Chapter 68 Faith and Science Conferences

Faith and Science Conferences

In 2001, the Church announced it was going to hold a three year cycle of conferences on Faith and Science. Among Adventists, “Faith and Science” are code words for earth history. The Bible says “In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them.” Genealogies give 4000 B. C. as an approximate date of that creation. The fossil record says single-celled organisms appeared on earth and over long ages evolved into modern life forms. Current conventional geochronolgy dates the beginning of this process at about 3.8 billion years ago.

Publicly, the Adventist Church had always been absolutely confident in 6 days/6000 years. Every article on the subject published in denominational magazines, every chapter in every book published by the denomination presented 6 days/6000 years as the clear teaching of the Bible and the best interpretation of scientific data.

In fact, for decades Adventist academics had debated the tension between the physical evidence and the Biblical narrative. In conversations with scientists I would hear about meetings convened to explore issues of origins. But I never saw any reports of these meetings in any denominational publications. In the years immediately before these Faith and Science Conferences, one of the outcomes of these closeted discussions was the general abandonment of the Ecological Zonation Theory. This had been Harold Clark's attempt to reconcile the geologic column with the Flood. At the time he proposed it, it was welcomed as a creative, responsible effort to be faithful to both the Bible and geology. But over time its supposed fit with the paleontological record proved untenable and it quietly disappeared from serious Adventist discussion of origins. These debates were never publicized. The papers presented were not widely circulated. As far as the larger church was concerned, Adventist scholars were universally confident of the scientific defensibility of our creation orthodoxy.

Now the Church was publicly acknowledging there were issues to be explored. I read the announcement of the Faith and Science Conferences with mixed feelings. My ambivalence was shared by others. Conservatives worried the conferences would bring into the open the paucity of scientific support for Adventist creationism. This could be the first step down the slippery slope. Liberals worried precisely the opposite. Bringing into the open the pervasiveness of doubts among Adventist science professors about the plausibility of 6 days/6000 years might become the catalyst for a purge.

It was impossible for the Church to change its doctrine. Twenty million people looked to the Church as their home, their spiritual guide. At least ninety-five percent of these believers had unquestioning confidence in our historic doctrine of Creation and 6 days/6000 years. They not only believed this is what the Bible teaches, they were sure there was massive scientific support for a recent creation and a world wide flood. If the denomination gave any sign of waffling on this doctrine it would unsettle the faith of millions.

On the other hand, no amount of pontification would change the fact that the weight of scientific evidence in support of an ancient creation was constantly augmenting. Those closest to the argument were being driven increasingly to the choice between utterly irreconcilable authorities—the Bible and Nature.

The only way forward for the Church that I could imagine was to reaffirm what it had always 

believed while perhaps acknowledging that individuals in the church were driven to aberrant views through honest, conscientious study.

The first conference brought together a select group of Adventist presidents, theologians and scientists from all over the world. They met at a hotel Ogden, Utah. I never heard why such an out-of-the-way location was chosen. I theorized it was to isolate the conference from the potential of being swamped by interested lay people.

The publisher of Adventist Today tried to secure an invitation to the conference for me as the editor of Adventist Today. Elder Lowell Cooper, the General Conference vice president organizing the conference responded that he could not allow Adventist Today access as a matter of fairness. If he allowed us in how could he say no to all the other people who were also clamoring for access to the meetings?

I replied to Elder Cooper that I understood his position and respected it, however, as the editor of a magazine committed to transparency and openness in the church, I was obligated to come to the conference venue and report as effectively as I could even if I did not attend the meetings.

On the shuttle from the airport to the hotel, I visited with a conservative theology teacher from Southern Adventist University. (Of course, there are only conservative theology teachers at SAU.) We had not met before but we knew of each other by reputation. He said he'd often read Adventist Today. His highest priority was to preserve the Church’s mission. God’s remnant church was called to preach God’s authority as Creator and Lawgiver. Surely, if the Church compromised its commitment to a literal reading of Genesis, it would lose its distinctiveness. It would lose its reason for existence.

I talked about the need for the Church to provide spiritual care for its scientists who were compelled by the evidence they worked with every day to believe life had been here a lot longer than six thousand years. He acknowledged my concern without giving an inch in his commitment to enforced doctrinal rectitude in Adventist education.

At the hotel I fell into conversation with a couple of physics professors. Their most optimistic dream for the conference was that there would be significant discussion of the issues and no consensus statement would be made. Because, they said, they could not imagine any conceivable “consensus statement” they could assent to.

That evening as I was eating at a small restaurant across the street from the hotel, a member of the organizing committee, found me and said he was bringing me a personal invitation from Lowell Cooper to participate fully in the meetings throughout Sabbath. Once the conference proper started on Sunday morning, I would need to be excluded, but until then I was welcome, including sharing meals. I was touched by this courtesy.

I hurried over to the meeting as soon as I finished my burrito. When I walked into the meeting room, people were gathered in groups. I stood there for a minute or two trying to see what was going on. Joe Galusha, a biologist friend, came over and explained they were gathered in groups according to the month of their birthdays. I found the March group. It consisted of Marvin Moore, Bob Cushman and Ed Zinke. Our assignment was to tell one another what we hoped for from the meeting.  

 

Marvin and Bob both hoped for civility, openness and genuine dialogue (my words but their sentiments). Ed Zinke spoke of recently rereading The Great Controversy with its championship of “the Bible and Bible Only” and its promise there would be a people in the last days who would accept the Bible above the false dogmas of science or any other source of knowledge. Zinke hoped the conference would result in a strong affirmation that Adventists were “that people.” (Ed was a trained theologian, but he was working as an executive in his wife's natural foods business. I strongly suspected his dollars had more to do with his presence than his scholarship.) I then talked about my desire for openness to ideas and to people so that our children would not be squeezed out of the church. 

 

After the group split up, Ed and I prayed together. They were clumsy prayers. What each of us really wanted, was divine intervention against the views the other represented. Ed represented to me the kind of doctrinaire biblicism that would exclude most scientists from the church. To him, I was the most dangerous kind of liberal–claiming to love and respect the church while questioning the fundamental assumption underlying its authority. He prayed truth would triumph. I prayed for the triumph of love.

After this small group exercise, we reassembled for the keynote address by Jan Paulsen, the General Conference president. He mentioned that this series of conferences grew out of a request originally voted by the Geoscience Research Institute (GRI) in 1998. GRI was the church office tasked with studying and defending the Church's doctrine of creation. In 1998, he, Paulsen, had been a vice-president of the Church and the chair of the GRI board. So, he said, we could understand his personal interest in the matters before us at the conference. 

 

He appealed for civility and mutual respect in our interactions, a firm confidence in the Bible as the word of God, a healthy skepticism about some of the claims of science, an openness to learn new things, an awareness of the world church and its members. He specifically questioned the uniformitarian ideas that undergird radiometric dating. He did not expect the conference to settle once and for all the questions surrounding origins.

The Sabbath morning sermon was preached by Dwight Nelson. He did a good job rhetorically. He tried to be civil, but in the end argued that science is irrelevant to the study of earth history. He argued our theory of earth history (at least that portion of earth history which involves fossils) must be compatible with the God of love described in 1 John 4. Perfect love casts out all fear. Since evolution necessarily involves fear it cannot have been God’s mode of creation. No matter what scientists find in their research, their conclusions must reconciled with the fact that life first appeared on earth 6000 years ago. Dwight told of listening to scientists as they struggled with the issues of earth history, but it was clear he listened only as a pastor. He worried about their struggles. He had no interest in their data. His own understanding of earth history was impervious to any so-called evidence that contradicted it.

After lunch, most of the conference participants went to Temple Square in Salt Lake City. I was invited by a scientist to join a group headed out to look at geology. We examined horn corals in an exposure of limestone in a road cut. A paleontologist familiar with area talked about the difficulty of accounting for the ecological assemblage in this formation if it had been deposited by the flood. Further east we looked at varves in a mudstone formation exposed in a canyon wall. Varves are layers of sediment laid down in lakes. The time it takes for one layer to form can vary from hours to years. In one part of the wall neat horizontal layers had been dramatically scrunched together and folded. The group had no particular interest in how this formation fit into Creationist or Evolutionist macro theories. They were just studying rocks and enjoying the commentary of the paleontologist who had studied the area and knew something of the overall geology.

Throughout the afternoon we observed the dramatic wave cut benches that mark the varying water levels of Lake Bonneville, a huge Pleistocene lake whose surface had been 400 feet higher than the present elevation of the Great Salt Lake. Lake Bonneville would have inundated all the present cities along the front of the Wasatch range–Provo, SLC, Ogden, Logan.

We returned to the hotel for a presentation by retired theologian George Reid. He began by narrating an encounter he had with students from Wesley Seminary which is located at American University in the D. C. area. He made much of the school's loss of religious identity. He said these students were fascinated by the way the Adventist story integrates so much of human experience and scripture. They went from curiosity to fascination.

He referred to the collapse of membership among mainline Protestants over the past 30 years and warned that if we compromised on our commitment to the plenary authority of the Bible we would follow them into decline.

Late that evening I was visiting in the lobby when I saw William Johnson, editor of the official church paper, The Adventist Review, and Don Schneider, president of the Church in North America. They had just arrived from the airport after speaking appointments elsewhere earlier in the day. I walked over to greet them while they were waiting to register at the front desk. Bill reached out to shake my hand,then embraced me. He immediately asked if there were going to be field trips. I told him, No there were not field trips planned, that I wasn’t an official participant, that I was there as a representative for Adventist Today. He then asked in kind of an agitated way, “Why are they having the conference here?”

I got the impression that he felt quite put out by the location and was expecting the adventure and stimulation of field trips as at least partial compensation for traveling to such a place for this conference. I was flattered he thought I would know information he was not yet privy to. He then turned to introduce me to Schneider. Schneider brushed aside the introduction. “Of course, I know John.” Then responding to my remark that I wasn’t officially invited, he asked, “Well, the meetings are open aren’t they?” 

 

“No, they aren’t.” I said. “I guess they were worried too many crazies would show up if they opened the meetings to everyone.” He shook his head and they turned to greet others. I went to bed.

Sunday morning the conference got down to business. I was excluded from the meetings, but through friends had access to all the papers and reports on the debates.