Comment on The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation by Sean Pitman.

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.

By the end of the 1800s “gap creationism” was not a minority view, but the majority view for many conservative Christian denominations. As you yourself point out, by the early 1900s it gained general acceptance when the Scofield Bible discussed it in the reference notes for Genesis. Bernard Ramm wrote about the popularity of gap creationism during this period of time noting: “The gap theory has become the standard interpretation throughout hyper-orthodoxy, appearing in an endless stream of books, booklets, Bible studies, and periodical articles. In fact, it has become so sacrosanct with some that to question it is equivalent to tampering with Sacred Scripture or to manifest modernistic leanings.”

In fact, even if Ellen White did personally believe that the material of the Earth was created during creation week, she clearly did not accept the YEC position that the entire universe was created during this time. So, even she clearly endorses, in no uncertain language, at least some form of the gap interpretation of Genesis 1 – as was commonly done during her day.

The YEC notion that everything was created during the creation week, the entire universe, declined in popularity throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, only to be revived after the 1920s.

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.

ICR, CMI, and AiG support the standard YEC position that everything, the entire universe, was created during creation week of Genesis 1. Not even Ellen White supported that position. She clearly argued that the universe existed before creation week – even describing other worlds that pre-existed our creation. This is simply not a standard YEC concept and most certainly requires at least some form of a gap interpretation of Genesis 1.

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.

You’ve got to be kidding. It is one thing to argue that an Earth-bound perspective could reasonably limit one’s view of the Sun, moon, and stars through a thick or cloudy atmosphere. It is another thing entirely to argue that all the animals that were always there were also obscured from view when the text clearly says that the planet was entirely covered by water and was “formless and empty”. The Bible also makes it very clear that there was no suffering or death on this planet, for sentient creatures (were not talking about planet cells or non-sentient bacteria and the like), prior to the moral Fall of Adam and Eve.

Your concept that Adam and Eve were somehow made of a different material than were the animals and where therefore not subject to the same type of biology or natural decay is simply not supported by the Bible by any stretch of the imagination. The same thing is true for the re-creation of the Earth after Jesus comes again to “make everything new”. You argue that death and suffering will continue on this planet after this re-creation. How could anyone call that “good”?

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.

Because your interpretation is not the Adventist interpretation – that’s why. You are free to interpret things however you want, but not as a paid employee of the Adventist Church. Do whatever you want on your own dime.

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.

And I never argued otherwise. What I was arguing against is your assertion that YECism is the historical Adventist position. Remember that the Adventist Church was organized in the late 1800s… during a time when the gap interpretation of Genesis was becoming quite popular and most certainly influenced many within the early Adventist Church as well.

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.

As I’ve pointed out to you time and again, young-life creationism (i.e., the passive gap theory) is in no way “acquiescent” to the interpretations of mainstream geology. The YLC position does not accept the popular ages assigned to the geologic/fossil records nor does it accept the popular understanding of radiometric dating as reliable or credible. How then can you say that my position is at all acquiescent to any form of Darwinism or theistic evolution or mainstream geology? That’s simply not true – obviously.

Jorge is right you do have a very idiosyncratic if not egocentric view of much of knowledge and science.

As does the Adventist Church… historical and modern. Clearly, my views are shared by a significant number of the conservative leadership, evangelists, theologians, and scientists within the Church today. I’m not entirely alone on this one 😉

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