General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Kwabena Donkor

Yes, Creation!

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians


It's good to have you for this presentation on evolution and spiritualism, especially as time comes to a close. This is a subject that has captured my attention quite recently, and I say that to imply that what I say to you is not probably the last word on it, but I hope to excite your mind to get thinking on this subject. Evolutionary thought, spiritualism, and the end of time. There are 2 disciplines that have significant impact on all cultures, especially in the West. Science and religion.

During the modern times, it looked like Religion will be snuffed out, but religion is alive. And within these 2 disciplines, there are 2 subjects, 2 topics that have had some quite significant resurgence in recent times. And I'm thinking about spirituality or spiritualism and evolution. What concerned me as I thought about this is that is there any connection between these 2 subjects and I was quite surprised to read something from great controversy that sparked my thinking on this issue. There Ellen White says, spiritualism teaches that man is the creature of progression, that it is his destiny from his birth to progress even to eternity toward the Godhead.

Now having studied a little bit into the philosophy of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, my attention quickly went to the connection between spiritualism and evolution. You see the idea of evolution that is addressed in that topic is not the 1 we are commonly used to. When we talk about evolution, we are thinking about biological evolution or organic evolution, which is fine because, I mean, if we lose this, the Sabbath goes, the sanctuary goes, and the Seventh-day Adventist church actually goes. So it's understandable. But as I think about it, it seems to me that if there is indeed a connection between evolution and spiritualism, then this debate, this issue has far larger implications for the cosmic conflict.

So come along as we explore a little bit the concept of evolution. There is a particular idea of evolution that should cause all Seventh-day Adventists some concern and that notion is that evolution is the origination of species of animals and plants by a naturalistic process of development from earlier forms and not by a process of special creation. This is the concept of evolution that causes concern in recent times, but you'll be surprised to know that the idea of organic evolution was already there in ancient times. The ancients tinkered with it, the Greek philosophers. So Anaximander, for Greek philosophers.

So Anaximander, for example, knew and taught that evolution or life began in the sea and that it began with simpler life forms and to more complex life forms. The first century Roman philosopher Lucretius also believed and taught. He actually toyed with the idea of the survival of the fittest. His idea was that life initially began spontaneously. But see all these ideas about evolution were really philosophical speculations.

They had no material basis. It was not until modern times that people have to contend with the material basis of evolution. We are talking about a time when mining took on great strides in the West. This is the time when canals were being dug. Now people began to look at the structure of rocks and they saw all these stratifications.

Then their attention were turned to fossils. How would you explain some of the phenomena they were seeing? There were questions to be answered. How is it that you had fossils, marine organism fossils, on top of mountains? How do you explain that?

How do you explain the fact that as you looked at these fossils, some of them, some of the, I mean, organisms, seem to have been extinct. How do you explain that? And then they realized that as they looked at the rock formations, there were stratifications. How do you account for that? Therefore any theory that would try to deal with these issues had to account for not only the stratification, but the phenomenon which seemed to be that Simpler life forms were at the bottom of the strata.

How do you explain this? We don't have the time to go into the details, but 2 main theories were propounded. The first 1, which is called Neptuneism. But the second 1, which caught on and which really prepared the way for Darwin was what we call uniformitarianism. And these names I have there were all the people who tried to make attempts to explain the phenomenon of fossils that they were seeing.

You have Hook Cuvier, George Cuvier is 1 that we could spend a lot of time on because he actually put biology on his footing and his research was used by others to develop evolutionary ideas. Comte de Buffon propounded evolutionary ideas, but Lamarck already had serious evolutionary theories that he propounded. So when Darwin came on the scene, evolutionary ideas were already in the air. Especially the concept of uniformitarianism helped Darwin propound his ideas because, you see, what uniformitarianism says is that when you look at the rocks and the sediments, it must have taken a very long time for these things to have formed and therefore the idea of long time had been developed before Darwin came on the scene. Malthus, the economist, already had given Darwin ideas that helped him to develop the concept of the survival of the fittest.

That is evolution. But what do we have to say about spiritualism? See it's interesting that at the same time that organic evolution was being developed, the idea of spiritualism, I'm talking about modern spiritualism, was also being developed. Now we are accustomed to thinking about spiritualism in terms of the occult and sorcery and magic and stuff like that. But modern spiritualism had a larger agenda.

Modern spiritualism sees both natural and human evolution as a self-disclosing revelation of the divine. This is the broader concept under which modern spiritualism developed. So for modern spiritualism, there was an attempt to reconcile science and religion. And the way to do it was through evolution. And if you have read about Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, the Theosophical Movement, they saw things that way.

I have this quote that will address that very point. This is what they said. While limited in its view of evolution from the standpoint of occult philosophy, this is talking about Darwinianism, the Darwinian theory was nevertheless the greatest advance in basic scientific inquiry since the time of Newton and was indispensable in preparing the ground for the conception of spiritual evolution outlined in the secret doctrine. Now the secret doctrine claims that the universe is in an evolutionary self-discovery And this is the grand agenda of spiritualism. It's interesting that at this same time, if you are into philosophy, Hegel's philosophy was also expounding evolutionary thoughts.

You probably have read about Hegel's dialectic of the spirit where he talks about the spirit evolving. He has thesis and antithesis and then the spirit moves on until the absolute is developed. This is at the same time that spiritualism is developing that Hegel also comes up with this view. Now by the 1880s, it looked as if spiritualism was on the decline. But by 1960, it was revived under the banner of what is called synthetic spiritualities.

The New Age movement is 1 of these synthetic spiritualities. What is synthetic spirituality? These are people who promote spirituality by developing things within yourself. That is what synthetic spiritualities are. And they also seek to construct a worldview which reconciles science with religion, and they also do it through the means of evolution.

I have this quote and it's very interesting. Evolution becomes an overarching concept that incorporates the sense of deep time and imbues the development of a global spiritual consciousness as an evolutionary advance for the cosmos. So evolution captures a bigger subject that we need to pay attention to. I spoke earlier on about Teilhard de Jardin. He claims, and he has a lot of following among the New Ages, he claims that this world began and evolved in 4 stages.

We are not at the fourth stage yet, But he says that the world is put together by psychic and physic energy. This is a Catholic priest speaking. He says that the world began with what he calls cosmogenesis, which moved to biogenesis, which then moved to neurogenesis, that's the development of consciousness, and finally we are headed for the omega point, which is when we become divine. So people, new ages, rely on ideas like those propounded by Teja de Jardin. Others look to the East and try to incorporate science with the philosophy and the religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism.

What I found fascinating as I research this is the fact that physics is beginning to lend support to this idea. I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but those of you who are interested in quantum theory will tell you that physics is now helping us to believe these days that We can be definite about much concerning ultimate reality. Now, what quantum theory and physics and evolution has done, especially evolution, is to create a worldview through which to think, a worldview that underlines many disciplines of study. But I just want to focus on physics. We are told that the particles that make our universe are basically 2.

Fermions are what comprise neutrons and electrons and so forth. These are things. But then we are told by physics these days that besides the fermions, we have what are also called bosons. These deal with relationships, consciousness, and this is the basis of evolution. These are forces.

Bosons are in the nature of forces, electromagnetic forces, gravitational forces, and nuclear forces. These are not things. These are relationships. The upshot of all of this development is this, that today many physicists and many scientists believe that nature is infused with divinity. That nature is divine and it's alive with energy or soul.

I took this quote from a recent book called the new spirituality. When physicists and astronomers probe the deep recesses of the universe, they find an indefinite and apparently infinite field of energy, a vacuum or void. The vacuum spoken of by quantum physics like the Buddhist concept of sunyata or the void to which it is so similar is replete with all potentiality. The ineffable vacuum which physics speak about is moreover the ground of all true religious experience. The void then is that ultimate and divine ground of being that is experienced by mystics.

This, friends, is the world of the new spirituality. So what physics has done, what science has done, is to give a new respectability to the old concept of mysticism. It combines evolution and the new physics to give this respectability. So we are back to mysticism and pantheism which has been closed with scientism. But we should never forget that mysticism in any form combines supposed revelations from God.

Let me read a quote. Mysticism, both ancient and modern, is choked full of supposed revelations from God as a matter of fact that is the draw God will personally meet you in the center of your soul they say and communicate to you matters far beyond anything found in scriptures. In ancient pantheism we knew about astrology, spiritism, witchcraft, Satanism, but friends these are exactly the same phenomena we are beginning to see in our own times. So the new mysticism has found way into evangelicalism. If you have not seen it already, I want to draw your attention because of the shortness of time to this edition of the Adventist Review which came out June 10th.

There are a couple of articles there on the emerging church. Worship is at the center of the emerging church And prayer, a particular kind of prayer, is at the center of it. When you think about the way worship is experienced these days and expressed these days, it's not worship that is based on Scripture. It's worship that is based on going into yourself. It's worship that is based on feeling.

And these things are already beginning to knock at the doors of our church. But let me talk about contemplative prayer. I wasn't aware of these developments until I started researching for this. And my attention was drawn to a book that has sold millions of copies by Richard Foster. And I was surprised that my daughter sitting here actually has a copy of that book and I didn't know about it.

This is where Richard Foster, I mean, promotes the old Catholic form of spirituality in combination with Buddhists mystical practices and this is a book that has been endorsed by even Christianity today. But you see our time is short. As we think about the way I see evolution promoting or helping spiritualism, My attention is turned to a quote from Evelyn White and I think I'll end with that. She says, Satan has long been preparing for his final effort to deceive the world. Little by little he has prepared the way for his masterpiece of deception in the development of spiritualism.

He has not yet reached the full accomplishment of his designs but it shall be reached in the last remnant time. Says the prophet, I saw 3 unclean frogs, spirits like frogs. They are the spirits of devils, working miracles. I pray that our eyes would be open to what is going on around us so that we don't embrace everything that comes from the mainline evangelical movement. Let's stick to Scripture and let our worship experience be informed by scripture.

God bless you all.

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Yes, Creation!

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

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Other Teachings in Series

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

...and it WAS good

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

DNA and Design

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Dealing with uncertainty

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Seventh-day Darwinians

Sound Doctrine