La Sierra University and the teaching of Evolution,

Wrong Every Time

(This was originally published in Adventist Today. I think it bears on the current controversy surrounding the teaching of biology at La Sierra University.)

In 1795, based on his geological research, James Hutton wrote: we find no vestige of a beginning–no prospective of an end. But he was wrong. Science eventually replaced his smooth, everlasting uniformitarianism.

As a twelve-year-old Adventist in 1962, I already was smarter than Hutton. I knew there had been a beginning about six thousand years ago, and there was an end two years in the future. The beginning was the ex nihilo creation of the entire globe six thousand years ago, a view rejected by all the theologians at the Andrews seminary. And my date for the end was based on the (now) dubious parallel between Adventist preaching about the judgment and Noah’s 120 years of preaching about impending judgment. (As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be . . .).

I learned in church school about uniformitarianism. Scientists blindly embraced the notion of peat bogs in Michigan and Scotland slowly, inevitably turning into coal seams. The sea floor would gradually accumulate enough limey deposits to create another Red Wall in a future Grand Canyon. Even as a twelve-year-old I knew this was nonsense. I knew that the coal seams were produced by the Flood burying the pre-flood tropical rain forests and that limestone was formed from the rapid burial of marine layers in the Flood. Ten years later I read William Agee’s The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record. This prominent secular geologist pointed out that the geologic record is full of compelling evidence of non-uniformity. Coal is not being formed in our world; massive limestone is not being created.

Science had been wrong. Which would have been a very gratifying thought except that I lived on Long Island, a terminal moraine created by continental glaciation. In church school I had been taught, a la George McCready Price, that so-called Ice Age deposits were actually Flood residue. Living on a moraine and studying geology, I was inexorably moved to the conclusion of all post-Price Adventist scientists: G. M. Price and the Church had been wrong. There had indeed been continental glaciation. And I realized the Church had been wrong about the coal, too, because we “knew” there had been no rain before the flood, but you needed rain to create the tropical rain forests for the flood to bury.

The church and science are always getting it wrong.

But now we have it right. The scientists know that the universe is about 14 billion years old and the theologians know that life is about six thousand years old. There will be no further corrections. There is no new data for science to discover; there are no new accommodations that theology will need to make. We finally have it right. . . . And I have a bridge to sell you.

If the Church builds its doctrine (officially required belief) on the assured results of scholarship, it is building on sand. If it makes a doctrine of historical or chronological conclusions drawn from the Bible by devout Adventists, it is building on quick sand. Because we are always getting it wrong. Whether it is George McCready Price arguing that the geologic column is a godless fiction, Robert Gentry arguing that the universe was created 6000 years ago or a union president pontificating to his constituents that the sun is younger than the earth, when public figures in the Church make strong chronological assertions and insist they are based on the Bible, they diminish the Bible’s credibility in the eyes our educated children, because they always get it wrong.

I have seen Bible reading transform drug addicts and watched its words soothe the terminally ill. I’ve seen obedience to its principles heal troubled marriages. The Bible is a good book. It is too good, too precious, to be discredited by our clumsy history writing.

Twelve-year-olds will always be wrong about something. My prayer is that they will not be wrong because they have been listening to their church.