Kurt Wise


Kurt Patrick Wise is an American paleontologist and geologist. A young Earth creationist, he is a professor of natural science at Truett McConnell University, where he is also the director of its Creation Research Center. He writes in support of creationism and contributed to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

Biography

Early life and education

Wise was born in 1959 to a fundamentalist Baptist family in Illinois. He was raised in a farming community in Rochelle, Illinois.
After high school, Wise graduated from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in geophysics with honors in 1981. He then completed graduate studies at Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Arts in geology and a Ph.D. in paleontology under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent opponent of creationism, in 1989. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard was titled, "The estimation of true taxonomic durations from fossil occurrence data". According to science historian Ronald Numbers, "fellow graduate students sometimes taunted their creationist colleague, but the bemused Gould always treated him with respect".

Career

Since the fall of 2009, Wise has been the director of Truett McConnell University's Creation Research Center in Cleveland, Georgia. Between August 2006 and May 2009, he taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as director of the school's Center for Theology and Science, a job in which he was preceded by intelligent design advocate William Dembski. He had previously taught at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, where he served as Director of the Center for Origins Research and as an Associate Professor of Science for seventeen years.
He served as consultant to the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum which opened in 2007. Timothy H. Heaton, another scientist who studied under Stephen Jay Gould, knows Wise as "a less propaganda-oriented creationist" than Ken Ham, the leader of Answers in Genesis, and said that Wise's influence on the displays was apparent.

Views

In 1998, Robert Schadewald described Wise as influential on "modern creationism as it is practiced at its higher levels." Wise has said he believes, according to a literal reading of the Bible, "that the Earth is young, and the universe is young, I would suggest that it's less than ten thousand years in age." He believes that science can be used to support and demonstrate these claims. Despite believing that science supports his position, Wise has written that:
As a young child interested in science, Wise tentatively adopted an old Earth creationist point of view after doing a science fair project on the geologic column, but was not completely satisfied with that decision:
Later, as a sophomore in high school, he took a newly purchased double-sided print Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out every other verse which could not be interpreted literally if scientific determinations on the age of the Earth and evolution were true. He pursued this task with a flashlight under the covers of his bed for several months; at the end, he had removed so much material that "with the cover of the Bible taken off, I attempted to physically lift the Bible from the bed between two fingers. Yet, try as I might, and even with the benefit of intact margins throughout the pages of Scripture, I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two." Wise decided to reject evolution instead of Biblical literalism, deciding:

Reception

Biologist and popular atheist author Richard Dawkins called Wise an honest creationist because he is willing to accept creationism even if he admitted "all the evidence in the universe" was against it:
Further, in his book The God Delusion, Dawkins referred to Wise's denial of science over creationism:

Books

  • Kurt Wise, Faith, Form, and Time: What the Bible Teaches and Science Confirms About Creation and the Age of the Universe. B&H Publishing Group, 2002.
  • Kurt Wise and Sheila A. Richardson, Something from Nothing: Understanding What You Believe About Creation and Why.
  • Kurt Wise, Devotional Biology.

    Other references

Category:1959 births
Category:Living people
Category:Baptists from Illinois
Category:American Christian Young Earth creationists
Category:Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Category:Southern Baptist Theological Seminary faculty
Category:University of Chicago alumni
Category:American geologists
Category:American paleontologists