painter once had himself tied to the mast of a ship during a storm so he could paint the storm. Well, not paint the storm, exactly.

A panda walks into a café and "eats shoots and leaves." Or rather, walks into a café and "eats, shoots, and leaves."

Language can be tricky—a point that hit me especially hard this past October. No sooner had this year's Annual Council received the report of the International Faith and Science Conference Committee, than people started exploiting the limits of language.

From the start General Conference president Jan Paulsen stressed that the purpose of the Faith and Science Conferences was not to change our position on creation. However, because the church faces challenges in this area, the leaders decided that instead of just ignoring these challenges, we needed to address them. Hence, the conferences.

Having attended both international meetings (Ogden, Utah, and Denver, Colorado), I can say that—despite the spin you might have heard elsewhere—the vast majority of attendees and presenters at both conferences unequivocally, even fervently, defended a literal 24-hour day, six-day creation a "short" time ago. Though other positions were presented, their advocates were vastly outnumbered (even if their proportions at the conferences were far greater than what exists in the church at large). After hearing a few paralogical attempts to harmonize evolutionary theory with Genesis, I said to someone rhetorically, "If what these people say is true, they're going to have to come up with a lot better arguments than they have now."

The most illuminating presentation for me came from Jim Gibson, Ph.D., of the Geoscience Research Institute in Loma Linda. Whatever creation model you accept (short chronology, long chronology, etc.), all the models come fraught with scientific problems, he said. Then from a purely logical standpoint, if all models have unsolved scientific problems, why not stick with the one clearly depicted in the language and text of the Scriptures? Gibson's presentation represented, I believe, the paradigm for how creation science should be taught in Seventh-day Adventist classrooms: an honest appraisal of the scientific pros and cons of both sides, but presented from the premise of faith in the creation model that we, as a church, have officially accepted.

After the meetings the Annual Council voted overwhelmingly to receive the full report and to accept the Response to an Affirmation of Creation document, a restatement of what we Adventists have always taught. The Response reads, in part: "We strongly endorse the document's affirmation of our historic, biblical belief in a literal, recent six-day creation. . . . We reaffirm the Seventh-day Adventist understanding of the historicity of Genesis 1-11: that the seven days of the Creation account were literal 24-hour days forming a week identical in time to what we now experience as a week."

Even before the printer that produced the response cooled, a paladin of the evolutionary model, after first reading the statement, said to me, "I can accept this. Sure, those who wrote the Bible really believed in a literal six-day creation week just like the week we experience now."

Please! The response isn't saying that this is what the Bible writers believed; the response is saying, unequivocally, that this is what we Seventh-day Adventists believe. Everyone knows perfectly well what the church means by "a literal, recent six-day creation," and to exploit the weaknesses of language in order to read into the statement what it is purposely not saying is sheer intellectual dishonesty.

With these Annual Council votes (not to mention Fundamental Belief No. 6 on creation), the church has made perfectly clear our stance on creation. Again, everyone knows what's meant by these words—everyone. If people can't accept that position, fine; but to try to make our statements mean what they were precisely intended not to mean, through exploitation of the inherent weakness of language, is the moral equivalent of stealing the cane of a lame person.

And God will one day judge stealing. Well, not judge stealing, exactly.

You know what I mean.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.