If you haven’t already, you should probably read part 1 and part 2 of this series. You may also want to read my rant about picking this horrible topic. I had hoped to cover the rest of the controversy in this installment, but it’s too big for that. So this time we’re going over the events at the 2010 General Conference in Atlanta, next time we’ll go over actions the university has taken and the accreditation issues this controversy has created.

At the very General Conference session that elected him president of the church, Ted Wilson proposed a resolution to affirm the 2004 affirmation of the the church’s fundamental belief on creationism. The current belief statement reads:

God is Creator of all things, and has revealed in Scripture the authentic account of His creative activity. In six days the Lord made “the heaven and the earth” and all living things upon the earth, and rested on the seventh day of that first week. Thus He established the Sabbath as a perpetual memorial of His completed creative work. The first man and woman were made in the image of God as the crowning work of Creation, given dominion over the world, and charged with responsibility to care for it. When the world was finished it was “very good,” declaring the glory of God. (Gen. 1; 2; Ex. 20:8-11; Ps. 19:1-6; 33:6, 9; 104; Heb. 11:3.)

The resolution calls for not only reaffirming the current statement but replacing with with a more specific revision, which would state that creation took place in a literal week involving literal 24 hour days the same as we experience today. Many important church figures supported this move, but a few opposed it, including Dr. Ben Clausen of the Geoscience Research Institute, the General Conference body that is tasked with finding harmony between faith and science. According to Spectrum Magazine’s report:

Ben Clausen of the Geoscience Research Institute said that Ted Wilson’s statement put science teachers in Adventist schools in an untenable position. Quoting from the statement, Dr. Clausen said that “it is impossible,” to teach students “scientifically rigorous exposure to and affirmation of our historic belief in a literal, recent six-day creation.”

He added: “There are no available models.”

One argument in favor of the motion was that it was backed up by the report from the 2002-2004 “International Faith and Science Conferences”, but Larry Geraty, former president of La Sierra University, and one of the participants of the conferences takes issue with that report:

There were several individuals there who urged its adoption but the gathered scholars and church leaders who were there specifically voted it down at that time. The Response was then taken back to church headquarters where it was voted without the scholars being present.

Geraty, who wrote the current fundamental belief has this to say about the proposed revisions:

I fear that the proposal will result in a more literalistic interpretation that will serve to exclude members who love the church, believe in the authority of the Bible, but interpret it in harmony with accepted standards of interpretation for God’s revelation in both nature and Scripture.

The existing belief statement clearly supports a literal creationism, but it does give a small amount of wiggle room for theistic evolution. The church, in General Conference, its highest governing body, has decided to make it very clear that the church believes in a very literal, recent creation myth.

The statement that was voted in calls for scientifically rigorous affirmations of creationism. It’s kind of telling that even one of the scientists on the church payroll who is supposed to be finding or fabricating these affirmations says it can’t be done. This is a case of people who don’t know what they’re talking about making unrealistic demands of scientists. Pastors are not scientists and are not qualified to speak on matters of science. It’s that simple.

A part of me hopes that this all passes at the next GC and prompts scientists, doctors, and other rational people to realize that they’re part of a church that values dogma over scientific evidence, a church that places “Truth” over fact. The SDA church has benefited over the years from its promotion of education and having a relatively intellectual membership (surprising for a fundamentalist group), I’m curious what would happen if this leads to a further exodus of intellectuals (more than half of Adventist college graduates never step foot in an SDA church after their graduation). I know the atheist community would gladly welcome them, heck, we wouldn’t even ask for 10% of their income.