Do you accept the traditional Adventist flood geology as articulated

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

Do you accept the traditional Adventist flood geology as articulated by EG White and fleshed out as science by McCready Price?

You mean that much of the fossil record can be explained by a Noachian-style Flood? Yes – as you already know.

If so then most of the work is done and you need no gap creation because all interesting geology is a product of the deluge. You can as the book “Seventh-Day Adventist Believe” says accept that the earth was created by the will of God on day 1 with our solar system/galaxy as perhaps the final of Gods creations.

I do not accept that this position is clearly supported by the Biblical texts.

Of course as I have tried to indicate this Adventist flood geology or catastrophism and its attendent YEC eventually formed the foundation of modern YEC creationism that is now widespread in fundamentalist Christianity?

Do you support any or all of ICR, CMI AIG? If not why not?

Of course I do not support the YEC concept where the entire universe was created during the creation week. I don’t think this concept is Biblical.

I know you support ID but that covers a multitude of sins and its protagonists are an heterogeneous group with the DI far from literalist in scriptural views.

Of course in asking these questions I am assuming that you are literalist in your approach to the scriptures. A view I think effectively equivalent to inerrancy.

You know that this is not my position. As I’ve explained to you, in this very thread, it is my view that God’s prophets were all human and subject to error. The Bible contains errors since it was written by humans with limitations. It was not dictated word-for-word by God Himself. That’s not how inspiration works. God gave the visions and humans wrote down what they saw from a limited perspective using the best limited language that they could. The same is true of the writings of Ellen White. Yet, I agree with Ellen White in her arguments against the thinking of the mainstream geologists of her day. As detailed by Gerhard Pfandl of the BRI, Ellen White disagreed with the “infidel geologists” on three main points:

1. That the six days of creation were six vast, indefinite periods.
2. That the day of God’s rest was another indefinite period.
3. That the world was populated long before the record of creation, by a race of beings vastly superior in size to men now upon the earth (ibid., 92, 93).

Ellen White dismissed all three propositions as out of harmony with God’s Word. The Bible recognizes no long ages in which the earth was slowly evolved from chaos, (PP 112) she declared. Each successive day of creation… consisted of the evening and the morning, like all other days that have followed (ibid.). This was not something she believed because she took Genesis 1 seriously; she “was shown”, she wrote, “that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week” (3 SG 90). The first and second proposition, of course, made “senseless the fourth commandment of God’s holy law” (ibid., 92).

They aimed directly at the foundation of the Sabbath commandment. Ellen White called it, “the worst kind of infidelity” (ibid., 91), because with many who professed to believe the creation record yet accepted these claims, “it is infidelity in disguise. It charges God with commanding men to observe the week of seven literal days in commemoration of seven indefinite periods, which is unlike his dealings with mortals, and is an impeachment of his wisdom” (Ibid.).

Concerning the third proposition she wrote, “I have been shown that with-out Bible history, geology can prove nothing” (Ibid., 93). While she acknowledged that “the bones of human beings and of animals found in the earth, are much larger than those of men and animals now living,” she added, “The time of their existence, and how long a period these things have been in the earth, are only to be understood by Bible history” (Ibid.). And Bible history for her was to be measured in terms of “about 6000 years” (LHU 52).

If you want to discard literalism then none of these issues apply. But literalism is like pregnancy; an all or nothing affair. You cannot be a little bit literalist and you cant wander far in your exploration of truth.

That’s not true. My view of literalism it not at all like pregnancy. It’s not all or nothing. It requires interpretation and investigation into the time, place, culture, intent, etc., of the author. I view the Genesis account, for example, as an attempt to describe literal history. However, this attempt was a limited human attempt from a limited Earth-bound perspective. He wrote what he saw. That’s it. I believe what he saw was real history. However, different people seeing the very same historical event will remember it and describe it differently – with different errors regarding various points. For example, the writers of the Gospels in the New Testament often describe the very same event with different details. And, when describing the very same detail, there is occasional disagreement between the different witnesses (such as how many times the rooster crowed at Jesus’ trial before Peter denied Him three times… etc.). Such errors would be impossible if God had written these texts. Such is the nature of Inspiration.

It seems to me you are struggling with this wall of literalism that surrounds and constrains you and provides for an uncomfortable mix of nascent empirical science, gap creationism, intelligent design and doctrinaire literalism. You say the right words about FB#1 and acknowledge that EG White was not canonical or inerrant but then are drawn back to a fundamentalism that effectively asserts all of these things.

There are two ditches that one may fall into. One can fall into the ditch that claims that every word of the Bible or of Ellen White is without any error of any kind. The other ditch, your ditch, is the ditch that claims that because errors exist that everything is subjective and open to what one personally desires the text to mean.

The truth, I believe, is that the Bible is a book written by humans who were Divinely inspired with the ideas, but not the words, to write. I believe that when the authors are trying to describe real historical events that they are actually describing real historical events. Are their descriptions always without any kind of errors? No. There are errors as there would be for any witness trying to describe a historical event. However, this does not mean that the historical event didn’t happen pretty much as described or that the witness was not being honest in trying to describe the event as well as he/she possibly could given his/her limitations.

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Sean Pitman Also Commented

The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
This is the same language used by the Bible. Whatever “wiggle room” the Bible leaves open is still open when one uses this language. The Bible is not clear that the “creation of the heavens and the earth” means that the material of the Earth itself was created during creation week. Quite the opposite is true. The Bible seems to suggest that something was here prior to creation week. Or, at the very least, leaves this question open.

The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
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…

The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
The question is if you or anyone else has even tried to explain how the evolutionary mechanism (RM/NS) can tenably work beyond very very low levels of functional complexity. The answer to that question is no. This means that this mechanism is not backed up by what anyone would call real science. It’s just-so story telling. That’s it. There is nothing in scientific literature detailing the statistical odds of RM/NS working at various levels of functional complexity. And, there is no demonstration beyond systems that require a few hundred averagely specified residues.

What is interesting is that no one who controls the mainstream journals will publish any observations as to why a real scientific basis for the Darwinian mechanism is lacking. The basic information is there. Contrary to Pauluc’s claims, a precise definition of “levels of functional complexity” has been published, along with what happens to the ratios of potential beneficial vs. non-benficial sequences. What no one is allowing to be published is the implications of this information.

Regardless, the implications should be clear to you. The math is overwhelmingly clear. If the ratio of beneficial vs. non-beneficial goes from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 the fact that the average time to success will decrease quite dramatically doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out. Evolutionists, who have actually seriously considered this problem must recognize the implications here, but seem to be trying to brush it all under the rug because no one knows of any other viable mechanism (again, despite Pauluc’s unsupported claims to the contrary – to include his “life enzymes”).

In any case, it is possible for you to move beyond blind faith in the unsupported claims of your “experts” and consider the information that is available to all for yourself. Start at least trying to do a little math on your own and you will no doubt recognize the problem for yourself regardless of what your experts continue to claim – without any basis in empirical evidence or science.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com