GYC 2017: Arise

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Baptizing the Devil: Evolution and the Seduction of Christianity

Clifford Goldstein

1. The Main Issues

This message was presented at the GYC 2017 conference, Arise, in Phoenix, Arizona.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

I'd like to say a prayer, and then we can Get started.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the opportunity to be here, and I thank you for just the wondrous message you've given us, this present truth message, which there's nothing else comes even close to it.

It's a privilege and it's a responsibility.

And I just pray that when this seminar is done, we'll come away strengthened in aspects of what we believe and why we believe it.

Okay, I guess you know my name is Clifford Goldstein.

I'm the editor of the Adult Bible Study Guide, the Sabbath School Quarterly.

I've been editing the quarterly about 19 years, and I just wrote this book.

It's called Baptizing the Devil, Evolution and the Seduction of Christianity.

And this seminar is basically based on things in the book.

If I'm not going to be able to cover everything, you could just read the book.

And some things I might be able to flesh out a little more.

Because actually, when I got done with the book, I just, I'm still reading and studying.

In other words, I'm hoping to get opportunities like this to talk about these things more, and I want to go beyond what I just had in the book.

And the essence, I did not write this book specifically for Seventh-day Adventists.

But they've been inundated by the very powerful and exceedingly effective propaganda coup of evolution.

It's become part of the intellectual culture, And a lot of thinking people are going to struggle.

Well, how could, you know, but it's science and so forth.

And yet at the same time, they see the contradiction.

And I spent about 5 years on this, 3 years reading and studying, and then about a year and a half putting it together, and I have been freed from this.

Well, just it's science, and I'm gonna be very careful.

You read the book, I'm not anti-science, I'm anti what they call scientism.

You're talking to someone and they say, but it's science.

The implication is we need to bow down and genuflect before it and surrender any and all recalcitrant views.

And let's face it, science is pretty impressive.

It's astonishing what science has done, what it can do.

But it's also just as fascinating when you understand what science has not done and what science cannot do.

And that's some of the things I want to look at in this seminar.

And I've given things like this a few times before, and inevitably, every time I don't get through a third of my material.

So I'm going to, we gave an outline, you know, the different topics, but I'm not going to lock myself into that.

We'll just see how it goes, and at some point, maybe the last 15 minutes, if somebody could – this goes from 9.15 to what time?

If maybe somebody at 10 o'clock could just say to me, hey, it's just point 10 o'clock.

Because I'd like to leave it open somewhat to some questions, to have an idea of maybe some of the things that you're interested in that I might be able to address, because I don't want to sit up here and wax eloquent about a bunch of stuff that I'm interested in, and that might not be what you have.

But we've got 5 hours, and I do think in 5 hours, we could cover a fair amount of material.

And don't sit here and blindly accept everything I'm saying.

I've been publishing books now for decades.

I don't believe everything the way I believed everything decades ago and yet it's in print.

It's in print and sometimes, in fact I'll tell 1 last story.

I used to do cassettes, tapes with American cassette ministries And I started doing that like 30 some years ago.

And then I remember 1 day I went to say to the guy, you know, some of these tapes that I made 30 years ago, tapes, that's how far back we're going, I don't necessarily see things this way.

And I thought about saying, you know, maybe it'd be good if you could kind of pull them.

Because maybe the stuff I'm speaking about today, there might be people that don't have the slightest interest in it.

That might not be where they're at, whereas the Clifford Goldstein 30 years ago might be what they need at that time.

So anyway, I don't know how I even got on that topic.

I gotta stick to my notes or else I'm gonna go all over the place.

I want to spend a few minutes talking about how I became an Adventist, because it's very, to a certain degree, related on a couple of levels to what I want to talk about.

I often joked, I say, in our family, the Jewish holidays boil down to, they try to kill us, they failed, let's eat.

That was, if you have Jewish friends, secular Jewish friends, you'll know that that's the essence of it right there.

Now I had always been, well anyway, because I was raised and I was educated in a secular environment.

I don't remember in my life ever questioning it.

I don't remember ever challenging it or ever hearing it challenged.

And I remember distinctly I was in the fifth grade.

And I don't really have that good of a memory, but I remember being home and memorizing the different aeons of the Earth's history, the Azoic era, Archaeozoic era, Protozoic era, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.

I still remember that from the fifth grade.

And then I remember distinctly too, they had a picture of like a shallow pool and then a one-cell creature, then a jellyfish, then some kind of amphibian, you know, and then a marsupial or something, and then a hominid, and then a Neanderthal, and then a human being, and they drew a line through it.

And that was human history, human evolution.

I remember that distinctly in the fifth grade.

Then you jump together, you jump to the ninth grade, Nautilus Junior High school.

And a little aside, I found out a while back that Doug Batchelor and I were in that same junior high school in Miami Beach at the same time.

There was a Burger King everybody hung out with and did a lot of stuff.

I'm not going to say what we did, but Doug knew the Burger King.

But anyway, I remember in the ninth grade, I thought I was hot stuff.

Okay, good, that's working a little better.

Because I knew what ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is.

I was in the ninth grade and I knew what that was.

And that was the idea that an embryo goes through the phases of evolution.

That if you look at it, you'll see fins and gills and so forth.

I was being taught that in 1969, even though decades earlier, Decades earlier, it had been known to have been a fraud.

Even a hard-nosed evolutionist, a Stephan Jay Gould, thought it was criminal, the way this thing was being promulgated.

It was first promulgated around the turn of the century.

And in the ninth grade, I was being taught it in 1969.

Then jump ahead to the University of Florida at Gainesville.

I had an anthropology course, nothing particularly stands out.

But I do remember how evolution was the ultimate subtext of everything we had been taught.

Now, What happened was, in 1979, in the fall of 1979, I had a very, I'll say dramatic, I guess every conversion experience is dramatic, but I became a born again believer in 1979.

All I knew was this, and I'm not gonna deviate on this now too far.

It hit me about 21 years, I was about 21 years old, this was a few years earlier, and it hit me that truth had to exist.

2. What Science Cannot Do

Heavenly Father, again, I just pray that we will come away with just a deeper understanding of the truths that you have given us as a people.

Now, As I said, we left off last time, and again, I threw out, it's a pretty heavy thought.

I'm just saying that if the world's experts, The vast majority of the experts, the scientists, those that have studied these things in depth, the chemists, the physicists, the biologists, the zoologists, if they're right and what they're adamant about, then I'm sorry, our religion is a joke.

If evolution is true, Christianity cannot possibly be true.

Ellen White, you know everything Ellen White said?

And as I said, I spent a lot of time reading the philosophy of science.

I can say that it doesn't bother me, okay, because it's just, you know, in fact, it's very funny.

I have a chapter in the book on the Galileo trial, and I'm just gonna touch on this very quickly.

People often view the Galileo trial as a prime example of ignorant religionists fighting against the rational progress of science.

And to a certain degree, there's a modicum of truth to that.

But I would argue that the real message is the opposite message.

And they were going to torture a poor old Galileo for 4 positions.

That the earth sits immovable in the center of the universe and all the planets circle it in perfect spheres.

And Galileo said no, And they were gonna, they were, you know, we know the story.

Where does the Bible teach that the earth sits immovable at the center of the universe and All the planets and suns and stars and all that orbit the Earth in perfect spheres.

That was the science of Aristotle that for 1, 500 years or longer, the smartest people, the scientists, the quote, PhDs, the most educated people taught and believed.

And what happened was the Christian Church, just like the Christian Church does today, you know some of Darwin's earliest defenders were the Christians, were the churchmen, the early scientists said this is a bunch of hickey, But it was the Christians who fell over themselves to try to accommodate it as it is today.

And it was the Christian church had taken Aristotle's science.

Aristotle taught that the earth sat immovable in the center of the universe and all the planets orbited at perfect circles at constant speeds.

That was the latest and greatest science.

And the church, Christian church, compromising, and the Protestants were no better than the Romans, compromising linked scripture to the latest and greatest science, and you got the farce of the Galileo trial.

And my argument is that theistic evolutionists today, they are the spiritual and intellectual heirs of the Roman Inquisition.

And that's a total different spin that you normally hear on it.

Now again, I brought that up Because I guess the idea is, coming back to what I'm saying, are you saying all these scientists, all these people, the experts, are wrong?

If it's fascinating, you study the history of science.

It's amazing how many things that were once believed, that were never challenged, that were just accepted as understood, have been thrown out.

And what we think our age is any different, any better.

And again, and I'll come back to this later, remind me, the fact that the theory works.

Well here, just give you an example of that.

Let's go back to the Aristotelian cosmos, okay, Taught that the Earth sits immobile in the center of the universe.

First, it teaches that the Earth sits immobile.

And they orbit in perfect circles, wrong.

And they orbit at constant speeds, wrong.

A scientific theory wrong on every particular.

For 1, 500 years, If you wanted to predict where's Venus gonna be in the sky in 6 months, you can do it.

If you wanted to sail your ship from Venice to Genoa using stars, using a science built on a theory that was wrong in every particular.

Just because a theory works, just because you can make accurate predictions, is a total separate issue from whether it's true.

Suppose you have a theory and according to my theory every time you do X, Y is going to happen.

My theory is every time, they gave me these wonderful blackboards here.

I used to say technology, you can't fail with a blackboard.

And my teacher used to tell me he could read my English.

This is, I was gonna blame the technology and it was human error.

I say I got my theory and anytime you do X, Y is gonna happen.

And so, all right, let's test the theory.

And they keep all the conditions the same.

And every time X happens, just like the theory said, y happens.

And 1 of the important things in science is repeatability.

Somebody claims they do something in a lab.

They do it in Washington State, they do the experiment.

3. Good but Not True

Let's say a prayer and then I'd like to get started.

Father again I thank you for the wonderful truths you've given us as a people.

We're getting assaulted from so many different angles, so many different ways.

The enemy takes something as good as extra knowledge and scientific knowledge and advances and seems like everything anybody anything humans do is eventually perverted and twisted and I pray we'll be able to work through some of these issues here and be strengthened in our faith, in Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, now we did touch on, I don't know how some of you have been here to some of the other meetings.

Some of you see some new faces and the gist of what I've done and did I bring my book?

And basically, we're looking at this idea.

In our society, people say, but it's science.

And the moment they say something is science, if you ever argued with someone and they say to you, but it's science, what is the implication?

Of course, the implication, well, how can you dare argue with this?

And science uses, I don't think I'll have time to get into it, maybe at least not today, maybe not.

I have a whole section of a book on the so-called scientific method.

We've all been in high school, do you remember being taught the scientific method?

And this idea is that, well, once you apply the scientific method to something, that's it.

Truth is almost deductively guaranteed to come out the other end.

A lot of the literature I read on the, in fact I have a chapter in the book called The Myth of the Method.

And they would say there's no such thing as the scientific method.

You know, the method that you use for doing 1 thing in science could be completely different from something else.

And it was fascinating, some of the stuff I read.

But the point on this is, and again, as I stated earlier, The point is not to be anti-science.

I believe science does teach us, it clearly teaches us things.

And I believe it actually teaches us, and some would debate this, it teaches us things about the real world.

Though there are actually some philosophers of science who say science doesn't teach us about the real world, Science teaches us only about how the world appears to us in our senses.

And there's a vast difference, they would argue, between what the world really is and how it appears to our senses.

And all in the end science could do is maybe give us a better view of how it appears to our senses.

You know, I use an analogy about our senses.

I have a whole section here and maybe I'll get to this.

Let's imagine, I want to right now, let's be quiet.

Okay, we hear him next door, but in the room right now, let's be quiet for a moment.

Okay, say ideally you didn't hear anything.

I'm gonna put something on my iPhone and I'll be...

It's funny, I'm gonna give away some of my...

I'm actually not that conservative as him, but I'm an unabashed, unrepentant, see if you could hear.

Now the question I have is, and I'm almost always, I used to be a Democrat all the time, it's getting harder and harder.

But I'm a Rush fan, I mean I pay $50 a year to listen to Rush.

Because he's good at what he does, I don't have to agree with him, I like what he does, but anyway, I'm deviating.

The point is, if we said nothing and it was empty, when I turn this on, where did that sound come from?

It was here in the air all around us, as real as my voice, as real as this chair is here.

It needed to go through this device to show us what was real, what was here.

And I'm saying that the point is that reality, We have our 2 eyes, and we get only a certain limited view of reality.

And there's some that'll say all science can do is help us get another view, a deeper view, but still it's still only a view of the way the world appears to us through our senses.

And 1 of the great philosophical questions has been, what is the difference between the world as it really is, and the way the world appears to us limited in our senses?

How many angels could be in this room right now?

Though I'm sure there's a few, somebody must have drug in a bad 1 or 2.

But the point is, There's a whole reality out there.

I mean, they say right now that there are, at this moment, billions of muons from the sun are going right through us right now.

The muon, I think they say a muon's so small you could take a thousand miles of steel.

And a muon will go right through it and never even slow it down.

So the point is there's a much greater reality out there than we, with our senses, can pick up.

And even science is still helping us pick up a reality.

It's helping us view that reality a little bit differently, but it's still ultimately our senses.

And can science really teach us what's there or not?

I tend to think science does give us a view of the real world, but it's a very limited view anyway.

Now, what I want to talk about, there was, Anybody ever hear of 1 of the most famous books of the 20th century?

It was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a man named Thomas Kuhn.

And Kuhn wrote this book like in the 60s, and it was considered 1 of the most influential texts of all of the 20th century.

And basically, what the guy Thomas Kuhn said is he said, he's basically saying what I basically say in my book, Baptizing the Devil, though I say this in a very specific context.

Kuhn was saying that science is nowhere near as rational, as objective, as sequential as people think it is.

He's saying it's much more haphazard, much more subjective, much more culturally influenced and culturally laden than a lot of people believe.

And for whatever reason, Kuhn's book created.

And to this day, people write books writing about Kuhn.

Some take it even further than Kuhn, or some try to dismiss him completely.

But the fascinating thing is you had 1 of this book by a scientist saying science is nothing, is nowhere near what people are led to believe that it is in terms of being the subjective truth.

In fact, I want to read you a quote in Kuhn's book.

Kuhn captured, he quoted a man named Max Planck.

Max Planck was 1 of the founders of quantum physics.

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1. The Main Issues

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