Seeing the light -- of science

Given your field of study, you have a particularly interesting personal history. You grew up in a family of Seventh-day Adventists.

That's correct. All my male relatives were ministers of one kind or another.

All? Going how far back?

Both my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather was president of the international church. My father and all my uncles on both sides worked for the church. My brother-in-law is a minister. My nephew is a minister.

Did you go to Adventist schools?

First grade through college. I graduated from Southern Missionary College in Tennessee.

And what did you think about life's origins as you were growing up?

I was never exposed to anything other than what we now call "young earth creationism." Creation science came out of Seventh-day Adventism. My father was a believer, all my teachers were believers, all my friends believed in that. I can remember as a college student -- I majored in math and physics -- there was a visiting professor from the University of Chicago lecturing on carbon-14 dating, and he was talking about scores of thousands of years. And my friends and I just looked at each other, wincing and smiling, saying he just didn't know the truth.

But at some point, your ideas obviously changed. What caused you to question the creationist account?

I wish I knew. There are a few moments that proved crucial for me. I went to Berkeley in the '60s as a graduate student in history and learned to read critically. That had a profound influence on me. I was also exposed to critiques of young earth creationism. The thing that stands out in my memory as being decisive was hearing a lecture about the fossil forest of Yellowstone, given by a creationist who'd just been out there to visit. He found that for the 30 successive layers you needed -- assuming the most rapid rates of decomposition of lava into soil and the most rapid rates of growth for the trees that came back in that area -- at least 20,000 to 30,000 years. The only alternative the creationists had to offer was that during the year of Noah's flood, these whole stands of forest trees came floating in, one on top of another, until you had about 30 stacked up. And that truly seemed incredible to me. Just trying to visualize what that had been like during the year of Noah's flood made me smile.

Did your beliefs come crashing down at that moment?

Well, the night after I heard that, I stayed up till very, very late with a fellow Adventist graduate student, wrestling with the implications of it. Before dawn, we both decided the evidence was too strong. This was a crucial night for me because I realized I was abandoning the authority of the prophet who founded Adventism, and the authority of Genesis.

You went on to write a book about Ellen White, the founder of the Seventh-day Adventists. Didn't that prove to be quite controversial?

It did. I wrote about her as a historian would, without invoking supernatural explanations. That bothered a lot of people because according to traditional Adventism, she was a chosen of God, who would take her into visions, where she would see events past, present and future. Once, God actually took her back to witness the Creation. And she saw that the Creation occurred in six literal 24-hour days. Which made it impossible for most Adventists to play around with symbolic interpretations of Genesis. I also found in my research that she had been copying some of her so-called testimonies, which were supposed to be coming directly from God. So it did create something of a stir.

That must have created trouble for you in your own family of Adventists.

It did. And it created trouble for my father, who was a minister. Some church ministers were very harsh with him. Here I was, about 30 or so. They were telling him he had no right being a minister if he couldn't control his son. So he took early retirement.

Because of your book?

Yes. He was thoroughly humiliated by this.

Did he try to talk you out of the book?

Oh yes. We had hours and hours of argument. He had a limited number of explanations for why I would be saying this about the prophetess. One was that I was lying. But he knew me too well, so the only explanation left for him was that somehow Satan had gained control of my mind. And what I was writing reflected the power of Satan. For a number of years, he could not bear to be seen in public with me.

Did you ever heal that rift?

We did. Some information came out a number of years later that he read before he died. It showed that the early ministerial leaders of the church had some of these qualms and decided to bury it. So he regretted that the church had not dealt with this issue a hundred years earlier and come clean. Before he died, he said, "I understand you now. And I understand what you said about Ellen White is probably true. But if I fully accept the implications of what you're saying, I'd have to give up all my religious belief." And I said, "Dad, I don't want you to. It's too important for you."

What are your religious beliefs now?

I don't have any.

Are you an atheist?

I don't think so. I think that's a belief -- that there's no God. I really wanted to have religious beliefs for a long time. I miss not having the certainty of religious knowledge that I grew up with. But after a number of years of trying to resolve these issues, I decided they're not resolvable. So I think the term "agnostic" would be best for me.

You mentioned that Seventh-day Adventism actually played a crucial role in the history of creationism. Didn't an early Adventist lay out the whole idea of "flood geology"?

Exactly. George McCready Price, a disciple of Ellen White's, came along in the early 20th century and made Noah's flood the key actor in the history of life on earth. He tried to show that the conventional interpretations of the geological column were fallacious and that, in fact, the entire geological column could have been deposited in about one year. And that became the centerpiece of what he called "the new catastrophism."

Then, in about 1970, that view -- flood geology -- was renamed "creation science" or "scientific creationism." Two fundamentalists -- a theologian named John Whitcomb Jr. and a hydraulic engineer named Henry Morris -- took Price's flood geology, reworked it a little bit and published it as "The Genesis Flood." Notice that the seminal books in the history of creationism have focused on geology and the flood, not so much on biology. And as a result of what Whitcomb and Morris did, Price's views exploded among fundamentalists and other conservative Christians.

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