Response to Alberto Valenzuela

In a recent article titled “Honoring God Through Science and Scripture,” Pacific Union Recorder editor Alberto Valenzuela contends that Adventists should reconsider the traditional belief in a literal six-day creation as described in Genesis and instead accept Darwinian evolution. He further advocates that Adventist schools should no longer teach the biblical account of creation and the flood as history, arguing that embracing materialism is necessary for the church’s credibility and witness. Underlying this position is the assumption that the historical narrative presented in Scripture is mistaken, while evolutionary theory and deep time provide the correct account of origins.

Had Valenzuela consulted with Bible-believing scientists, however, he would have encountered entire fields of inquiry that point unmistakably to the truth of biblical history. He would have discovered that the layers of sedimentary rock in the geologic column look young, and were deposited over vast areas in catastrophic conditions, just as we would expect in a global flood; that the continents are eroding far too fast to be millions of years old; that the fossils throughout the geologic record were buried in water-borne sediments until the very top of the column, where we find them in natural traps. Again, exactly what we would expect from a global flood.

He would have apprehended the research done on women’s mitochondrial DNA that shows that they all descended from a common ancestor even evolutionists call Eve a mere 6000 years ago, and that men’s common ancestor lived about 4500 years ago; that mice, rats, and humans share an astonishing number of long, identical DNA strands, confirming a recent creation (millions of years of mutations would have scrambled these sequences); that even evolutionists who have studied the math know that it would take the ages of multiple universes for mammals to come up with a handful of specific, helpful genetic mutations. And he would have heard of all of the biomolecules preserved in fossils throughout the geologic column, many of which should only last thousands of years in ideal environmental conditions.

We could have discussed the hurdles preventing life arising unaided from minerals, and how the hurdles reduce the probability of such an event to exactly zero. When the building blocks of life are synthesized in a lab, the useless, harmful molecules outnumber the useful ones a trillion to one, and that one only has a 50/50 chance of being the right chirality. And, even if all the building blocks were present, the fundamental principles of chemistry would never allow the development of life by chance. Deliberate misinformation in news releases has led millions of people to believe that scientists have created life in the laboratory, but in reality, as we learn more about how cells work, the goal of recreating the simplest organism in a lab vanished over the horizon long ago.

There are entire scientific disciplines such as taphonomy and genetics, the academic journal articles of which could be scrubbed of their digressive and irrelevant obeisance to evolutionism and republished in creationist journals. Interpretations of the same empirical findings would make vastly more sense as a result.

These examples represent only the tip of the iceberg.

I have heard many Adventists and other Christians disparage apologetics, but articles like Valenzuela’s convince me that we and our children desperately need to know the real scientific and historical data that undergird our faith, and we need Bible-believing Adventists to engage in philosophy and epistemology.

How may Adventists know how extraordinarily robust the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is? How many know of the vast pile of biblical manuscripts that have been preserved for so many centuries, some NT manuscripts even dating back to the second century AD and some OT manuscripts dating back to the second century BC? How many know of the discoveries that have shown that both New and Old Testaments have been preserved unchanged, and how unprecedented such preservation of ancient manuscripts is? How many are aware of the archaeological work done in the Holy Land and elsewhere that so thoroughly corroborates the names, places, and dates specified in the Old Testament?

Given the accessibility of this information, why is it shared so infrequently within church settings? If God exists, then He is the arbiter of reality. Truth is not merely a social construct, and truth still matters. Regularly presenting this material within congregations would strengthen our faith, support the younger generations, and help believers critically engage with the inevitable onslaught of scientific and philosophical claims fraught with hidden atheistic assumptions.

On the great day of judgment, when at last every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, will anyone—righteous or wicked—still believe in evolution? When the One who humbled Himself to death, even death on a cross, is exalted to the highest place in the universe and crowned King of Kings and Lord of Lords, will there be anyone left who believes that, in order to win at the game of life, one must beat out all the competition? When Satan himself recognizes that his insatiable desire to claw his way to the top has only resulted in his own destruction, will anyone doubt that God’s law of love applies, and has always applied, to the whole of creation?

Richard Lewontin, atheist, and former chair of biology and zoology at Harvard University, wrote

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

This commitment to materialism explains how so many scientists can, with a wave of the hand, brush aside the complete absence of evidence for crucial puzzle pieces in secularism’s great narrative—pieces like the origin of the universe, the laws of physics, the origin of life, the generation of information to make that life more complex, and countless other things on which our existence is contingent. Ultimately, many of these same scientists—when backed into a logic corner from which they cannot escape—profess a deep faith in some yet-undiscovered mechanism that can intelligently design an entire, interwoven universe of unimaginable, interdependent complexity—and do it all while utterly lacking intelligence or foresight.

Why give credence to a worldview that only makes sense in an atheistic framework? Why capitulate to a worldview that dogmatically asserts patently absurd, counter-intuitive, mystifying, unscientific claims, and only exists because of a dogged, intentionally closed-minded, absolute adherence to materialism? Countless churches have embraced theistic evolution and lost their mission. Not a single church that has plunged over that cliff has come back. The Seventh-day Adventist Church decidedly stepped back from that cliff at the 2010 General Conference session. Let’s not inch our way to the edge again to cast longing glances down at the ruins of our fallen comrades.