SDAs Promoting Darwinian Evolution:

I was pretty surprised today to be sent this month’s copy of the Pacific Union Recorder, a Seventh-day Adventist publication representing the Pacific Union of the Church, containing an article written by Alberto Valenzuela, the Editor of the Recorder, entitled, “Honoring God Through Science and Scripture” (Link).  I was expecting a nice article supporting the Seventh-day Adventist perspective on Creation.  What I actually read was the forceful promotion of Darwinian-style evolutionary arguments in favor of sentient creatures existing, evolving, suffering, and dying on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Not since the years of La Sierra University promoting Darwinian evolution have I seen such blatant promotion of Darwinian evolution by an official Church organization. It just amazes me that I am compelled, yet again, to defend the official and historical position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church regarding a literal six-day Creation Week within relatively recent history, followed by a literal worldwide Noachian Flood that destroyed all land animal life on this planet, save that within Noah’s Ark – in the face of strong opposition from within.

The Arguments:

As usual, the arguments presented aren’t new, but have been around for decades.  The first has to do with the claim that believing in Darwinian evolution need not harm or reduce one’s faith in God.  The other arguments presented have to do with the physical evidence that is commonly cited as being best explained by Darwinian-style evolution.

Darwinism Doesn’t Harm Faith in God:

Valenzuela starts off with the following quote:

“Let us begin by acknowledging what science has done for us. Through the gift of discovery, God has enabled humanity to extend life, cure diseases, travel across continents and even into space, and feed billions. From the smallest microchip to the largest space telescope, science has lifted our quality of life. These advances aren’t accidents — they’re the fruits of minds that God has gifted.”

Sure, it is generally agreed that scientific investigation and discovery have significantly improved our lives.  Scientific methodologies are very important when it comes to rationally investigating our world and universe – to discover useful truths and knowledge regarding how to best function here.  However, what Valenzuela doesn’t seem to understand is that not all of the opinions of popular scientists are scientific. Not uncommonly, scientists will promote philosophical ideas as being based on the overwhelming weight of scientific methodologies, when what they’re really doing is presenting philosophical and/or methodological naturalism – a type of religion that does not have the weight of real scientific evidence in its corner.

Pope John Paul II:

Valenzuela counters by quoting Pope John Paul II:

“Many devout Christians, including Pope John Paul II, have affirmed that the theory of evolution does not conflict with belief in God. In his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, he said: “New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis.” He reminded believers that acknowledging biological processes doesn’t negate God’s creative hand.”

The question that Valenzuela gets wrong here is not if Darwinian evolution excludes God, but what kind of picture of God does Darwinian-style evolution paint?  If Darwinian evolution is true, then the God of the Bible is a sadistic liar.  And, I’m not the only one who comes to this conclusion.

James Barr:

Take, for example, the comments of the well-known secular Oxford Hebrew scholar, James Barr:

“Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that: (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience, (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story, and (c) Noah’s flood was understood to be worldwide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark. Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the “days” of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.”

Letter from Professor James Barr to David C.C. Watson of the UK, dated 23 April 1984.

Consider that Prof. Barr made this statement while personally considering the Genesis narrative to be false. He did not believe that God created life on this planet in just six literal days. He believed that life existed and evolved on this planet over billions of years, just like most mainstream scientists do today. Yet, he still was quite clear that the author(s) of the Genesis narrative intended to say something about real historical events. They did not intend to be figurative in their language. Now, it is quite a different thing to say that the Biblical authors were simply mistaken compared to the argument that suggests that they were intending to write symbolically or figuratively.

William Provine:

Or, consider the more pointed and direct observations of William Provine, late professor of biological sciences at Cornell University. A few years back, he gave a very interesting speech for a 1998 Darwin Day keynote address. As part of this speech, he explained the moral and philosophical implications of Darwinian Evolution – if followed to its most rational conclusion:

“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly:

• • No gods worth having exist;
  • No life after death exists;
  • No ultimate foundation for ethics exists;
  • No ultimate meaning in life exists; and
  • Human free will is nonexistent.”

“In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism.”

Provine, William B. [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life”, Abstract of Will Provine’s 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.

Academe January 1987, pp.51-52

God is Love?

And, as best as I can tell, Provine was right.  Sure, you can believe in a God and Neo-Darwinism at the same time, like Zeus or Odin or Thor, but your God won’t be the God of the Bible – the God of Love.  I mean, how can a God of Love create a world that is full of suffering and death, hundreds of millions of years before humans ever evolved on this planet, and call that world “good”, much less “very good” (Genesis 1:31)?  You’re talking about the suffering and death of untold billions of innocent creatures, before mankind sinned against God?  Is that truly reflective of the God of the Bible, who is described as suffering when even a small sparrow falls wounded to the ground? and caring about even the animals of Ninevah (Matthew 10:29; Jonah 4:11)? Not only that, but a God who created via a Darwinian mechanism while claiming that He did it in just six literal days would be lying to us, for what reason?  Really, it wouldn’t have been very hard to simply say that creation took vast eons of time – if that’s really what happened.

Really, what Darwinism does, and what Valenzuela is promoting here, is a situation where some of the strongest physical evidence in favor of God’s existence and in the credibility of the Bible as the very Word of God to humanity is significantly undermined. The basis of rational faith in God and His Word takes a huge hit when Darwinism is entertained.  I, for one, if I ever became convinced of the truth of NeoDarwinian evolution, would leave behind not only the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but Christianity as well.  The logical inconsistencies would simply be too much for me. It is for this reason that I am very sympathetic to Darwinian evolutionists who are also atheists or at least agnostic in their thinking, since this is the most rational conclusion given the truth of Darwinism.

Still, truth is truth. Personally, I’d rather know the reality of a painful truth than live with a pleasant lie.  So, what is this “overwhelming evidence” that seems so convincing to Valenzuela?

The Evidence:

Observed in Real Time:

Valenzuela puts NeoDarwinian Evolution on the very same footing as physical sciences that can be observed and studied in real time. He argues:

“Theories like gravity, germ theory, atomic theory, and evolution are foundational, not speculative.”

Antibiotic Resistance:

And, to a certain degree, Valenzuela is right.  Evolutionary changes, based on random mutation and natural selection, the Darwinian mechanism, can be observed and studied in real time.  Take antibiotic resistance, for example (Link).  Antibiotic resistance is based on random genetic mutations that can be preferentially selected based on function, on the “survival of the fittest”, very rapidly, in an antibiotic-rich environment. Antibiotic resistance is not only real, it can and does often evolve very rapidly within a population of bacteria. The specific mutations that cause the evolution of antibiotic resistance can be determined as well.  It’s all a matter of uncontrovertible fact.  It’s observable Darwinian-style evolution in action – no question.

Humpty Dumpty:

So, there you go, evolution is a fact since it can be observed in action in real time.  The problem here is that this type of evolution is based on the loss of a pre-existing interaction between antibodies and antigens.  Change the antigen just slightly in a multitude of different ways, and the antibody will not attach to it as well, and a degree of antibiotic resistance is suddenly gained.  It’s like breaking Humpty Dumpty.  It’s so easy to do because there are so many ways to do it.

Never Observed:

Evolution of The Bacterial Flagellar Motor:

Now, consider what it would take to evolve something that is not based on the loss or disruption of a pre-existing interaction, something that requires a minimum number of different parts working together in a specific arrangement at the same time – like a bacterial flagellar motility system that requires around 40 different types of protein parts all working in a specific 3D arrangement at the same time. The problem with this type of evolution is that there simply are not enough viable, potentially beneficial “stepping stones” at this level of functional complexity. The amount of time required to evolve any one of the multitude of required steps along any proposed evolutionary pathway requires far far too much time – trillions upon trillions of years!  (Link)

And, that’s the basic problem with the Darwinian mechanism in a nutshell. It just doesn’t work beyond the very lowest levels of function complexity in what anyone would consider to be a reasonable amount of time.  All of the examples of evolution in action that are given are all low-level examples. There are no observable examples of evolution in action that require more than a couple hundred specifically arranged amino acid residues.  It’s just that the minimum gap distance is sequence space between stepping stones rapidly gets too far for evolutionary mechanisms to cross this side of a practical eternity of time.  It just doesn’t happen and, statistically, cannot have happened.

Kenneth Miller’s Arguments:

Yet, Valenzuela quotes well-known Christian evolutionists, such as Kenneth Miller, who argue that such things can easily happen.

“Likewise, Kenneth Miller, a professor of physics at Brown University, states that “rigid creationists look for God in what science cannot explain, while scientists who are religious look for God in what science does understand and explain.”

Yes, Kenneth Miller is a Catholic Christian and an evolutionist. He has proposed ways to get complex multipart systems to evolve via random mutation and function-based selection. As one of the stepping stones toward flagellar evolution, for example, he proposed an intermediate stepping stone known as the Type III Secretory System (TTSS) – a bacterial toxin injector comprise of around 10 of the 40 required proteins in the flagellar system (Link). Of course, like flightless birds on windy islands or cavefish without eyes, those systems that require fewer parts to work came into existence after the more complex systems.  That’s right, the TTSS system devolved from the fully formed bacterial flagellar motility system, not the other way around – just like cavefish without eyes devolved from fish with eyes and flightless birds devolved from birds that could fly.  You see, again, it is far far easier to evolve downhill than it is to evolve uphill because there are so many many more ways to break Humpty Dumpty compared with the very few ways to put him back together again, starting with all of the broken pieces – even if a few of the broken pieces may have some kind of useful lower-level function.

The Fossil Record:

But what about the fossil record?  Are the “missing links” being discovered all the time?  Valenzuela argues:

“Let’s consider one example: the fossil record. Creationists often claim that evolution is false because there are “gaps” in the fossil timeline. But those gaps are steadily being filled. The fossil Tiktaalik, discovered in 2004, is a stunning example—a creature that bridges the gap between fish and land animals, exactly as evolutionary predictions suggested. That is not chance—it is evidence.”

Tiktaalik is a unique lobe-finned fish designed with gills, fin rays, and fishy body scales.  And, there are other similar lobe-finned fish living today.  There are even fish, alive today, that can walk on land with their fins – surviving outside of water for fairly long periods of time (like the mud skipper).  Also, subsequently discovered details are a bit problematic for Tiktaalik being such a clear “missing link” as Valenzuela claims.  In 2014, evolutionary science writer Colin Schultz stated that Tiktaalik had “mobile rear fins,” not legs (Link). In addition, a diagram of the fossilized pelvis—while elaborate and enlarged—clearly shows that it’s not attached to the spinal column as one would expect with a true tetrapod (Link). See also: Link

In short, it really doesn’t matter.  What if there really were a fish-like creature that had lungs and actual feet with a pelvis to support the real legs.  What would that really prove?  Without a viable evolutionary mechanism, one is left with the only rational conclusion that any such creature would have had to have been deliberately designed and created by an intelligent designer.   If this designer created such creatures over millions of years of time to suffer and die, then that designer would be evil.  If, however, the Designer created such creatures in an initially perfect world without suffering or death for sentient creatures, then that Designer would match the God described by the Bible.

Evidence for Young Age:

Beyond this, the weight of the evidence from the Fossil Record and Geologic Column strongly supports the Biblical story of a worldwide Noachian-style Flood within relatively recent history.  Take, for example, that many large dinosaur bones contain soft tissues with sequencable proteins and even fragments of DNA, as well as measurable amounts of radiocarbon.  None of these should exist if these bones are more than a few tens of thousands of years old (Link, Link).  Consider also that dinosaur eggs, worldwide, show features that are most consistent with a worldwide watery catastrophe (Link).

The Geologic Column, some of which can be very clearly seen in places like the Grand Canyon, shows very clear features of rapid catastrophic formation, to include a striking lack of expected surface erosion between layers (Link, Link).

Testimony of Ellen White:

Consider also that, at least for Seventh-day Adventists and the leadership of the Church, it should matter what Ellen White has to say about Darwinian Evolution and the notion that life has existed and evolved on this planet over the course of hundreds of millions of years. After all, who was more inspired by God with privileged information regarding the origins of our world? – Ellen White or Pope John Paul II?

Although a fan of true scientific research and investigation, Ellen White wrote extensively about the literal nature of the Creation Week and the literal worldwide nature of Noah’s Flood and how it destroyed all land animal life save for what was on the Ark – and extensively reworked the surface of the Earth (Link).

“God is the author of science,” and therefore, “rightly understood, science and the written word agree, and each sheds light on the other” (CT 426).

Science, so-called, and religion will be placed in opposition to each other, because finite men do not comprehend the power and the greatness of God” (Ev 593)

“Geology has been thought to contradict the literal interpretation of the Mosaic record of the creation. Millions of years, it is claimed, were required for the evolution of the earth from chaos; and in order to accommodate the Bible to this supposed revelation of science, the days of creation are assumed to have been vast, indefinite periods, covering thousands or even millions of years. Such a conclusion is wholly uncalled for. The Bible record is in harmony with itself and with the teaching of nature” (Ed 128-129).

“I have been shown that without Bible history, geology can prove nothing” (3SG 93). Ellen G. White 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” and added that “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” (3SG 93).

Closing Remarks:

Regardless of one’s opinion regarding the truth of Neo-Darwinism or Creationism, God-included or not, the fact of the matter is that Alberto Valenzuela is clearly out of line with the official position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on this topic.  Therefore, I do not understand why he was placed in a leadership position as a paid representative of the SDA Church.  How is it that someone who promotes views that are fundamentally opposed to the basic pillars of the SDA Church can be an Editor of one of the main Journals of the Church? – the Pacific Union Recorder? – with a distribution to ~76,000 homes of church members (Link). Is there no oversight here?  After all, the article written and published by Valenzuela strikes very directly at what the Church stands for as a fundamental part of the Gospel Message of Hope that we should be striving to share with the world.