With what dedication posted in mind, the whole Bible would become a falsehood.

"TIME TO FACE THE FACTS

When Adventist scientists were polled in 1994, more than half rejected the literal reading of Genesis 1. One third denied that the geological strata and its fossils can be explained by Noah's Flood; and almost one in five assented to theistic evolution. See Darwinism comes to America, Ronald Numbers, Harvard University Press, p. 109.

Probably most Adventist scientists versed in geology, can be classified as progressive creationists, believing in God's creative interventions over long eras of time. But it is certain that most well-read Adventists have moved well beyond George McCready Price. When William Jennings Bryant cited Price as a respected scientist at the famous Tenessee Scopes trial, Darrow responded: "You mention Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know who signs his name as a geologist who believes like you do. Every scientist in this country knows that he is a mountebank, a pretender, and not a geologist at all."

There are two main barriers, which have led to the church's unpaid debt to science and its own scientists. On the part of leadership, it is the fear of confessing that we have been wrong. The smaller the group, the greater the felt necessity of infallibility. Second, like all other people we are shackled by cognitive dissonance. That is to say, we all carry a sieve to separate from our minds all that we hear or read that doesn't fit with our preconceptions. The human mind typically functions in terms of comfortable grooves of thought. But real truth shocks this tendency. It is a realistic immoveable rock upon which our comfortable theories are often shattered. Much of reality to all of us is a vast unknown.

Are we then to ignore Genesis 1:26, 27 about the creation of our first parents and adopt the theory of natural selection? Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist of Harvard, recently deceased, said that Darwinism was dead. Many other scientists have agreed. But Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium, his substitute for natural selection, has also been punctured. It has not worn well. Ellen White wrote long ago that "God's created works are just as mysterious as God himself." That wise and good woman also told us that the Bible was given for practical purposes and that, like Jesus, it is a combination of the human and the divine. If we take her seriously we will also recognize that her writings are not meant to set forth science, though they may help us to cease unnecessary warring against genuine truth discovered by scientific research.