I read Adventist World

The latest issue of Adventist World carries an article called "Creation Wonders: Why special creation matters." It's an excellent brief overview of why it's necessary to believe in special creation in order to be a Seventh-day Adventist.

The article is part of Adventist World's ongoing series on the fundamental beliefs of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Unusually, this article uses four authors:

John T. Baldwin is professor of theology in the Theology and Christian Philosophy Department at Andrews University. Leonard R. Brand is professor of biology and paleontology at Loma Linda University. Arthur Chadwick is professor of geology and biology at Southwestern Adventist University, and Randall W. Younker is professor of Old Testament and biblical archaeology at the same university.

Here's one of the things two theologians and two scientists need the SDA church to know (emphasis mine):

Additionally, the chronological material in Genesis 4, 5, and Matthew 1 are only compatible with a time since creation of a few thousand years, not millions of years (deep time). But why does it matter how long ago it was? Why do we care about time? It matters a great deal, and the reason involves our response to modern scientific interpretations of geologic time and what it says about the nature of God and of the Bible. Deep time and the theory of the evolution of all creatures go hand in hand. Our choice is between deep time plus evolution of life forms, or a recent biblical creation week.

Sigh. There's that clear black-and-white choice again.

In a nutshell, here's why special creation matters to the authors:

1. If Genesis 1 and 2 can't be read literally, then the Bible cannot be trusted. And if we can't trust the Bible on this issue, how can we trust the other parts of the Bible?
2. God is love. If God used evolution in his creation process, then he is a cruel God who, instead of the comparatively gentle method of creation described in the first two chapters of Genesis, used a method that resulted in "more than 3.8 billion years of trauma (predation), disease, death, mass extinctions, suffering, countless regional geologic catastrophes of all sorts."
3. The acceptance of deep time requires "requires the denial of a historical, literal Fall*, a global flood, and a historical Adam through whom sin and death passed to all humanity, and ultimately involves the denial of the need to accept Jesus as Savior through His life and death on the Cross*."
4. No special creation makes God a liar. God himself wrote the fourth commandment in which he describes himself as the creator of the heavens and the earth, and he did it in six days.
   

They sum up with the following:

Special creation preserves the integrity of Scripture, safeguards the loving, praiseworthy character of God, establishes the reality of the atonement and redemption, and the soundness of the seventh-day Sabbath.

If one is to believe in and worship a god, one would vote for the loving one (or at least I would). The idea that God is a loving God is deeply comforting to many people, and I have no interest in asking anyone to give up that idea. Keep it. I'd rather you have that one than some of the alternatives.

But the God of the Bible is not the God of warm fuzzies:

• By the seventh chapter of Genesis, God has wiped out much of creation with a global flood. Note that not everything created during creation week was destroyed—he preserved light, the sky, sun, moon, stars, and a few animals and humans. Vegetation, nearly all animal life, and almost all of humanity—gone.
  
• During the history of the Israelites, he repeatedly asks them to commit genocide and punishes them when they don't follow through.
  
• If one reads Revelation literally (and Adventists like to read part of it literally and part of it figuratively), God intends to throw anyone who doesn't believe in him into the lake of fire where, some believe, they will burn forever and ever (which, in spite of our other faults, Adventists do not believe).

Perhaps we need to accept that God has a dark side?

*When did we start capitalizing fall and cross?