Sean, I am only able to post occasionally, due to …

Comment on A “Christian Agnostic”? by A Servant.

Sean, I am only able to post occasionally, due to my rigorous schedule in medical school, but I want to affirm the last three postings you have made. This statement was especially meaningful: “In short, Biblical credibility, with regard to those claims that cannot be directly tested and potentially falsified, is dependent upon the credibility of those claims that can be directly tested and potentially falsified.” The main reason I still believe in God and the Bible as a SDA Christian is that I have directly tested and verified many of the Bible’s claims. This gives me reason to believe in the claims that cannot yet be verified.

In addition, you are not undermining faith in the slightest. Such an accusation is the product of mental gymnastics, which assume that faith in God must have no basis in evidence. It becomes a clever guise for saying, “We can teach anything we want in a Christian school, because our faith needs no connection in reality.”

If we applied this same principle to finance, we should all put our funds in Greek government bonds. Their government is failing, they may leave the euro, and they are not likely to pay back the money they borrow. But who cares? If our faith in God doesn’t need any supporting evidence, who says that our faith in each other needs evidence? What prevents us from having faith in Greece that we will be paid back, despite the evidence to the contrary? What prevents us from wasting our money in a worthless investment?

Recent Comments by A Servant

Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science
@Sean Pitman:
Sean, there are a lot more people that read your site and agree, although they do not comment because they may not be able precisely to articulate a defense against the attacks made on those who speak.


Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science
@pauluc:
No, Paul, you are again mistaken. Sean’s position is completely intellectually sound. It just rests on different presuppositions than yours. After years of thorough investigation, I hold the same position as Sean, that any faith tradition that is to influence our behavior in the real world needs to be supported by real-world falsifiable evidence.

Your position seems to rests on the assumption that we believe God without a reason to do so. But you have never given a clear answer to why we should believe in God versus Krishna, tree spirits, or gurus. Do you have a direct answer to this? You evade this question every time Sean or someone else asks it. Worshippers of Krishna or tree spirits have faith, too.


Dr. Jason Rosenhouse “Among the Creationists”
@A Servant:

Hi Dr. Rosenhouse! I have been watching for your reply, but have seen none. It makes it hard for me to favor your arguments if you don’t have a good response to the counterarguments Pitman has presentet. I would still enjoy hearing your reply to Pitman’s specific points in this article.


Dr. Jason Rosenhouse “Among the Creationists”
Hi Dr. Rosenhouse,

I am a graduate student and frequent visitor to this site, and am pleased to see your comment to his article. I appreciate what I sense is a collegial approach on your part to a sensitive topic.

I have independently arrived at similar conclusions as Dr. Pitman has, and am wondering if you have any experimental data with which to counter the argument he presents in this article. I am open-minded to arguments from both sides, and would give your thoughts fair consideration if you wish to share further. Thanks for considering this!


The Adventist Accrediting Association to Approve LSU’s Accreditation
@Pauluc: As a Seventh-day Adventist graduate student, I would be happy to have a teacher like Dr. Pitman in my program. As can be seen by his reply, he is by no means the first Adventist leader to suggest that the earth existed for a long period before the creation of life. If you have any objective dispute or material counterarguments to what he presented in his reply to you, I’d like to hear them. I’m open-minded, but I find that he has made a strong logical case for his position.

At this time, I would respectfully suggest that Dr. Pitman’s teaching far better represents traditional Adventist views than the teaching of many of the biology faculty at La Sierra. This should come as no surprise to long-time readers of this website.