Comment on The ANN Highlights LSU’s Dr. Lee Grismer – An Evolutionary Biologist by Eddie.
For those who are curious to know what the 13 baptismal vows on the back of my Certificate of Baptism from the 1970s state, here they are:
1. I believe in God the Father, in His Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit.
2. I accept the death of Jesus Christ on Calvary as an atoning sacrifice for my sins, and believe that through faith in His shed blood men are saved from sin and its penalty.
3. I renounce the world and its sinful ways, and have accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour, and believe that God, for Christs’s sake, has forgiven my sins and given me a new heart.
4. I accept by faith the righteousness of Christ, recognizing Him as my Intercessor in the heavenly sanctuary, and claim His promise to strengthen me by His indwelling Spirit so that I may receive power to do His will.
5. I believe that the Bible is God’s inspired Word, and that it constitutes the only rule of faith and practice for the Christian.
6. Loving the Lord with all my heart, it is my purpose, by the power of the indwelling Christ, to keep God’s law of Ten Commandments, including the fourth, which requires the observance of the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath of the Lord.
7. I believe that my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and that I am to honor God by caring for my body in abstaining from such things as alcoholic beverages, tobacco in all its forms, and from unclean foods.
8. I accept the doctrine of spiritual gifts, and believe that the Spirit of Prophecy is one of the identifying marks of the remnant church.
9. I believe in the soon coming of Jesus as the blessed hope, and it is my settled determination to prepare to meet Him in peace, as well as to help others to get ready for His glorious appearing.
10. I believe in church organization, and it is my purpose to support the church by my tithes and offerings, and by my personal effort and influence.
11. I accept the New Testament teaching of baptism by immersion, and desire to be so baptized as a public expression of my faith in Christ and in His forgiveness of my sins.
12. Knowing and understanding the fundamental Bible principles as taught by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, it is my purpose by the grace of God to order my life in harmony with these principles.
13. I believe that the Seventh-day Adventist Church constitues God’s remnant people, and rejoice to be accepted into its membership.
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Eddie Also Commented
The ANN Highlights LSU’s Dr. Lee Grismer – An Evolutionary Biologist
Can somebody explain to my why any Christian would want to fellowship with somebody who writes comments such as these about fellow brothers and sisters in Christ?
Ron Stone M.D.: the person who wrote it should either be fired or taught proper “fact finding” and background to their stories printed at ANN.
Ron Stone M.D.: who exactly is responsible for this horrific blunder?
Ron Stone M.D.: have these people been living “under a rock” for the past several years?!
Ron Stone M.D.: Please explain how a “news network” cannot be “living under a rock” when they do a story on a person who has been accused of undermining our SDA beliefs, and not even mention this fact.
Ron Stone M.D.: ANN is a classic example of working with your “eyes wide shut”
Ron Stone M.D.: another terribly embarrassing example of how our SDA Church is working with their “heads in the sand,” being, as Sam Pipim states, “administrative ostriches” completely “out of it” when it comes to actually supporting our SDA bibliclal beliefs.
Ron Stone M.D.: Grismer should be totally exposed for the complete fraud he is
Ron Stone M.D.: ANN is probably what Stalin termed a “useful idiot” in regards to publishing this article.
Ron Stone M.D.: ANN should have been actually looking at the real world, instead of having its head in the sand for the past several years.
Ron Stone M.D.: What kind of an organization can these guys have? Are they “clueless?” Are our Church moneys being wasted on such articles as this?
The ANN Highlights LSU’s Dr. Lee Grismer – An Evolutionary Biologist
Faith: This situation has been going on for 25-30 years now
Slightly less than 21 years. It began in the fall of 1990 after the biology graduate program, under the direction of Dr. Leonard Brand, moved from the recently divorced La Sierra campus to the Loma Linda campus of Loma Linda University. And it gained steam with some subsequent hires. And more recently it has slowed down with some subsequent retirements.
I wonder if those who voted for the divorce between the two campuses ever imagined what would transpire?
The ANN Highlights LSU’s Dr. Lee Grismer – An Evolutionary Biologist
Please change “clandered” to “slandered”
Recent Comments by Eddie
SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines
Will humans and animals in New Jerusalem need to sleep?
Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
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?
