I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised that yet another pastor and leader within the Seventh-day Adventist Church has published an article supporting theistic evolution over vast spans of time on this Earth.  Elder Scott A. LeMert, retired pastor at the Sunnyside SDA Church in Portland Orgeon, published an article yesterday in Spectrum Magazine entitled, “DEEP TIME: The Forbidden Conversation“. He presents evidence that he believes definitely undermines the current and historical SDA position of a literal Creation Week within recent history (some 6,000 years ago).  As usual, the arguments presented are not new.  They are decades old and do not overcome the abundant evidence that life on this planet arrived recently and that the geologic column and fossil records are records of a worldwide rapid catastrophe consistent with the Noachian account detailed in the Bible. So, let’s go through what LeMert finds so convincing.

Egyptian Pyramids Surviving the Flood:

“How do you get around the pyramids having survived the flood? The wall engravings and tablets they left behind recorded their history in time by using things like total solar eclipses, dates easily verifiable today.”

As it turns out, the oldest solar eclipse linked to ancient Egypt is an annular eclipse that occurred on October 30, 1207 BC. Researchers identified this date by analyzing a biblical text from the Book of Joshua (“the sun stood still”) combined with Egyptian records of Pharaoh Merneptah’s campaign in Canaan (University of Cambridge & The Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics, October 2017). This is right in line with the Biblical account. There’s nothing here that undermines a recent or literal Creation week described in Genesis.

Clearly, the Egyptian pyramids weren’t built until after the Flood.  They didn’t survive the Flood because they weren’t there during the Flood.

Greenland Ice Sheet:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet has been core-drilled, and the ice exhibits at least 100,000 years’ worth of seasonal pollen layers.”

The Greenland Ice Sheet is not dated via “pollen layers”, but by actually counting the layers of ice.  And, when these layers become so thinned out that they cannot be visually distinguished, they are counted with the use of “chemical signatures”, such as with the use of oxygen isotopes.  The problem here is that this counting isn’t reliable since these chemical signatures within the ice can move over time and form false layers (Link). Another key problem with this argument is that Greenland was recently green.

Greenland was once Green:

Greenland, in particular, has not always been covered in ice.  It was once truly green – all over.  In fact, within the Hypsithermal period or “warm age” (which, according to mainstream thinking, is said to have lasted some 7,000 years, ending only some 2,500 years ago), the northernmost parts of the planet were very much warmer than they are today.  Studies on sedimentary cores carried out in the North Atlantic between Hudson Strait and Cape Hatteras indicate ocean temperatures of 18°C (verses about 8°C today in this region) during the height of this period of time between 4,000 to 6,000 years ago (again, according to mainstream thinking).  Given that the Greenland ice sheet is currently melting at a fairly rapid rate, it’s rather hard to believe that it existed at all during the very warm Hypsithermal period – a period when millions of mammoths along with many other types of warmer weather plants and animals happily lived within the Arctic Circle all around the globe along the very same latitudes as Greenland (Link). A 1995 study of mammoth remains located on Wrangel Island (on the border of the East-Siberian and Chukchi Seas) shows, according to radiocarbon dating, that mammoths persisted on this island till about 1,700 B.C. (Vartanyan S.L, et. al., 1995). And yet, somehow, Greenland was still covered with thick sheets of ice that are over 400,000 years old (Link), when everything around it was warm and balmy? supporting huge herds of animals and lush forests with fruit bearing trees and abundant grasslands?  This seems quite unlikely to me…

More at: Ancient Ice

The Ice Ages:

“The North Dakota State Geological Survey labels these glacial recessional terminal moraines—accumulations of rocks and other glacial sediment deposited at the farthest edge of a glacier’s advancement by the “bulldozer” effect of ice pushing debris. These moraines stretch as far as the eye can see—the southern limit of the last ice age that ended 10-12,000 years ago. Inside the walls of our church occasional discussions could be heard on their origins: “Were these landforms glacially caused or remnants of Noah’s flood?” And since the Bible didn’t talk about glaciers, it was the flood, 6,000 years ago, period. End of discussion!”

I don’t know any prominent creation scientist who believes in a literal Creation Week who doesn’t believe in the ice ages or that they happened after Noah’s Flood.  Before the Flood, there were no ice caps in the polar regions. The entire Earth was uniform in temperature.  Also, according to the Bible and the writings of Mrs. White, before the biblical Flood, there were no great oceans, mountain ranges, or deserts (Link).  The Earth was watered by underground springs and fountains driven by four great rivers (Genesis 2:10).  The ground was watered by dew each morning, so there was no need for rain.  In fact, it never rained.  That is why Genesis described the inhabitants of the pre-Flood world as laughing at Noah when he said that water would soon fall from the sky and flood the world.  Such a thing was a scientific impossibility in that day – that was until all of the fountains of the great deep were broken up within a single day (Genesis 7:11).

Right after the Flood, of course, the world would have been a rather warm place because of all the energy released during the catastrophe. There were no ice caps on the poles since even within the Arctic Circle, it was warm and lush all around the world, harboring enormous forests and fruit-bearing trees as well as vast grasslands and millions of animals – including large mammoths, deer, bison, etc. This situation lasted for hundreds of years after the Flood.  However, when the first ice age came, it came so suddenly that it trapped, froze, and preserved millions of these trees and animals all around the Arctic Circle.  This means, of course, that Greenland was also once very green – in very recent history (Link).

The ice ages started suddenly and progressed rapidly a few hundred years after Noah’s Flood (Link), until now, what is New York City was covered by more than 2,000 feet of ice. In fact, this created a very different environment in a relatively thin belt around the middle of the Earth compared to what exists today.  During the time of Abraham, Canaan and the regions of the Middle East looked very different from how these places look today.  Today, these places are basically desert environments.  Back then, they truly were lands “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8).  They were rich, verdant gardens. Even the Sahara Desert was rich and verdant at that time, covered with a huge lake called “Mega-Chad” – a colossal lake spanning ~400,000 square kilometers (about the size of Germany) during the “African Humid Period”, which is thought to have peaked, in mainstream thinking, around 5,000 years ago before rapidly drying out.  All of North Africa was green and lush.  It was a very very different world during this time.

The Scablands:

“The 40-100 cataclysmic Missoula glacial ice dam flood-bursts in the states of Washington, Idaho, and Montana were concentrated between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago—all happening at the end of the earth’s last ice age.”

Consider that scientists originally believed and strongly argued that the Scablands of Oregon and Washington State took millions of years to produce.  It took J Harlen Bretz many decades of argument before mainstream geologists finally accepted the reality that these features can be produced catastrophically (Link).  And, they only agreed with Bretz once they realized that they didn’t have to believe in Noah’s Flood to explain the Scablands.  The fact is that these Scablands were formed after Noah’s Flood as well, via catastrophic ice dam failures.  The dating of “13,000 – 15,000 years ago” is based on radiocarbon dating, which works pretty well as long as one knows that the ratio of atmospheric C12 vs. C14 is throughout history – that it doesn’t change.

Carbon 14 Dating:

“Frequently I have people come to me objecting to the use of carbon 14 radiometric dating. However, in scientific circles it is considered as being highly reliable to around 50,000 years, and extremely accurate to 15,000 years.”

Carbon-14 dating is based on the simple idea that all living things are built based on the carbon atom. And, some of these carbon atoms that a living thing takes in while alive are radioactive carbon-14 atoms.  These atoms have a half-life of around 5,730 years. Of course, when something dies, it stops taking in carbon-14.  So, the original amount of carbon-14 starts to decay over time. So, all one has to do to find out when the remains of a living thing were actually alive is to measure the amount of carbon-14 in the remains and compare that amount to the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. It all seems very simple and straightforward until one considers that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere doesn’t stay the same over time – especially when considering something of worldwide catastrophic proportions like the Noachian Flood that buried huge amounts of carbon from living things, removing it from the biosphere of the Earth (Link).

That’s right. The ratio of atmospheric ¹⁴C to ¹²C doesn’t stay the same over time, but changes.  Also, there are regional variations in the ratio that must be considered. This is why carbon-14 dating isn’t an entirely independent dating method, but requires calibration against other dating methods – like various historically-derived events and tree-ring dating for instance (Link). Of course, tree ring dating is, in turn, calibrated by other dating techniques, primarily carbon-14 dating – which is just a bit circular. Also, attempts to use amino acid racemization rates as a dating method, with efforts to help to calibrate radiocarbon dating, have failed. AAR dating methods have themselves also turned out to require calibration by radiocarbon dating (Link).

What’s also particularly problematic about carbon-14 dating is that it strongly favors the literal creation week perspective, not the Darwinian perspective.  Along with flexible soft tissues and sequencable proteins, and even fragments of DNA, many large dinosaur bones also contain quite a bit of ¹⁴C within their preserved soft tissues (Link).  Given that ¹⁴C would be undetectable beyond 80,000 years or so, the presence of significant quantities of ¹⁴C within their remains, without any reasonable evidence of “contamination”, speaks very strongly in favor of the Biblical account of a literal Creation Week within recent history.

As an interesting aside, note that many ancient cultures also have a similar date for creation of less than 10k years. The Anglo-Saxons, for instance, start history 5,200 years before Christ (according to the Laud and Parker Chronicles). The Nennius’s record of ancient British history has 5,228 years from creation to Christ, the Irish chronology has a date of about 4000 B.C. for creation, the Egyptians 6081 B.C., the Chinese 6157 B.C., the Samarians 4427 B.C., and the Mayan calendar began September 6, 3114 B.C., with a “Great Flood” occurring around this time as well. Isn’t it interesting that all of these histories are much more in line with the Biblical account and SDA claims compared to the claims of theistic evolutionists? What? Nothing recorded until just a few thousand years ago? Despite modern humans existing for hundreds of thousands of years?

Ancient Archeological Sites:

“According to National Geographic (subscription required), archeologists have continued to explore the “tell” upon which the biblical Jericho is assumed to have stood, and are now down to the site’s first fortifications of human settlement, which date to 10,000 BCE. This parallels the recent archeological find of the Göbekli Tepe site in southeastern Turkey that dates to 11,000+ years ago. This is surpassed by the recently-discovered Rimrock Draw Rockshelter in Oregon, which dates to 18,000 years ago and shows that the human occupants consumed now extinct species of giant land mammals.”

Again, all of these sites are based on radiocarbon dating techniques, which assume a constant atmospheric ratio of ¹⁴C to ¹²C (see above).  None of these “dates” is written in stone, so to speak, with credibility that undermines the Biblical account given to us by God Himself, who was actually there when it all happened.

The Orion Nebula:

“Early astronomers thought they saw a dark hole in its middle which was interpreted by many early Adventists as the passageway from which Jesus would return to earth at the second coming, and through which the saints would travel on the return to the heavenly house of God. However, today the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope are recording thousands of amazing pictures of this region. They find no hole. Instead, the region is a congested, super-hot, explosive nuclear furnace forming countless new stars, exploding supernovas, and colliding stars and planets. Is it time for us to have meaningful conversations about the Orion Nebula?”

Ellen White describes an “open space” in “Orion” through which will one day come the “City of God” (Early Writings, p. 41). This was in line with the description of Joseph Bates regarding the Orion Nebula (The Opening Heavens, Pamphlet 1, p.6). Of course, the Orion Nebula is huge, making the term “congested” a rather relative term. Who are we to say that Jesus can’t come through that region? I dare say that He wouldn’t be worried by the “furnace” of Orion.

Also, there does appear to be an actual “open space” or “hole” in the “center” of the Orion Nebula:

In the center of the nebula is a dark patch. Normally, a dark patch such as this would indicate a dense cloud of cosmic dust, obscuring the stars and nebula behind it. However, in this image we can see that the patch remains strikingly dark, even when the APEX observations are included. Thanks to these APEX observations, combined with infrared observations from other telescopes, astronomers believe that the patch is in fact a hole or cavity in the nebula excavated by material flowing out of the star V380 Orionis. For once, it truly is a hole in the sky!

SO, Garching, Germany, A dark patch in Orion star formation, Published: January 24, 2013, Last updated on May 18, 2023 (Astronomy.com)

See also: Link

As an aside, evidence suggests that a black hole, estimated at 200 times the sun’s mass, likely resides within the Orion Nebula. Proposed in 2012 by an international team, this potential black hole is located within the Trapezium Cluster and could explain the high velocities of the young stars in that region (Link).

An Evil God and the Credibility of His Word:

For Seventh-day Adventists in particular, the claims of theistic evolutionists undermine the credibility of both the Bible and Ellen White, and put God in a very bad light.  The fact is that most world-class scholars of Hebrew, particularly secular scholars, agree that the author(s) of the Genesis account intended to convey a literal account of a literal creation week (Link). Such an understanding does increase the overall credibility of the Bible and of the rational basis for the Sabbath as a memorial of our Creation. For God to have created a Sabbath day of rest as a memorial to vast eons of evolutionary progress on this planet makes far less sense and also paints God as calling something “very good” that is actually full of evil, pain, and suffering for sentient creatures over vast spans of time – unrelated to “sin” or the “fall” of mankind. Such a view also paints God as being rather coy with us by not sharing with us the actual truth of our origins. If millions of years of life existing and evolving on this planet were a reality, it would have been relatively simple to say so in the Genesis account of origins, rather than to leave it to Darwin to explain. The official SDA position on origins paints God in a far better light – and also enjoys the weight of true empirical evidence.

I know that Pastor LeMert is not alone in these questions or thinking on this topic.  However, for a Pastor who is employed by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, it is a form of theft, of robbery from his employer, to be promoting ideas as “true” that strike directly at the clearly stated “fundamental” goals and ideas of the SDA Church.  After all, Pastor LeMert’s article strikes directly at what the Church stands for as a Fundamental part of the Gospel Message of Hope that we, as a church organization, are striving to share with the world. Sure, Pastor LeMert is now retired, so I guess he is free to say whatever he wants at this point. It’s just that he was preaching his theistic evolutionary ideas during his 41+ years of employment with the Church and is now actively undermining one of the key reasons for the very existence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.