News Notes
June 13, 2007


Join two college students as they travel more than 7,000 miles in a quest to sort out the mix of data, opinions, and emotions surrounding the question of our origins.

Addressing topics such as Darwinian evolution, faith, the geological column, catastrophism, dinosaurs, the big bang, and the nature of mankind, In the Beginning, tackles questions that confront Christian young people today.

This exciting new series produced by Paul Kim especially for high-school and college students seeks to provide them with an alternative model for understanding our origins.

Be sure to watch The Hope Channel for this important and exciting new series starting in July!


Hope Channel:
Wednesday 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. EST/Thu 00h00 GMT
Friday 8 p.m. PST/11 p.m. EST/Sabbath 03h00 GMT
Sabbath 1:30 p.m. PST/4:30 p.m. EST/20h30 GMT

Hope Channel International:
Monday 05h30 GMT/15h30 AEST
Thursday 22h30 GMT/Friday 08h30 AEST
Sabbath 11h00 GMT/21h00 AEST

I doubt very much that they will seriously investigate either

(a) the case for a long-aged earth and evolution, OR
(b) the case against any short-age evidence they turn up

http://news.adventist.org/data/2005/04/1115741499/index.html.en

"Just last year, following a series of faith and science discussions held over a period of three years, the Adventist Church reaffirmed its belief in the Biblical account of creation."

Yeah, that was what the administrators spun the result of the Faith and Science Conference into. That was NOT the conclusion of the participants.

/Bevin

http://www.hopetv.org/article.php?id=3

You can get Hope Channel in the USA via the internet

I had been corresponding with some folks at the Geoscience Research Institute about this. This is an exciting adventure for the church.

I am VERY cynical about this.

It has been very apparent over the years that the administrators have a strong desire to maintain the status-quo, and a history of punishing those who threaten it.

The F&S C "reaffirmation" was an instance of this. The actual evidence presented seriously threatened the status quo. Bill Johnson's summing up basically admitted that the situation was very unclear and the challenges to the traditional position were very strong - then the administrators claimed the conference "affirmed" the status quo.

I predict another "affirmation". Cynically I doubt that they will present the actual evidence for the long-age earth either in its breadth or its strength.

I hope I am wrong. I would like to see it come out with at least a "the situation is unclear, the traditional position is not supportable, the contrary evidence is strong" conclusion.

/Bevin

I get the distinct feeling, for some reason, that you would like to see the SDA church accept the evolutionary theory as fact and begin teaching that evolution, not special creation, accounts for everything as we see it in our world today. But of course that conflicts with the Word of God. I see nothing in the Bible that suggests that the time it took God to make the earth was actually almost endless aeons and that humans evolved in a struggle for survival from lower life-forms. Except for science's theories, no one would believe or teach that this is what the Bible says.

I realize that some SDA scientists, especially those specializing in the earth sciences, do believe that the earth is much older than the Bible seems to indicate. I respect that. I believe that science does show this. I don't know why there is a conflict between science and Scripture in this matter, but I choose to believe Scripture because I know it to be the inspired Word of God. I think that is the only choice open to SDAs who accept both the Bible and the writings of Ellen White as inspired by God.

The church would only change that view if the majority of SDAs accepted evolution as the only true explanation for the origin of life, and I seriously doubt that is ever going to happen. It would totally change our view of the Sabbath, for one thing, to say nothing of how it would radically change our view of Adam's original sin and of death that followed it. (Who, on this view, is Adam anyway?) It would have the effect also of causing SDAs to see less importance in the Sabbath, and after a while, it would even appear inexcusable to believe that God expects mere human beings to die rather than break the Sabbath and keep Sunday. After all, if life is a struggle for existence, and if God made it so, why would God require people to suffer death rather than keep a day that has lost its original significance if indeed there was no real creation but rather a process of millions of years in which our ancestors progressed by amoral means to become at last the intellectual and moral giants that we are today?

What! You cynical? You gotta be kidding. (Half joking here, Bevin.)

I was reading in William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," which was published some 100 years ago. He compares and contrasts different religious experiences. Interesting enough is that he includes those that replace religion with science. That is much more common today than it was when his book was originally written.

Many today are cynical because they have replaced religion with science. Yet they place as much faith in the laws of science as Christian place in the inspiration of the Word of God. One major scientific assumption is that of continuity. Science assumes that laws which govern nature today have always been the same. Of course there is no way they can prove that since we can't travel back in time and perform experiments of make observations. Yet they place faith in the assumption of continuity as much as a Christian places faith in the Bible. The Bible, of course, contradicts the idea of continuity (2 Peter 3:4-7) which turns natural science upside down.

I do not expect the SDA church in my lifetime to



but I would like to see a change similar to that many other denominations have made - that they accept that their members may have widely disparate views on this particular issue.

For example: they should encourage the SDA who made long-age presentations at the S&F C to publish such information in the Adventist Review, and they should discourage Clifford Goldstein's anti-evolution diatribes.

/Bevin

.some are cynical about religion and some are cynical about science. :-)