Robert Vance Gentry obit

Robert Vance Gentry has died

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Robert V. Gentry was born during the Great Depression in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He died in his sleep at his son's home in Loma Linda, California on January 28, 2020. He was 86 years old. He was a research physicist whose area of expertise was the geophysical phenomena of radioactive halos. For thirteen years he was a visiting scientist in the Chemistry Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, from Columbia Union College, Takoma Park, Maryland. After completing an M.S. in physics at the University of Florida in 1956, he spent several years in the defense industry in Fort Worth, Texas (Convair) and Orlando, Florida (The Martin Company). It was while in Orlando that Robert was introduced to Seventh-day Adventism through the It is Written television ministry and baptized following an evangelistic series by George Vandeman. He subsequently joined the physics departments of Walla Walla College and Columbia Union College. Robert authored numerous scientific publications in journals including Science and Nature. He was a member of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, Sigma Xi, the New York Academy of Sciences and listed in Who's Who in America. He authored Creation's Tiny Mystery and collaborated with the Adventist Media Center in the production of Fingerprints of Creation, The Young Age of the Earth and Center of the Universe. One his favorite Bible verses, Daniel 12:3 captures his desire to be found among the faithful who will stand at the last day. He is survived by his wife of 67 years, Patricia (Loma Linda), daughter Patti Guthrie (Mt. Shasta) and sons Michael (Norfolk, VA) and David (Loma Linda). Funeral arrangements and memorial service scheduled for February 14, 2020 at the Monticeto Memorial Park and Mortuary in Colton, California. A second memorial service is planned March 7, 2020 at the Knoxville First Seventh-day Adventist Church in Tennessee.

In 1981, Gentry was a defense witness in the McLean v. Arkansas case over the constitutional validity of Act 590 that mandated that "creation science" be given equal time in public schools with evolution. Act 590 was ruled to be unconstitutional (a verdict that was upheld by the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard).

Gentry has devised his own creationist cosmology and filed a lawsuit in 2001 against Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cornell University after personnel deleted ten of his papers about his cosmology from the public preprint server arXiv.[21] On 23 March 2004, Gentry's lawsuit against arXiv was dismissed by a Tennessee court on the grounds that it lacked territorial jurisdiction, as neither defendant in the case was considered to have a significant presence in the state of Tennessee.

His self-published book Creation's Tiny Mystery was reviewed by geologist Gregg Wilkerson, who said that it has several logical flaws and concluded that "the book is a source of much misinformation about current geologic thinking and confuses fact with interpretation." Wilkerson also noted that the book contains considerable autobiographical material and he observed that "[i]n general I don't think educators will find it's worth their time to tread through this creationist's whining." This criticism of Gentry's "frequent whining about discrimination" has also been made by fellow creationists, who concluded that "his scientific snubs resulted more from his own abrasive style than from his peculiar ideas", according to critic Ronald L. Numbers, a historian of science.