Comment on General Biology Seminar 111A to be revised by David Read.

I’m also very pleased that the Review is covering this, but before we start congratulating each other, I would note that Mark Kellner’s article is a bit vague about what is going on at LaSierra. The article is easy to misread; if you’re not reading it very carefully, with good background knowledge, it sound as though Louie Bishop was complaining only about the new seminar class (111A), and hence Ricardo Graham’s decision that that seminar be reviewed and revised answers the whole controversy.

But that isn’t the case. Louie Bishop was disciplined in the spring of ’09 and temporarily held out of school in the fall of ’09. The seminar class didn’t even exist until the fall of ’09, so of course it could not have been the reason Bishop was disciplined. He was disciplined for complaining about the biology faculty’s Darwinism, and the fact that they denigrate traditional Adventist teachings.

And that’s also the reason why this site exists. Shane set up this site, and Sean and Shane got David Asscherick to write an open letter, because all of the biology instructors at LaSierra–all of them–are Darwinists and teach Darwinism as truth, in derogation of Adventist origins doctrine. Thanks largely to Shane, Sean and David’s efforts at publicizing this problem, LaSierra decided to create a special freshman seminar class (the now infamous biology 111A) that was supposed to help integrate science and Adventism.

The seminar class was hosted by Lee Greer, one of the Darwinist biology professors, and simply became an additional venue, an additional opportunity, to inculcate Darwinism and denigrate Adventism. John Webster delivered a lecture in which he strongly implied that in the conflict between Darwinism and Adventism, Adventism has lost and is going to have to change its origins doctrine. He was immediately followed by Warren Johns, who lectured on a theory that the creation story of Genesis 1 does not describe the creation of the world, but rather the dedication of the temple/cosmos, and is to be understood figuratively, not literally. (See this page: http://www.educatetruth.com/la-sierra-evidence/presentations/biology-seminar-111a-class-videos/.)

But, again, the seminar class was not the original problem, and was not the reason Louie Bishop was twiced disciplined, although he did complain about the seminar class once it became apparent what it really was. The underlying problem is the fact that Darwinism is promoted in all the other biology classes.

So now we have two problems 1) Darwinist professors teaching Darwinism as truth in the pre-existing classes, and 2) a seminar class that tells the freshman that they need to try to understand Genesis in a new way, a way different from how Adventists have always understood it. Ricardo Graham has promised to review and make some “adjustments” to the seminar class (problem two). But the seminar could be completely eliminated, and it would not solve the underlying problem (problem one). It would only solve the problem created by LaSierra’s response to negative publicity.

Unfortunately, the article is susceptible to being read as saying that the problem has been solved, when in reality, the underlying problem has not even been addressed.

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