Comment on A big reason why so many people are leaving the church by Eddie.
Ron, I was being as sarcastic as the hole that is left in a cup of coffee after you pull your finger out of it. Nearly everything I wrote echoed stuff I had written earlier here. The SDA church is in desperate need of biology professors. And not just biology professors, but professors in all disciplines.
I have repeatedly stated here that it’s very difficult to find suitable SDA candidates for many vacancies in SDA colleges and universities. If you don’t believe me, just ask any biology professor in any SDA college or university how many applicants they had for a recent vacancy in their department. SWAU, WWU and PUC just filled their vacancies. SAU is still searching. My department recently interviewed the only two suitable applicants. We were fortunate to have two, because a couple of departments on my campus can’t find anybody to fill vacancies! Which means–horror or horrors–that they may have to hire non-SDAs.
Candidates often get interviewed by multiple SDA colleges and universities, which are competing with each other to entice candidates, but have very little to offer other than a lower cost of living for some fortunate campuses. And candidates often come from another SDA campus, which means hiring them fills a vacancy on one campus but leaves a vacancy on another.
Very few SDAs feel called to become professors. Students who excel in sciences are urged to go into the health sciences, which is a strong part of SDA culture. How many of you have urged your children to become a professor? If you don’t believe me, Ron, why did you choose to go to medical school rather than go to graduate school to become a college professor? I suspect I know the answer. You often target administrators in the Pacific Union Conference, but do they really deserve the blame for the church’s culture of apathy for becoming a professor?
Frankly a professor’s pay is abysmal. Years ago the SDA colleges and universities went off the denominational payscale. Wages are now set by each institution’s board, and by necessity many have been less generous than the denomination in giving raises. As a consequence, professors are the lowest paid (based on their qualifications) employees in the denomination. And they’re probably the least materialistic. They have to be, otherwise they would never choose to be professors in a SDA institution. How would you feel if you earned $15,000 less than a 1st-grade teacher in a SDA school across the street? One of my colleagues with a PhD degree could tell you exactly how he feels, because that’s how much more his wife earns.
And that may explain in part why LSU is reluctant to fire any professors. Who would they find to replace them? I would never work there. Way too much scrutiny and controversy.
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Eddie Also Commented
A big reason why so many people are leaving the church
Sean Pitman: Science, in essence, allows one to measure the degree one can rationally put faith or trust or confidence in the validity or truth of the proposed theory.
Your views are interesting. So are you saying that faith is proportional to the evidence? The more evidence supporting a hypothesis, the more faith you have in the hypothesis? As scientific knowledge increases, faith increases? If this is what you believe, it appears that you are essentially equating science with faith. What do you regard as the difference between faith and science?
Dictionary.com gives eight definitions of faith:
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another’s ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3. belief in god or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
5. a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.
6. the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.: Failure to appear would be breaking faith.
7. the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one’s promise, oath, allegiance, etc.: He was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles.
8. Christian Theology . the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.
It appears to me that you are basing your definition of faith in the context of science on the first definition. The stronger the evidence for a hypothesis, the more faith you have in it. I have always viewed faith as the second definition. The stronger the evidence for a hypothesis, the more certainty and the less faith I have in it.
Sean Pitman: I really can’t believe you guys are actually arguing this point… since you are supposed to be scientists yourselves. This is basic Philosophy of Science 101 stuff…
I don’t know everything. I make mistakes all the time. I don’t have to win every argument. I think humility is a virtue. I need a Savior. I wish you could be more respectful and less condescending when you engage in these discussions.
A big reason why so many people are leaving the church
Or a cadillac?
A big reason why so many people are leaving the church
BobRyan: Quoting Ellen White, with emphases added: “Infidel GEOLOGISTS claim that the world is very much older than the Bible record makes it. They reject the Bible record, because of those things which are to them evidences from THE EARTH ITSELF, that the world has existed tens of thousands of years.”
BobRyan: Yes – because when Ellen White refers to “World” and to “other Worlds” she is always talking about a planet with life on it.
But when she talks about “planets” the context determines whether or not she means a planet with life on it or a planet that does not have life on it.
Bob, she specifically referred to “geologists”–not biologists. And then she specifically referred to “evidences from the earth itself”–not “evidences for life on earth.” It seems clear to me from the context of her language that Ellen White was a young earth creationist (YEC), not a young life creationist (YLC).
I’m trying to understand how you, Sean and others here at Educate Truth accept Ellen White’s literal interpretation of Genesis 1 but disagree with her on the age of the planet’s rocks. Seems a bit inconsistent.
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Stephen Ferguson: Sean, how did we get to this position? In particular, why after spending decades and millions of dollars has the official Church’s own pet organisation, the Geoscience Research Institute, done so little to disprove evolution?
Why if it is all hogwash has it been thoroughly not been disproved over the last 150 years? Why do some 99% of scientists across a multitude of different fields (e.g. paleontologists, physicists, archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, chemists, cosmologists, historians, cosmologists and geologists etc) all consider evolution to be the most plausible model?
Maybe because the evidence for microevolution and speciation is overwhelming. And some evidence for megaevolution (e.g., sequence of fossils) and long geological ages can be perplexing to explain from the perspective of most (but not all) young life and young earth creationists.
Stephen Ferguson: Why, if it is all rubbish, is there Adventist scientists and theologians who believe in evolution? Why would they risk their careers and standing in the Church to promote something they consider truth, given the huge pressure to just shut up, if they didn’t believe there was something in it?
Maybe because they’re not as honest as some prominent supporters here. Or their faith is weaker. Or, perhaps, physicians and lawyers are simply better trained than scientists and theologians to evaluate scientific evidence.
Stephen Ferguson: I really, really hope Christian scientists, especially Adventist ones, will disprove evolution some day.
Me too.
Stephen Ferguson: If the SDA hierarchy wants someone to blame for all this, they should blame themselves. It has been their pet organisations that have so spectacularly failed to offer scientific arguments in favour of YEC. Ted Wilson must accept some of the blame onto himself – if not personally then on behalf of the hierachy he leads.
I wouldn’t blame anybody. But if they were to fire the current GRI staff, hire certain supporters here, and then move GRI from LLU to SAU or SWAU, I suspect a certain faction of the church would be happier.
La Sierra University won’t neglect creation teaching, president, chairman vow
Sean, you have essentially written enough about this to publish a book, which you ought to do, exhorting SDAs to abandon Sola Scriptura and rely exclusively on empirical data, which surely will be a best seller among neoconservative SDAs.
Dr. Ariel Roth’s Creation Lectures for Teachers
Like Ken, I am puzzled by the lukewarm reception of his suggestion to establish an endowed chair for intelligent design at LSU. Perhaps there was confusion about his term “intelligent design.” I think he had in mind the kind of creationism that most SDAs believe in, specifically young earth creationism or young life creationism (I realize some of you view ID negatively). So it could be called an Endowed Chair of Young Life Creationism, or whatever term is preferred.
For what it’s worth, I like his idea for several reasons:
1) SDA professors in all our institutions with the exception of LLU have relatively heavy teaching loads and scant time available for research, which means they have little time to conduct and publish research on creationism (I’m quite certain Art Chadwick would concur). That’s why as a denomination we have no well published and respected researchers with expertise on the subject, with the sole exception of Leonard Brand at LLU–who ranks among the world’s most successful scientists whose research focuses on YLC (if you believe there are other SDA experts with more expertise, you might be disappointed if you conducted a search of their publication records).
2) Most students in our institutions are seeking a career in a health profession, therefore SDA professors by necessity focus mostly on subjects that prepare students for the biomedical fields. Few have time to keep up with issues related to creationism and evolution, let alone conduct original research on the subject. You can’t really expect all professors to be as well informed with the subject as Leonard Brand.
3) It would be fantastic for LSU to have a professor with the available time and resources to pursue high quality research on creationism, which I believe was the intent of Ken’s wish. We already have one such professor at LLU; why not another at LSU? I’m astonished that some here seem to think it is undesirable to have another expert SDA researcher on the subject. Perhaps some of you naively imagine that ALL professors have the unlimited time and resources to become world-class researchers on creationism–and are wasting the denomination’s money by not doing so.
4) SDA institutions struggle to meet their payroll obligations and can benefit by obtaining financial assistance from donors.
5) If the evidence overwhelmingly favors the traditional SDA position of origins, as some here claim, what harm is there in funding a professor with the time and resources to discover even more evidence? It’s pretty hard to convince the world that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favors our position unless the evidence is published in respectable scientific journals–as Leonard Brand has done repeatedly. It won’t ever happen unless there are more full-time researchers who focus exclusively on issues related to creationism.
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
Sean Pitman: Most scientists who believe in the Biblical model of origins interpret Tertiary sediments as post-Flood sediments.
So if Noah’s flood ended at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, which coincides with a period of high global sea levels according to geologists, does that mean Noah’s flood is represented by the second of two worldwide floods in this graph?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Sea_Level.png
How would you account for the geological evidence for a worldwide flood during the Paleozoic and the lack of geological evidence for high sea levels during the early Mesozoic?
