. Also, we do not have the conditions of an Archean Earth with us. We do, however, have plenty of people dying around us all the time. The fact there are very few reliable medical cases of people rising from the dead, and no (to my knowledge) reliable medical cases of people rising from the dead after three days, strongly indicates that decomposition takes too great a toll on a corpse after three days for it to regain the characteristics of life.
–Har-dee-har-har! The trend of scientific opinion over the past five centuries has been a great convergence of thought from all civilized parts of the Earth. Science as taught in California (the only state with science standards graded A by the Fordham Institute and one of a handful of states whose science standards directly mention human evolution) is pretty much the same as science taught in Calcutta, Mogadishu, Tokyo, Leiden, and Melbourne. In contrast, in the past five centuries, there has been an explosion of varieties of new Christian opinions and a significant decline in clerical consensus regarding True Christian Doctrine®. Globalization has unified science and has split religion. This should tell you something, specifically, that to the unbiased observer (and to me, a biased observer) it is Christianity that apparently ultimately rests upon arbitrary choice, leading to inconsistent beliefs.
-Was it covered by several layers of clay, metal, and plastic? What do you believe Khufu did with the Great Pyramid? Why place an inscription mentioning Khufu in the topmost relieving chamber, but not in the King’s Chamber? According to even Pothead Graham,
According to even Demon-believer Schoch,
Sealings of Khufu (p. 121) have also been found in the debris to the southeast of the Great Pyramid. Thus, all the good evidence I know of, both textual and archaeological, points to Khufu, King of Egypt, successor of Sneferu, being the builder of the Great Pyramid; none points to any hypothetical “Sons of Seth” (the equivalents of “non-pork-eating martians”) being its builders. There is not the least bit of evidence I know of for the idea the Great Pyramid was ever covered by seawater. Your strange beliefs about the Great Pyramid puzzle me- how can you believe them in the face of so much evidence!?
Are you saying
were “buried suddenly by a catastrophe such as a flood or volcano or by humans ritually”? If so, how is this in any way inconsistent with mainstream science? The “billions of transitional bones expected [by whom?] over millions of years spanning a wide region” aren’t there because there was no global flood. “All the actual examples” are “lonely”, while “bones left to non-catastrophic natural processes over long periods of time as taught in mainstream science classrooms” aren’t there because they didn’t last for “hundreds of thousands, or millions” of years because such bones “decay to dust in a few centuries in very dry regions & in a few years in damp regions”.
Read closer.
1. The quadruple facepalm was a response to a comment you made on another website, not to a statement in your book.
2. The post only stated “Perhaps the most ridiculous two contiguous blocks of text from the book are these:” (emphasis added).
-Is that statistic to be taken literally?!? Couldn’t you have advertised it on the sidebar(s) your blog(s) like I do with the Bob Miller monograph?