Patriarchs and Profits

Chapter 18 - Science-Defying Statements

by Dirk Anderson

The previous chapter tested Patriarchs and Prophets against the Bible it claims to illuminate. This chapter applies the same test to a different, equally unforgiving standard: the physical world God created. Scripture and nature share the same Author, so a book truly traced by His hand should not describe either one wrongly. This chapter will test Patriarchs and Prophets against facts about the natural world.

Just as Ellen White supplied the test in the last chapter, she supplies the test here as well:

When the Bible makes statements of facts in nature, science may be compared with the written word, and a correct understanding of both will always prove them to be in harmony. One does not contradict the other. All truth, whether in nature or revelation, agrees.¹

The principle is unmistakable. Since Scripture and nature have the same divine Author, a correct understanding of nature should therefore agree with the written word.

That provides a straightforward test. If Patriarchs and Prophets makes statements about the natural world that contradict established facts, then her statements are false and uninspired.

The following two examples put that claim to the test.

Prehistoric Giants

In her earliest account of the Creation, published for the sect, Ellen White wrote in Spiritual Gifts:

As Adam came forth from the hand of his Creator, he was of noble height, and of beautiful symmetry. He was more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth, and was well proportioned.²

White gave a comparative measurement, presumably from her visions. Adam was not merely “tall.” He was more than twice as tall as men now living. If the average modern man were roughly six feet tall, White's statement places Adam at more than twelve feet.

Later in the same volume, White extended the claim to the generations before the Flood:

Those who lived before the flood, come forth with their giant-like stature, more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth, and well proportioned. The generations after the flood were less in stature. There was a continual decrease through successive generations, down to the last that lived upon the earth. The contrast between the first wicked men who lived upon the earth, and those of the last generation, was very great. The first were of lofty height and well proportioned — the last came up as they went down, a dwarfed, feeble, deformed race.³

Here the claim becomes even more extraordinary. White was not merely saying that Adam was unusually tall. She described an entire prehistoric population of giant humans followed by a continuous physical decline from the generations before the Flood down to modern humanity.

By the time Patriarchs and Prophets was published in 1890 for the general public, however, the precise measurement had disappeared and the language had been softened. White's own literary trustees later explained why, in the preface to a facsimile reprint of the very volume that had made the claim:

An instance of this is the statement that Adam as created was “more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth.” (Volume III, p. 34.)… Being, however, so specific in its detail, the author, to avoid unnecessarily prejudicing the reader not informed with regard to her call and work, dropped out of the later account this point not vital to a reception of the general statement of truth presented.⁴

That explanation is remarkably candid. The problem was not that the statement had become controversial. The problem, according to the trustees, was that it was so specific in its detail that it might prejudice readers who were not already familiar with White's prophetic claims. The precise measurement was therefore removed because it was not considered essential to the “general statement of truth.”

When Patriarchs and Prophets came out, the claim of a continual decline from giant humans to a “dwarfed, feeble, deformed race” disappeared entirely. The specific measurement was made more vague — and harder to test:

As man came forth from the hand of his Creator, he was of lofty stature and perfect symmetry. ... Adam’s height was much greater than that of men who now inhabit the earth. ... There were many giants, men of great stature...⁵

The difference is not trivial. “More than twice as tall” is a specific claim that can be tested. “Much greater” or “great stature” is more vague. The first can be falsified by physical evidence; the second is elastic enough to survive almost any evidence.

That raises the obvious question: was the original claim ever supported by the physical evidence?

Not Supported by Fossil Record

There is no fossil or skeletal evidence demonstrating a prehistoric human population with an average stature remotely approaching twelve feet, nor is there evidence of a continuous decline in human stature from such a population to modern humanity. The nineteenth century was already accumulating significant evidence about ancient human remains. The Neanderthal remains discovered in Germany in 1856 and the Cro-Magnon remains discovered in France in 1868 had brought ancient human anatomy into scientific discussion decades before Patriarchs and Prophets appeared. The emerging study of human antiquity did not reveal a vanished race of twelve-foot humans.⁶

Ancient human remains do show variations in stature due to genetics, nutrition, disease, environment, and other factors. However, the fossil and skeletal record does not support a prehistoric human population averaging anything remotely approaching twice modern human height, nor does it reveal a continuous downward progression from twelve-foot humans to the stature of people living today.⁷

Not a Biblical Teaching

The idea that humanity had declined physically from a superior ancestral condition did not originate with Ellen White. Long before Spiritual Gifts appeared, various forms of degeneration theory were circulating in European and American thought. The basic premise was that earlier generations had possessed greater strength, stature, or physical perfection, followed by a gradual decline in succeeding generations. Ideas of this kind had also found their way into nineteenth-century American health reform and, significantly, into the Adventist press.⁸

In 1844, Joshua Himes speculated about the physical condition of the ten generations between Adam and the Flood:

Himes was careful to call his conclusion an inference. Ellen White presented the same basic idea as revealed history. In her account, Adam possessed extraordinary stature and perfect symmetry; the generations before the Flood retained their great size and strength; and after the Flood, human stature progressively declined until the race became a “dwarfed, feeble, deformed race.”

That progression is nowhere found in Genesis. Scripture gives no measurement for Adam, never says that he was more than twelve feet tall, and nowhere describes a continuous decline in human stature from Eden to the present. Nor does it portray modern humanity as the physically degenerated remnant of a prehistoric race of giants. Those details belong to Ellen White's expanded history — a history that closely resembles ideas already circulating in the world around her.

The KJV Bible does, of course, speak of giants before the Flood:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that... (Gen. 6:4).

At first glance, that may seem to provide biblical support for Ellen White's giant-human narrative. However, the passage cannot solve her problem without understanding the meaning of the Hebrew word translated as "giants."

The Hebrew word for giants — Nephilim — is of uncertain meaning. The Hebrew word does not provide any indication of physical height. The connection with the Hebrew root naphal, “to fall,” has led many modern commentators to refer to them as “fallen ones,” but the precise meaning remains elusive. The only indication of who they are is found in the same text: “mighty men” and “men of renown.” Whatever else those expressions may mean, they do not tell us that the Nephilim were extraordinarily tall, nor do they tell us that human beings before the Flood were giants.

In fact, the Nephilim passage demonstrates exactly how far Ellen White went beyond the biblical record. Genesis gives us a brief and enigmatic statement about the Nephilim. Ellen White supplied an entire physical history of the human race: Adam was more than twice the height of modern men; the antediluvian generations retained giant-like stature; the post-Flood generations became progressively smaller; and modern humanity ultimately became “dwarfed, feeble, deformed.” Genesis gives no such history. Nor does the fossil record.

Discarded Prophetic Utterance

As the nineteenth century progressed, it became increasingly difficult to defend Ellen White's theory of devolution. Thus, the revealed truth in Patriarchs and Prophets was modified to make her unscientific statement less obvious. The twelve-foot Adam became an Adam of merely “lofty stature.” The continuous decline disappeared. The “dwarfed, feeble, deformed race” disappeared. What remained was a general assertion that Adam was taller than modern humanity.

That is not what we would expect if the original measurement had been an important fact revealed by God. It is exactly what we would expect from someone relying upon the theories of her day.

Geological Claims

Patriarchs and Prophets offers a complete physical mechanism to explain earthquakes and volcanoes:

At this time immense forests were buried. These have since been changed to coal, forming the extensive coal beds that now exist, and also yielding large quantities of oil. The coal and oil frequently ignite and burn beneath the surface of the earth. Thus rocks are heated, limestone is burned, and iron ore melted. The action of the water upon the lime adds fury to the intense heat, and causes earthquakes, volcanoes, and fiery issues.¹¹

The original account, published decades earlier for the sect alone, said the same thing at greater length — buried antediluvian forests “petrified and become coal,” the coal producing oil, God igniting the deposits, the same water-and-limestone mechanism driving the same earthquakes and volcanoes.¹²

This was not Ellen White having a vision of geology. It was, sentence for sentence, the standard model of an identifiable school of nineteenth-century writers known as the “scriptural geologists” — men who argued, against the emerging discipline of actual geology, that the world’s rock strata were laid down rapidly by Noah’s Flood rather than over long ages. For example, George Fairholme argued in 1833 that coal beds were deposited by “a violent and rapid process, at some period of unusual destruction in the vegetable kingdom” rather than by slow, gradual accumulation.¹³

George Bugg made the identical case in his own two-volume Scriptural Geology, published a few years earlier.¹⁴ White’s buried-forest-becomes-coal mechanism is their theory. Her water-meets-lime explanation for earthquakes and volcanoes belonged to the same circle of period writers — a chemical folk-theory of the sort then common in popular religious literature on geology.¹⁵

Such pseudo-scientific ideas also circulated among Adventists. Joshua Himes wrote in 1844 of coal beds formed by buried antediluvian forests:

“Immense beds of vegetable matter have accumulated under the earth's surface and become masses of coal…And when the forests which had grown for 1656 years were uprooted in that mighty overturn of nature [the Flood], the accumulation of vegetable matter which forms the largest coal beds, is not so unaccountably strange.”¹⁶

None of it was original to her. All of it was already circulating, and already controversial, among religious writers of her own century arguing against the geologists of their own day.

It was also, chemically and geologically, wrong.

• Coal is not petrified wood. Petrification replaces organic material with minerals, turning wood to stone while preserving its shape. Coal forms by an entirely different process, carbonization, in which buried plant matter is compressed and chemically transformed by heat and pressure over vast stretches of time into a carbon-rich substance. The two processes are not variations on a theme; they are different chemistry entirely.¹⁷
• Oil does not come from coal. Petroleum forms overwhelmingly from marine microorganisms — plankton and algae — settling on ancient sea floors and transforming under heat and pressure in marine sedimentary basins. Coal forms from terrestrial plant matter in swamps and peat bogs. They do not share a source, and one is not the raw material for the other.¹⁸
• The chemistry does not work. The reaction White describes — water reacting with lime — is real chemistry: it is the exothermic “slaking” of quicklime (CaO + H₂O → Ca(OH)₂). But that reaction tops out at roughly 100–150°C. It cannot come close to the temperatures required to melt iron ore (around 1,538°C) or produce molten basalt (upward of 1,000°C).¹⁹
• Underground coal cannot sustain the fire the theory requires. Deep coal beds sit in oxygen-starved environments. Combustion needs a continuous oxygen supply; without one, large-scale subterranean burning cannot sustain itself, let alone generate force sufficient to fracture the crust.²⁰
• Earthquakes and volcanoes are not chemical events. They are driven by plate tectonics — mantle convection, subduction, and the slow grinding of crustal plates against one another, originating at depths of tens to hundreds of kilometers, far below any coal seam, which sits only a kilometer or two down. A shallow chemical reaction in the upper crust could not overcome the immense lithostatic pressure of that much overlying rock even if it produced enough heat, which it does not.²¹ Volcanic explosions themselves come from the rapid expansion of trapped gases in magma, not from fire meeting water on a ledge of ore.²²

In Ellen White's era, plate tectonics was decades away from general acceptance — but that is precisely the point. A book claiming to relay a vision from the Creator of plate tectonics had every opportunity to say something no scriptural geologist of 1833 could have written. It said, instead, exactly what they were already writing. Even a scholar sympathetic to White’s ministry has conceded as much. Roger W. Coon, writing for the White Estate, put it plainly:

I know of no scientific data that would tend to support Ellen White’s statement that one cause of these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes is the presence of coal and oil burning beneath the surface of the earth.”²³

The significance of this evidence is not that Ellen White failed to anticipate modern geology. The problem is much more fundamental. She presented a particular geological theory as revealed truth, yet the theory was already circulating among nineteenth-century religious writers who were attempting to explain the earth without accepting the conclusions of mainstream geology. Those writers were wrong about how coal forms, wrong about the origin of petroleum, wrong about the source of volcanic heat, and wrong about the mechanism producing earthquakes. Ellen White did not correct their mistakes with information from the Creator. She reproduced the same mistakes and placed the authority of divine revelation behind them.

That is precisely the kind of claim her own test does not allow us to excuse. She said that when nature is correctly understood, it will agree with revelation, because “All truth, whether in nature or revelation, agrees.” The problem is that Patriarchs and Prophets does not agree with nature.

Conclusion

The evidence leaves Ellen White with a simple problem. She portrayed herself as someone receiving revelations about the natural world. Yet the specific facts she reported were not only wrong; they were already part of the nineteenth-century intellectual world around her. Her twelve-foot Adam belonged to a culture fascinated with human degeneration. Her coal-and-lime explanation belonged to the scriptural geology of her own century.

When the most vulnerable claim became too specific, it was softened. The twelve-foot Adam became merely “much greater” in height. The precise measurement disappeared. The problem was not solved; the claim was made harder to test.

In the instances presented in this chapter, Patriarchs and Prophets does not agree with either nature or revelation. It agrees only with the mistaken science of White's era.