Old Universe But Young Life?

Abstract

Most Seventh-day Adventist thought leaders have never questioned a "young"age for the Earth’s biosphere, i.e. from six thousand to tens of thousands of years.However, while pioneer Adventist Church leaders were also explicit in acceptingthese same ages for all inanimate matter on Earth and in space many prominentAdventist individuals and institutions now allow or accept a conventional “BigBang” cosmology with its implications of 4.5 and 13.7 billion-year ages for theEarth and universe respectively. This view has been increasingly championed bya number of Adventist writers on science during the last five decades and in recent years there has been a renewed theological attempt to strengthen its exegetical foundation. This paper argues that the coherence of this “old universe but younglife” model is compromised at two levels. The first involves the selective acceptance of scientific evidence and inconsistent use of scientific methodology. The second, more fully developed in this paper, relates to the implications of the tacit admission of ongoing “process” made by the “old universe but young life” model.