@Ken: ken You say “Does the ongoing credibility of Adventism …

Comment on A “Christian Agnostic”? by pauluc.

@Ken:

ken

You say

“Does the ongoing credibility of Adventism require the empirical blend of faith and science or will such blend be toxic in light of the findings of main stream, peer reviewed science? Is Adventism going through the same process that all religions invariably go through when there is ideological disparities? Is a schism inevitable or even predisposed in light of a remnant philosophy?”

It is fascinating to see the strands in Adventist belief that are discordant with the current ascendancy of fundamentalism.

Adventist in terms of their doctrine of life after death very much reject a cartesian dualism. Adventist doctrine sees the breath of life resident within the body as producing a living soul. The loss of the breath or spark of life from the body results not in a disembodied soul seperate from the body going off to live forever but in nothingness. Perhaps one can conceive of the individual existing within the mind of God since adventists do conceive of a resurrection but there is certainly no dualism with a body and a independent and persisting soul seen in most of Christianity. In Adventism the soul or the mind is supervenient or an emergent property of the body.

Flowing from this belief in the soul as a function of a physical body is an understanding of the “body temple” and the Adventist health messages and the critical role of life style in the life of the believer.

Improvement of the body/mind of the believer is the substrate by which God communicates with man. This physicalist understanding of the soul has resulted in two predominant themes in Adventist. The critical role of education and of the medical ministry of the Church.

This however is where the fault line and conflict in the church today can be seen. On one hand both education and orthopathic medicine have been embraced by the church such that we now have naturalistic evidence based medicine at almost all adventist health care institutions and a cadre of well educated staff. Educational institutions have adopted similar scientific perspectives pari passu with the medical institutions.

Evidence based medicine and education in the sciences based as they are on methodological naturalism however cannot help but erode the fundamentalist perspective that priveliges a plain reading of scripture as supreme and sees knowledge as immutable and fixed.

What we witness on this site is a microcosm of this conflict between those who would seek to make Christianity relevant in a secular world where natural cause rather than divine intervention is seen as predominant and those who cling to a God of the gaps who prospers and is best justified on a substrate of ignorance. Conditions not favoured by emphasis on education and evidence based medicine.

As you say time will tell.

pauluc Also Commented

A “Christian Agnostic”?
@Sean Pitman:

You seem to be moving into some very dangerous territory with your desire to prove the historicity and veracity of the claims of Christ by empirical evidence.

You make a statement I really cannot believe a pathologist would make.

Let’s say that the engine in your car “dies”. It is fatally damaged and your car simply won’t run anymore – for the past 3 days now! Is it outside of the realm of science to effectively demonstrate that your car cannot be “resurrected” via any known mindless mechanism? How about with the effort of a very skilled mechanic? That changes the scientific likelihood of car “resurrection” quite substantially – doesn’t it?

Why argue at all for resurrection rather then recreation. How much viable tissue is present in a body left for three days in the middle east where daytime temperatures are likely 20-30oC. As you well know a body is by no means an inanimate object like a car that is essentially intact while nonfunctioning. The analogy is completely unhelpful A body 3 days old and stinking is dead and gone. You must start again and make a facsimile but there is no neuronal substrate for mind and no metabolic function remaining.

In your desire to avoid blind faith You are now in the troubling position of asking where is the evidence that such miracle happened and at the the same time perform the feat of objective verification without recourse to hearsay or toi that same blind faith. One solution to the disconnect between pathological reality and the account is to ask “did it really objectively happen this way or was it reported to happen, mostly by those with a vested interest in the account. When you start appealing to the empirical evidence you will likely end up in higher criticism and arrive at the position of theologians like Albert Schweitzer who in his search for the historical Jesus ended up believing only in the sanctity of life. Nothing else of the ethic or life of Christ could be objectively demonstrated.

You then ask Erv

“Do you really have an actual belief or faith in the reality of the empirical claims of Jesus to be the God-man that he claims to be? to have lived and died and been resurrected for our salvation? or, is yours simply an attraction to Christian culture and moral ideals in general without a real belief in the empirical realities claimed by Jesus and his followers? Why not respond, in a meaningful manner, to these simple questions?”

I assume you have answers to these questions which Erv Taylor does not.

Simpler to say as a neo-orthodox believer would that Jesus is the revelation of God and we accept that by the leap of faith. There is nothing else. At core that is what a Christian is; a believer in Christ as God and as a man who lived among us. That is enough for me.

We can argue at the periphery of whether Christ existed as the historical figure that the new testament almost alone describes or if the account of Christ as we know it is largely a product of the community of faith. That distinction is largely irrelevant as the Pauline doctrine of the church as the body of Christ allows for the continual revelation of God.

For me I cannot read the gospel account and the ethic He described and to which He called His disciples to see that in that grace beauty and transcendence is all I need to be a disciple. I accept that the characteristics of the community of Faith is love and that the just shall indeed live by faith.

To believe a life of faith can be based on a requirement for empirical evidence I consider a a blasphemous confusion of empirical reality with a transcendent reality of faith.


A “Christian Agnostic”?
@ken:

Ken
some points
1 If there was any lingering doubt about the religious nature of IDT after Behes testamony in the Dover court case I think the post here dispel it. IDT has to me only ever been a sophisticated God of the gaps an historically verifiable losing proposition
2 What surprises me is the willingness to privege the new athiests with expertise on religion and the deference given to dawkins
3 I am not sure Sean appreciates the difference between hope and meaning. Many in the presence of mortality salience find that some meaning is enough. Why and why me are questions asked in a medical and existential context snd in the former a naturalistic explanation is enough to give comfort. “At least we know”
4 For myself I find meaning in the community of faith the body of Christ of which the Adventist community is part. The two books that have been most helpful in my appreciation of christian community are Bonhoeffers life together and yoders the politics of Jesus.
They give me a perspective that allows me to see that it not about the way I am accepted by Faith Bob Ryan David Read Sean Kevin Peterson or Your Friend but how I treat them. How do I manifest the Grace of God.
Family and progeny are of course important but the moments of transcendence to me comes through contemplatation of the Christ of Phillipans 2 and translating those moments of transcendence into some sort of reality
I make no apology for the essentialky mystical nature of my religuous experience. Mystical I understand but as scientist I must can only accept the supernatural by faith.


A “Christian Agnostic”?
@Ken:

ID is most interesting not because of its lack of conformation to the normal rules of science but because of the issues about the attraction it has for its adherents.
Apropos of your suggestion that childhood experience is an important determinant of ones later beliefs there have been a few papers over recent years (mostly cited in the paper below) in the area of psychology that have addressed aspects of ID.
One of the most interesting has just been published in “Plos One” a Public library of science free online journal.

Tracy JL, Hart J, Martens JP. Death and science: the existential underpinnings of belief in intelligent design and discomfort with evolution. PLoS ONE 2011;6(3):e17349.

In this paper Tracy et al look at the relationship between changes in mortality salience and response to Evolutionary Theory ET or Intelligent Design Theory IDT. What they find is that increasing mortality salience is a driver to embracing theories that give life meaning and that IDT is attractive beyond the confines of religious belief because it it religion “neutral” and “scientific”. In the academe however where the creationist origins of IDT are recognized ET remains more attractive. . In contrast among students ET is more firmly embraced for its meaning in the face of increase in mortality salience. This nicely encapsulates the evangelical zeal I have increasingly seen acolytes of Richard Dawkins and the new atheists who embrace ET as a antidote to the nihlism that characterized the “old” atheists and gives meaning in the present of mortality salience. The most recent was a taxi drive who started an unprovoked discourse on the parlous state of the world, attributed it to christianity the source of all wars and preached the virtue of ralionality and atheism.

This paper I think nicely encapsulates the tangential arguments on this site on death, the soul and Adventist belief. Clearly Adventist belief has from the beginning manifest a high degree of mortality salience which has been reinforced by its forms of evangelism and eschatology.


Recent Comments by pauluc

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.

You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.

Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath

On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”

You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.

Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?

1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.

I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.

Grace


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.

And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.


Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?

Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…

Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.

Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.

That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.