@Sean Pitman: “After all, what’s the point in having an …

Comment on PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood? by Zachary Benton.

@Sean Pitman: “After all, what’s the point in having an SDA school if the SDA position on the topic at hand is not favored by the professors who are presenting the topic?”

There are Adventist institutions of higher education like Weimar where the obvious mission is to churn out future SDAs to be Bible workers or missionaries. Our accredited colleges and universities do not hold the same mission.

PUC’s mission is as follows:
Pacific Union College is a Seventh-day Adventist learning community offering an excellent Christ-centered education that prepares its students for productive lives of useful human service and uncompromising personal integrity.

As an alum of PUC, every part of that statement is important, but the most important part about it is that the COMMUNITY is SDA, but the EDUCATION is Christ-centered, not necessarily SDA-centered. The point of having colleges where not every professor is neck-deep in the kind of fundamentalistic and dogmatic Adventism you seem to be demanding is that it allows students to have a space where they can LEARN, not be INDOCTRINATED. The professors are there to offer their perspective and encourage students to adopt it, but their ultimate goal is to EDUCATE, which necessitates viewing the issues from ALL SIDES. Even if that perspective is sometimes more progressive than you would like, it is still very Adventist and the fact that many of these professors have given up promising careers in the “secular” world to be at places like PUC should be a reminder of that. Without academic diversity (that Alice mentioned), we are at best presenting a one-sided view of reality, or at worst preventing our youth from making their own decisions and assessments of the community they live in. If you do not think there is room for diversity within our church, perhaps it is you that needs to leave, not Dr. Ness.

Zachary Benton Also Commented

PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood?
@Shane: I was referring specifically to Honors Program professors being demonized, as in this quote by Lisa: “He is part of a larger network of people at PUC that believe in their own intellectual ability over the Bible. These beliefs are rampant throughout the Honors Program at PUC (of which Ness is also a part).” Sounds pretty demonizing to me given Ellen White’s interpretation of Lucifer going bad because of his pride, the same kind of pride Lisa is accusing them of.


PUC Professor: The Noachian Flood was just a local flood?
@Shane Hilde:
Is having recently attended the university and taken classes from Dr. Ness and other professors of the biology department and the here-demonized honors program evidence enough that I know both sides are being presented? Students are given both and are asked what to choose, to be scientists who are Christians, not “Christian scientists” who only look for evidence in support of their preconceived, undisprovable, and unchangeable beliefs. Perhaps there are many evolutionists who do this as well, but our Adventist colleges do not encourage such one-sided thinking. To do so would be to close our minds and thereby render them useless.