General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Kwabena Donkor

Yes, Creation!

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians


Back in 2003, I wrote a column, I have a monthly column in the Adventist Review, and I wrote a column called Seventh Day Darwinians, in which I stated what I assumed and still assumed was a no-brainer. And it was the simple point is that any, I wrote what I thought what any logical and reasonable person would assume, which is that Darwinism is completely incompatible with Seventh-day Adventism. And contrary to the hype, because there was a lot of hype that followed, I never advocated throwing people to get out of the church over this issue. What I simply advocated was for people to take their premises to their logical conclusions. And I simply advocated, I think, for a little honesty.

I was asking people to at least believe the name they claim for themselves. Okay? And anyone who, you know, we're seventh-day Adventists. And anyone who knows anything at all about The history of Adventism, about our background, everything, understands that we were referring to the final day of a literal six-day creation. And I believe it's only the most cynical misuse of language and disregard for Adventist history and theology could allow for it to mean anything else, especially some kind of neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution taking billions of years.

Billions of years. Well, let's just say a small but vocal minority had somewhat of a hissy fit over this, and I was an object of scorn and ridicule and still am, though I will say that that was a small but very vocal minority and I believe that the vast majority of the Adventist Church agrees with that position because it's just obvious. It's just obvious. I mean, again, aside from the fact that the name, Seventh-day Adventist, everybody knows what that means and the background to it. Besides that, I think there's the slight problem, there's a slight problem of the texts in Genesis themselves.

Okay, now let's get hypothetical. And let's pretend, let's pretend that the Genesis creation account was never meant to be taken literal, okay, because that's 1 of the arguments. Let's assume it was meant to be a broad account, okay, not literal. Okay, even the most broad account reading of Genesis, well, let's look at a few verses. And God said, let there be light, And boom, there was light.

God said, let there be the waters, and gathered under the heaven, and there was a water. God said, let the dry land appear. The dry land appeared. On and on and on. God said, and it was done.

On and on and on. When you read it, even the most broad reading, the most broad reading of it shows that everything was precise, planned, calculated. There was no hint, no hint of any kind of randomness at all. It would take a goddess interpretation of Genesis 1 to somehow derive randomness out of there. Then number 2, Let's look at another point.

Again, we're taking a broad reading of it. We're not locking ourselves into, I say locking our heart, into a literal reading. You read Genesis, and it goes, and God created the whales and the waters after their kind, and the fowls of the air after their kind, and the beasts of, you know, after their kind, and each 1 after its own kind. So what you see here, the text revealed unambiguously that each creature was made after its own kind. Okay, and this is a broad reading.

So even from a non-literalist interpretation of Genesis, non-literalist, 2 points seem to stand out very, very clearly, which is that nothing was left to chance. Nothing was left to chance and that there was no common ancestry for all the different creatures, all the different forms of life. Okay, is that, I mean, is that, seems fair enough? Nothing left to chance and not a common ancestry. Well now, along comes Darwinian evolution in all its various incantations.

And even the broadest reading of any form of evolution that anything I've ever read fundamentally teach 2 things. They teach, of course, randomness and they teach common ancestry. So how then does 1 interpret Genesis through a theory that at its most basic level contradicts Genesis at its most basic level. See, it just doesn't make sense to me. You know, it doesn't make sense.

And then think about this too. If evolution were true through, for thousands of years, the whole Israelite period, up through the early New Testament period, up through the Protestant Reformation, all the way up through the 19th century, the church was kept in darkness about origins until God raised up his man, Charles Darwin. Basically an agnostic, basically a man who had some very wrong and false total misunderstandings about the nature of the world. That's the 1 God used to suddenly straighten us all out after thousands of years on history. I don't know, it just doesn't make sense to me.

It would seem the 1 who created language, it would seem God could have done a better job of communicating to us on creation than he did. Why inspire a creation account that teaches non-randomness and a non-common ancestry of all species when God, according to theistic evolutions, used randomness and a common ancestry as a means of creation. I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense to me. If that's true, Why can I trust God on anything? I mean, if creation of life on Earth took 4 billion years or whatever they're saying, 3 billion years as opposed to 6 days, I mean, it's off by a factor of about, I'm not very good at math, 185 trillion, 500 billion to 1.

Why trust them on anything? You get something more accurate out of a fortune cookie than from the word of God. Then you go on. And people say, well, the ancients, they weren't, they couldn't comprehend these ideas. These ideas were too complicated for them.

See, it's funny, a friend of mine, 1 of my best friends at the GC, Dr. Angel Rodriguez, he's been doing some research, and he's showing that you can find in ancient writings, he's looking in the Egyptians, concepts of evolution, concepts of creatures having formed through 1 process or another from animals. I mean, this isn't anything new, and I know it comes much later, but if you've ever read Lucretius' Dererum Naturae, on the nature of things, I mean, this is a purely materialistic, atheistic, naturalistic view of origins that sounds just like evolution. God didn't have to dumb it down for the ancients. The Lord could have revealed to them and us the truth instead of promulgating a fairy tale, 1 that hardly parallels, you know, the model anyway.

Billions of years of false starts, chance events, and endless death allegorized as a six-day pre-planned creation with nothing left to chance and no death? I mean, I'm sorry, again, even if you don't want to take it literally. If you don't want to take it literally, how can you possibly read any kind of evolutionary paradigm into that. And what works, what follows in Genesis 1 and 2, it becomes even more dubious. That's only half the problem.

What do we have? The Lord incarnates into an evolved ape, created through the vicious and painfully murderous cycle of natural selection, all in order to abolish death, which Corinthians calls the last enemy. But how can death be the enemy when it was 1 of God's chosen means for creating humans to begin with. You know the Lord must have expended plenty of dead homo erectus, homo heidebergarius, homo neanderthalus, and on and on and on in order to finally come up with 1 in his image, Homo sapiens. Okay, so Jesus came to save mankind from the very process that he used to create it in the first place?

I don't know, Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And then we've got the idea of the fault. How does this work? God uses violence, selfishness, and the dominance of the strong over the weak in order to create a morally flawless and selfless being who falls into a state of violence, selfishness, and dominance of the strong over the weak, a state from which she has to be redeemed from or else face final punishment? I mean, does that sound as ridiculous to you as it does to me?

And then the last point and then I'll leave it open for questions. Oh my god. Whatever. Whatever. Think about eschatology.

Think about the end. What the hope that we have for the final, you know, the resurrection and the twinkling of an eye. You know, I mean, will God, will God's gonna make a new heavens and a new earth and we're gonna be people, we're gonna be on it again. Is it going to, Will that be by divine fiat? Or will we life again endure the rigors and the joy of natural selection and survival of the finished for billions of years into a new world, 1 in which dwelleth righteousness finally appears?

Can you see the problem there? If he could do it by divine fiat the first time, why doesn't he do it, didn't do it that, you know, I mean, if he does it that, this time, why didn't he do it that way the first time? I want to end on 1 other point. I think our church has staked out a very clear position on creation. And I don't think we can budge on that.

But at the same time, too, we have to acknowledge There are difficulties. I am a staunch six-day literal creation. In recent time, I believe in Noah's Ark, Adam and Eve, the talking snake, the whole spiel. I take it literally. I don't question.

But I know that there are problems. I don't have a problem with that. My problem's everything. I don't even know how a can opener works. And I'll deal with that.

And I wanna just make sure, as we have a firm, firm position on this, because we cannot budge on this, That to make sure that the church is still a safe place for honest people who are struggling with the questions. Because the problems are there, the questions are there. I've got probably more questions than I've got answers. And the older I get And the more I learn, I discover more questions I have than answers. That's what stepping out by faith is, believing in what you don't fully understand.

So we take a firm stance on this, but we want to make sure we have a safe place where we can nurture and work with those who are honestly struggling with it. If you've already made up your mind you believe in Darwinian evolution, then I'm sorry you do not belong in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Say that with love, say that, you know, sorry but don't you think you ought to take it, go somewhere else where you can, or at least the name. The name doesn't mitigate against everything that you believe. But on the other hand, if you're struggling, we're all struggling.

We can work together and work through these and come to strong reasons for the faith that we have.

Series

Yes, Creation!

Seventh-day Darwinians

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

19m

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

17m

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

20m

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

17m

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

21m

Sabbath and Creation

19m

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

19m

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

18m

...and it WAS good

19m

Lions in the Garden of Eden

17m

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

21m

DNA and Design

21m

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

23m

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

20m

Do millions of years solve the problem?

16m

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

22m

Dealing with uncertainty

11m

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

28m

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

30m

Seventh-day Darwinians

13m

Sound Doctrine