General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

It's good to have you for this presentation on evolution and spiritualism, especially as time comes to a close.

This is a subject that has captured my attention quite recently, and I say that to imply that what I say to you is not probably the last word on it, but I hope to excite your mind to get thinking on this subject.

Evolutionary thought, spiritualism, and the end of time.

There are 2 disciplines that have significant impact on all cultures, especially in the West.

During the modern times, it looked like Religion will be snuffed out, but religion is alive.

And within these 2 disciplines, there are 2 subjects, 2 topics that have had some quite significant resurgence in recent times.

And I'm thinking about spirituality or spiritualism and evolution.

What concerned me as I thought about this is that is there any connection between these 2 subjects and I was quite surprised to read something from great controversy that sparked my thinking on this issue.

There Ellen White says, spiritualism teaches that man is the creature of progression, that it is his destiny from his birth to progress even to eternity toward the Godhead.

Now having studied a little bit into the philosophy of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, my attention quickly went to the connection between spiritualism and evolution.

You see the idea of evolution that is addressed in that topic is not the 1 we are commonly used to.

When we talk about evolution, we are thinking about biological evolution or organic evolution, which is fine because, I mean, if we lose this, the Sabbath goes, the sanctuary goes, and the Seventh-day Adventist church actually goes.

But as I think about it, it seems to me that if there is indeed a connection between evolution and spiritualism, then this debate, this issue has far larger implications for the cosmic conflict.

So come along as we explore a little bit the concept of evolution.

There is a particular idea of evolution that should cause all Seventh-day Adventists some concern and that notion is that evolution is the origination of species of animals and plants by a naturalistic process of development from earlier forms and not by a process of special creation.

This is the concept of evolution that causes concern in recent times, but you'll be surprised to know that the idea of organic evolution was already there in ancient times.

The ancients tinkered with it, the Greek philosophers.

So Anaximander, for example, knew and taught that evolution or life began in the sea and that it began with simpler life forms and to more complex life forms.

The first century Roman philosopher Lucretius also believed and taught.

He actually toyed with the idea of the survival of the fittest.

His idea was that life initially began spontaneously.

But see all these ideas about evolution were really philosophical speculations.

It was not until modern times that people have to contend with the material basis of evolution.

We are talking about a time when mining took on great strides in the West.

This is the time when canals were being dug.

Now people began to look at the structure of rocks and they saw all these stratifications.

Then their attention were turned to fossils.

How would you explain some of the phenomena they were seeing?

How is it that you had fossils, marine organism fossils, on top of mountains?

How do you explain the fact that as you looked at these fossils, some of them, some of the, I mean, organisms, seem to have been extinct.

And then they realized that as they looked at the rock formations, there were stratifications.

Therefore any theory that would try to deal with these issues had to account for not only the stratification, but the phenomenon which seemed to be that Simpler life forms were at the bottom of the strata.

We don't have the time to go into the details, but 2 main theories were propounded.

But the second 1, which caught on and which really prepared the way for Darwin was what we call uniformitarianism.

And these names I have there were all the people who tried to make attempts to explain the phenomenon of fossils that they were seeing.

You have Hook Cuvier, George Cuvier is 1 that we could spend a lot of time on because he actually put biology on his footing and his research was used by others to develop evolutionary ideas.

Comte de Buffon propounded evolutionary ideas, but Lamarck already had serious evolutionary theories that he propounded.

So when Darwin came on the scene, evolutionary ideas were already in the air.

Especially the concept of uniformitarianism helped Darwin propound his ideas because, you see, what uniformitarianism says is that when you look at the rocks and the sediments, it must have taken a very long time for these things to have formed and therefore the idea of long time had been developed before Darwin came on the scene.

Malthus, the economist, already had given Darwin ideas that helped him to develop the concept of the survival of the fittest.

But what do we have to say about spiritualism?

See it's interesting that at the same time that organic evolution was being developed, the idea of spiritualism, I'm talking about modern spiritualism, was also being developed.

Now we are accustomed to thinking about spiritualism in terms of the occult and sorcery and magic and stuff like that.

But modern spiritualism had a larger agenda.

Modern spiritualism sees both natural and human evolution as a self-disclosing revelation of the divine.

This is the broader concept under which modern spiritualism developed.

So for modern spiritualism, there was an attempt to reconcile science and religion.

And the way to do it was through evolution.

And if you have read about Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, the Theosophical Movement, they saw things that way.

I have this quote that will address that very point.

While limited in its view of evolution from the standpoint of occult philosophy, this is talking about Darwinianism, the Darwinian theory was nevertheless the greatest advance in basic scientific inquiry since the time of Newton and was indispensable in preparing the ground for the conception of spiritual evolution outlined in the secret doctrine.

Now the secret doctrine claims that the universe is in an evolutionary self-discovery And this is the grand agenda of spiritualism.

It's interesting that at this same time, if you are into philosophy, Hegel's philosophy was also expounding evolutionary thoughts.

You probably have read about Hegel's dialectic of the spirit where he talks about the spirit evolving.

He has thesis and antithesis and then the spirit moves on until the absolute is developed.

This is at the same time that spiritualism is developing that Hegel also comes up with this view.

Now by the 1880s, it looked as if spiritualism was on the decline.

But by 1960, it was revived under the banner of what is called synthetic spiritualities.

The New Age movement is 1 of these synthetic spiritualities.

These are people who promote spirituality by developing things within yourself.

That is what synthetic spiritualities are.

And they also seek to construct a worldview which reconciles science with religion, and they also do it through the means of evolution.

I have this quote and it's very interesting.

Evolution becomes an overarching concept that incorporates the sense of deep time and imbues the development of a global spiritual consciousness as an evolutionary advance for the cosmos.

So evolution captures a bigger subject that we need to pay attention to.

I spoke earlier on about Teilhard de Jardin.

He claims, and he has a lot of following among the New Ages, he claims that this world began and evolved in 4 stages.

We are not at the fourth stage yet, But he says that the world is put together by psychic and physic energy.

He says that the world began with what he calls cosmogenesis, which moved to biogenesis, which then moved to neurogenesis, that's the development of consciousness, and finally we are headed for the omega point, which is when we become divine.

So people, new ages, rely on ideas like those propounded by Teja de Jardin.

Others look to the East and try to incorporate science with the philosophy and the religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism.

What I found fascinating as I research this is the fact that physics is beginning to lend support to this idea.

I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but those of you who are interested in quantum theory will tell you that physics is now helping us to believe these days that We can be definite about much concerning ultimate reality.

Now, what quantum theory and physics and evolution has done, especially evolution, is to create a worldview through which to think, a worldview that underlines many disciplines of study.

We are told that the particles that make our universe are basically 2.

Fermions are what comprise neutrons and electrons and so forth.

But then we are told by physics these days that besides the fermions, we have what are also called bosons.

These deal with relationships, consciousness, and this is the basis of evolution.

Bosons are in the nature of forces, electromagnetic forces, gravitational forces, and nuclear forces.

The upshot of all of this development is this, that today many physicists and many scientists believe that nature is infused with divinity.

That nature is divine and it's alive with energy or soul.

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

And this is a lesson against procrastination.

Standish sent out an email asking for titles for this and I didn't send it back quick enough.

And my first reaction was how many dinosaurs were on the ark?

But then I got to thinking about it and there's some interesting issues.

There's some Adventists that don't believe there were any on the ark.

Some Adventists that don't believe that God created them at all.

So the first question is, are dinosaurs real?

If dinosaurs are not real, but they're the creation of evolutionary scientists to confuse us, then the answer to how many dinosaurs were on the ark is 0.

In conjunction with Southwestern Adventist University, we have a dinosaur dig site in eastern Wyoming that you all can participate yourselves.

The website is dino dig dot SWAU dot edu.

Every year about a thousand specimens are collected.

Guess how many elephants we found in there?

So that is going to bring up another interesting question.

Why, if it didn't evolve, why are dinosaurs there but no big mammals?

Maybe it's because they were all on the ark.

If you look at a dinosaur jaw, the bone that holds the teeth is the dentary for dentists.

He likes to look at bones that hold teeth.

Notice behind it anyway that there are several bones between the jawbone that holds the teeth and the skull.

And that the jawbone that holds the teeth does not articulate with the skull.

We have a single jaw bone and in it it holds the teeth so the bone that holds the teeth is what 1?

So with mammals we have a dentary squamosal jaw articulation.

So if we find fossils that have more than 1 bone in the jaw and the 1 that holds the teeth doesn't articulate with the jaw, we know we have a reptile.

Hence, we would know that Daspletosaurus, Tyrannosaurus are reptiles.

In fact reptiles, I mean sorry, in fact dinosaurs are reptiles that behave like mammals.

On the left is a triceratops, and on the right is an elephant.

They're both about the same size Notice how the limbs are on the triceratops They come straight down out of the body just like a horse a camel or a person Modern reptiles don't have that Do you anybody everybody seen an alligator or a crocodile?

So these are not big alligators, contrary to what some creationists have said.

You let an iguana live for 900 years and it becomes a dinosaur.

So dinosaurs are real, and they're reptiles behaving like mammals, so were they on...

What if God did not create the dinosaurs?

What if they were created by man or Satan?

If God did not create the dinosaurs then there wouldn't have been any on the ark, right?

How many of you believe that God didn't create dinosaurs?

Huh, fewer than I would guess, about a third.

All right, first of all, can Satan create dinosaurs?

I think it's unlikely that Satan has the power to create life.

1 of the reasons that he rebelled in the first place was he wasn't invited to join Christ and God in the anticipated creation of the earth.

That's found in Story of Redemption pages 13 and 14.

Why then would we think that he could create something as grand as a dinosaur?

Then comes a question, did man create dinosaurs?

Some Adventists believe that dinosaurs are the product of amalgamation.

Ellen White makes this the following statement, Every species of animal which God had created were preserved in the ark.

The confused species, which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood.

Since dinosaurs are extinct today, many Adventists believe they must not have been on the Ark.

They must have been the product of amalgamation.

We use the term today in amalgam, which is the blend of metals that dentists use in filling teeth.

What are you going to blend to get a dinosaur?

How do you get it to be 50 or 80 feet long?

Amalgamation doesn't seem to fit, at least as it applies to dinosaurs.

Let me give you a couple other quotes that you might not have heard.

This is from Spiritual Gifts, Volume 4, page 121.

Soon after the flood, the race began to rapidly decrease in size and in length of years.

There was a class of very large animals which perished at the flood.

God knew that the strength of man would decrease and these mammoth animals could not be controlled by feeble man.

Wow, not every animal that God created was on the Ark.

Now, that doesn't mean Ellen White isn't a prophet.

I remember back to the plagues that fell on Egypt.

And in 1 of the plagues, all of the cattle were killed.

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Time is 1 of the great focuses of contention in the battle between creation and evolution.

I want to talk to you especially about 2 main ideas here that we're considering.

1 is did life gradually develop on earth over billions of years?

And this is the normal accepted scientific interpretation.

And even some people who believe in God suggest, well, God took billions of years to develop the advanced forms of life that we have now.

Then in contrast to that and very different is the biblical model that God created all in 6 days just a few thousand years ago.

So you've got these 2 basic ideas involved.

And most implicit in that last model is the idea of the Genesis flood.

The earth was destroyed by this Genesis flood.

And the fossil record harmonizes that story of creation and the flood together so that we have the explanation for all those fossils out there.

There's a significant amount of scientific data that favors the recent creation.

Science repeatedly changes its views, new ideas come in and so on.

So let's keep in mind what we're referring to in this discussion that we're having here.

The first point I want to mention to you is erosion.

Erosion is so fast that the continents should not have endured the long geologic ages.

Here's a river carrying a lot of sediment after a storm.

Well, the erosion is pretty slow, but you start talking about billions of years for the continents, and you are in deep trouble as far as the long geological ages are concerned.

I know of a dozen studies where they have studied the output of all the rivers of the world on all the continents, measured how much is being poured into the oceans.

And those studies suggest that you average those dozen studies and you get 24, 000 million tons.

Well, if you convert that to the average height of the continents, which is 623 meters, it would take about 10 million years to erode the continents to sea level.

While 10 million years is just a small fraction of time in the billions of years that are assumed for the evolutionary model.

This is data that seems to favor the creation model.

The idea of erosion has been discussed for quite a number of years.

About 50 years ago, geology became aware of this problem.

It's recognized in the scientific literature.

Here's an extreme statement by Sparks in his book, Geomorphology.

He says, some of these rates are obviously staggering.

The Yellow River could peneplain an area with average height of that of Everest in 10 million years.

Well, this river is faster than normal, but it tells you a recognition of this, hey, if you can erode Everest in 10 million years, How could the continents be billions of years old?

Right now our erosion is a little bit fast.

But correcting for all this, you can probably safely say our continents should have been eroded 100 times in the proposed billions of years of geologic time.

And we're still here, fortunately, and they haven't been all eroded away, otherwise we'd be underwater.

Well, a corollary to this is, of course, hey, how long is it going to take to fill up the oceans?

You got all this material pouring into the oceans, how long is that going to take?

The suggestion is made in the reference again regarding this, and it says here, if we next assume the present rate of erosion and exposed continent volumes to have been constant over say the past 1 billion years, then we would expect a staggering 30, 000 meter thick layer of sediments to cover the sea floors today.

And they're going to say apparently we have air battling making our assumptions and I would agree with that.

If you take the biblical story into account and so on, instead of the long evolution, you don't have the problem.

Now You go out to the seas and the deep oceans, you have about 300 meters, which is 1% of what he's suggesting here we should have in 1000000000 years.

And the continents, there's probably been 2, 7000000000 years, different ideas regarding how big they were and so on.

But anyway, we still should have a tremendous amount of sediments out there.

You have a picture there of the continents.

Sediments are supposed to have gone down in the trenches.

It's not a real argument for it because you have only about 10 to 20 percent of the sediments produced by the river that go down into the trenches and so your oceans, you can say well probably the oceans have been filled up at least 10 times in 2 and a half million years, and they are still here.

Next we have the presence of old flat surfaces that we find on the surface of the Earth that, how come they're still there?

You have a picture here of Kangaroo Island in Australia.

And look carefully at the end of the red arrow.

And you can see a straight line clear across the picture of the island.

It's extremely fine, extremely thin, right above sea level there.

And that surface is supposed to be 160 million years old.

Now, in 160 million years, you would expect about 3 miles of vertical erosion.

How come that surface, which is supposed to be 160 million years, is so flat if it is really that old?

The answer is, of course, well, probably kangaroo island is not that old.

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