Kurt Wise

Kurt Patrick Wise (born August 1, 1959) is an American paleontologist 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 (B.A.) in geophysics with honors in 1981. He then completed graduate studies at Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Arts (M.A.) in geology and a Ph.D. in paleontology under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent opponent of creationism, in 1989.

Wise's 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 [Wise] 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 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. 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:

What nagged me was that even if the days were long periods of time, the order was still out of whack. After all, science said the sun came before the Earth—or at least at the same time—and the Bible said that the Earth came three days before the sun. Whereas science said that the sea creatures came before plants and the land creatures came before flying creatures, the Bible indicated that plants preceded sea creatures and flying creatures preceded land creatures. On the other hand, making the days millions of years long seemed to take away most of the conflict. I thus determined to shelve these problems in the back recesses of my mind. It didn't work. Over the next couple of years, the conflict of order nagged me.

Kurt Wise doesn't need the challenge; he volunteers that, even if all the evidence in the universe flatly contradicted Scripture, and even if he had reached the point of admitting this to himself, he would still take his stand on Scripture and deny the evidence. This leaves me, as a scientist, speechless... We have it on the authority of a man who may well be creationism's most highly qualified and most intelligent scientist that no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference. 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. (B&H Publishing Group, January 2004) Kurt Wise, Devotional Biology. (Compass Classroom, July 2018)