@LSU Alumnus: I appreciate that if you are contributing data …

Comment on Another Student’s Perspective of La Sierra University by pauluc.

@LSU Alumnus:
I appreciate that if you are contributing data that is appearing in the scientific peer reviewed literature you are functioning as a scientist. I would have thought that if that is so you would have some awareness of what the canonical literature of science is like. Do you think that what you have done in your research at NIH is somehow in conflict with your spiritual beliefs? You will no doubt also recognize that you have not published any observations in the peer reviewed literature for which you have invoked a miracle as the explanation. This is the way science at its core is practised. Seeking to understand the natural world on the basis of natural mechanisms; methodological naturalism.
It has never pretended to be anything more than that and attempted to move into the supernatural. It makes no claim about the supernatural and is, except in the mind of the atheist or philosophical naturalist, completely neutral on the spiritual life and anything beyond the natural.
As a Christian I can endorse and practice science on the basis of methodological naturalism and as a process for explanation of the natural but believe that there is a world beyond the natural and live a life where things like faith hope and charity are core values that are rooted in the incarnate God, Jesus Christ.

I am curious then as to what you want to be taught in Science classes at a Christian institution. Science is not about everything it is extremely restricted in its content. Why would you want to expand it, as the atheists do, and make it the sum of everything by including the supernatural within its gambit. If you are to include the Christian creation narrative as having value for scientific explanation then logically you should accept that Science should also teach other explanations for origins that come from other spiritual traditions. Greater minds than ours have established the scientific tradition as methodological naturalism. When it does not at all claim to impinge on our understanding of supernatural why should we in our wisdom seek now to change it.

pauluc Also Commented

Another Student’s Perspective of La Sierra University
@Ethan:
Sorry but I do realize that MDs publish in the peer reviewed literature, although I would question if they represent the vast majority.
My point was not the preceding degree for scientists publishing in the peer reviewed literature but simply that a scientist is one who performs experiments and publishes the results.
Publishing without doing experiments makes you a journalist. Performing experiments without publishing means you have not performed your role as a scientist since you have not contributed to knowledge. A scientist is one who completes the tasks performed by a scientist. Of course I consider a clinical trial an exercise in hypothesis testing.


Another Student’s Perspective of La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman:

Sean

Thanks for that clarification. I have noted it down. It seems abundantly clear what you think of the scientific tradition based as it has been on methodological naturalism for the last 2 centuries. There seems really little point in responding with specificity and no prospect of meaningful dialog.

Peace and Grace to you.

Paul Cameron


Another Student’s Perspective of La Sierra University
I find curious the statement

“As a scientist, I have no problem learning about evolution. In fact, I think that it is essential to know about it to be a functioning member of the scientific community…. ultimately I chose to just learn this information for my classes and instead believe what my convictions and the Bible said to be true ”

Is the anonymous author a medical doctor or a scientist?. They are not at all the same thing. A scientist does experiments to test hypothesis to see if they are untrue and publishes the results in the biomedical literature. A medical doctor may practice evidence based medicine but that is not being a scientist.

It seems from the statement that “another student” believes that the scientific evidence favours evolution but that creation is a position based only on faith in the bible. A position I agree with entirely.


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.