Comment on The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation by Pauluc.
Sean Pitman: Many of the founders of Adventism held to the passive gap theory of creation and the YLC position from the earliest days of the formation of the church.
Weasely words. “Many” Name 3 other than Smith that were “founders” that articulated your ideas before 1865.
It was a minority view held by better educated people just like the gap creationism is today.
The problem with your gap creationism as you have articulated it is; a pre-existing earth more than 4 billions year old, the 4 billion year old sun and moon and the stars tens of billions of years old suddenly appearing on the fourth day is that as has been well discussed on Spectrum you now open the way to say that the animals that had millions of years of ancestory also were made to appear in a 6 day period. Certainly the older Genesis 2 account would fit with this.
Why can you allow for a billion year old earth and sun moon and stars that suddenly appeared but call for the resignation of those that might accept the second scenario of sudden “appearance” of preexisting life as the accurate reading of the text.
You might not care about Luther but then again you do not really seem to care much about accounts of history at all. Whatever you imagine is true. You have already dissed the Wiki entries on the chronology of ascendance of YEC and YLC. I merely pointed out that this (Luthers view) was and remained the prostestant view up to the 18th century when the gap theory and day age theories became prominent. It was to both these that EG White was responding in talking of infidel geologist. By the time of the Schofield bible with its marginal entries for both Usher Chronology and the gap theory gap was widespread and you therefore imagine that EG White was convinced or equivocating on this. Most of traditional Adventists were slow in adopting there non-traditional view. The premillenialist view of EG White from the 1840s undoubtedly influence her views on the age of the earth. Her views are I think more accurately reflected in the ICR, CMI and AIG theology and YEC than in your gap theology no matter how many scholars and pop star theologians you can cite as supporters.
As Bernard Ramm suggests
“Now we shall pass on to the great revival of flood geology in the twentieth century. This revival was carried on principally by the Seventh-Day Adventist apologists and was termed the new diluvialism or the new catastrophism to distinguish it from the older flood geology of Cuvier and Agassiz [theories of successive floods over the ancient past which explain geological layering]… One of the strangest developments of the early part of the twentieth century was that George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist with very limited professional training, became American fundamentalism’s leading apologist in the domain of geology. Even this had a most peculiar quirk, because most fundamentalists accepted the gap theory as taught in The Scofield Bible, a theory which the Seventh-Day Adventists vigorously reject. At any rate, the influence of Price is staggering.”
Bernard Ramm The Christian View of Science and Scripture
Henry Morris states;
“The smaller fundamentalist churches, such as the so-called Plymouth Brethren and various independent churches, for the most part retreated to the “gap theory,” inserting the geological ages in an imaginary gap between the first two verses of Genesis.”
Morris History of modern creationism pg38
But Morris in his critical book did follow the Adventist tradition and initially was concerned about revealing his true indebtedness to the Adventist tradition of EG White and MacCready Price.
In reality modern YEC is the progeny of EG Whites visions. Stoner writes
“The connection to Price and the Adventists worried Whitcomb and Morris. Unfortunately their actions reflected more concern with the outward appearance than with the substance. Fearing that Price’s Adventist-tinted reputation might hinder the acceptance of The Genesis Flood, Whitcomb and Morris tried to avoid any visible connection with Price. Although they left the substance of their arguments unchanged, they removed nearly every mention of Price’s name from their book. This irritated many of Price’s friends who felt Whitcomb and Morris had not given him sufficient credit for the intellectual debt they owed him… The Genesis Flood, as it has been variously described, is essentially an “updated version” of Price’s New Geology or a “reissue of G.M. Price’s views brought up to date.”
Don Stoner, A New Look at an Old Earth: Resolving the Conflict Between Bible & Science pg 126
The connection between the Adventist apocalyptic vision and the creation should not be underestimated. Just as a literal interpretation of Revelation with the Adventist futurist vision cannot at all be subject to science so the creation must be an act of God accepted as it is literally described. Why critique the beginning by science when you cannot critique the end. Whatever you might like to say as a Church, Adventism’s tradition of YEC is bound up with its premillenial understanding of the future. Miraculous end – miraculous beginning. You do not critique the miraculous end why do so for the beginning with gap creationism which has only even been an acquiescence to the geology.
Jorge is right you do have a very idiosyncratic if not egocentric view of much of knowledge and science.
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Pauluc Also Commented
The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
Sean Pitman:
Oh please.You do realize that there are difference kinds of “heavens” in Hebrew understanding? This is not a statement arguing that God made the entire universe…
Come on Sean.
Why obfuscate and attempt to railroad the discussion onto what is the heavens and recycle your nonsense about YEC being restricted only to an absurd YUC. The question is about an old earth.
What the statement clearly and unambiguously says is that the earth (and heaven whatever you may say that is) was created in the 6 literal days of creation. There is absolutely no wriggle room for an old earth in this statement. It says earth and heavens ie something beyond the earth and all that lives in them. BOTH earth itself and life in 6 days.
It seems very clear that Ted Wilson sees Ellen Whites statements about infidel geologists as referring to all and any belief that would make the earth itself older than 6000 years as I inferred he probably would.
We are in the same boat here. I think that you, me, Goldstein, Davidson, Younker, Pfandl and others will all have to admit we are out of step and we live with the consolation that it is a non-creedal statement of belief that has a preamble that does allow a minority view that the earth is billions of years old. Or have you changed your mind on the age of rocks so you disagree with me.
It does raise an interesting question for Goldstein. He will certainly have to curtail his ridiculing of YEC.
The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
Sean Pitman: I don’t see that happening since the YEC position is not and has not been favored over the YLC position in the Adventist Church – either by the church leadership or by conservative academics. And, even if, for some very strange reason, the YEC position were to be clearly supported by the language of FB#6, that wouldn’t change my position. What it would do is force me to no longer advocate for my YLC views if I were to become a paid representative of the church. I would actually have to advocate for the YEC position as the most reasonable interpretation of the Genesis account – something I could not do. Therefore, I could not work for the SDA Church in good conscience.
Note the suggested wording from Autumn council
“God is creator of all things, and has revealed in Scripture the authentic and historical account of His creative activity. In a recent six-day creation, the Lord made ‘the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them’ and rested on the seventh day. Thus He established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of His creative work performed and completed during six literal days that together with the Sabbath constituted a week as we experience it today. The first man and woman were made in the image of God as the crowning work of Creation, given dominion over the world, and charged with responsibility to care for it. When the world was finished it was ‘very good,’ declaring the glory of God.”
http://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2013/10/16/good-news-bad-news-day-annual-council-diary-day-five
Well Sean it now seems from the clear statement that you are indeed not orthodox adventist
“In a recent six-day creation, the Lord made ‘the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them’ and rested on the seventh day”
Seems pretty clearly YEC not YLC to me.
The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
@Sean Pitman:
Sean I can see yet again why you have never found anyone to explain the science to you. I join the ranks of those who have tried and dismally failed.
I truly am way too sanguine in once again trying to discuss issues of science and faith. If I clearly cannot communicate the idea of ignorance of process as a confounder in statistical analysis without being accused of believing in magic I do not deserve to be given access to your site.
Grace and peace to you.
Recent Comments by Pauluc
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.
You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.
Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath
On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”
You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.
Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?
1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.
I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.
Grace
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.
And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…
Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.
Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.
That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.
