It’s not “all or nothing” Paul. Of course God

Comment on Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution? by Sean Pitman.

It’s not “all or nothing” Paul. Of course God has created natural “processes” that act over time according to the pre-established laws of nature. However, God is also able to act to manipulate these natural laws. Such manipulations can be detected as true “artifacts” of deliberate design. Your mistake is that you think everything can be explained as a process beginning with the same set of original natural laws. That’s simply wrong. Many things cannot be explained as an inevitable process resulting from these original natural laws. The origin of the universe itself cannot be explained as a natural process. It literally screams intelligent design – as you yourself have occasionally admitted. Likewise, the origin of life cannot rationally be explained as a process based on natural laws. The mechanical complexity of the most simple of living things precludes this and therefore demands the additional input of creative intelligence to manipulate basic materials beyond what natural laws and processes along could achieve this side of eternity. Also, the diversity of life with the existence novel mechanically-complex systems cannot be tenably explained by the original natural laws and processes beyond extremely low levels of functional complexity. Again the additional input of high level creative intelligence is required to explain the existence of such functionally complex diversity.

You see then, arguing for the existence of God without any ability to recognize His hand in anything beyond what can be explained by natural laws and processes leaves one with nothing more solid than wishful thinking when it comes to believing in God. Such fideistic wishful thinking cannot form the basis of useful religion that is able to establish a rational hope any anyone else beyond yourself in a better reality beyond this life and place.

That is why both the Bible and Ellen White describe Heaven and the New Earth as a real physical place – not a metaphysical idea or something off in some other dimension completely different from what we experience here in this world. There will be plants and animals. There will be mountains and hills, valleys and rivers. We will eat and drink. We will plant gardens and build houses. We will walk on streets and live in physical structures. Yes, the city of Heaven is a physical place with a physical location in a physical universe.

Beyond this, Ellen White did seem to understand the concept of a massive universe that had a beginning – as did the Biblical authors. After all, Genesis starts out with a description of “the beginning” of the universe (Genesis 1:1). The idea that the universe had a finite beginning and was not always popular in science (since a universe with a finite beginning is much more difficult to explain without an appeal to a Designer to explain its origin out of nothing). Also, the Bible appears to even speak of an “expanding universe”. For example, Isaiah 40:22 says that God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” This would suggest that the universe has actually increased in size or “spread out” since its original creation. Ellen White also specifically speaks about the Plan of Salvation being in existence “prior to the beginning of time” (Signs of the Times, Nov. 21, 1892). In fact, the idea that the universe and time itself had a beginning is a very Christian idea. The idea of a “Big Bang” actually supports the idea of a need for a Designer of the universe – a Designer who is able to make something out of nothing and exist outside of our time and place. Also, as far as the size of the universe, Ellen White describes the Earth as the tiniest speck, the tiniest “atom” in comparison to the rest of the universe which “circles the throne of God”.

All the treasures of the universe will be open to God’s redeemed. Not limited by mortality, they fly tirelessly to far-off worlds. The children of earth enter into the joy and wisdom of unfallen beings and share treasures of knowledge that these have gained through ages upon ages. With undimmed vision they gaze on the glory of creation—suns and stars and systems, all in their appointed order circling the throne of God. (EGW, LF, p. 273)

And, what do you know, physicists have suggested that the entire universe might indeed be rotating or spinning after all (Longo, 2011, Shamir, 2012, Sivaram, 2012, Seshavatharam, 2014)

It seems then that Ellen White did have a reasonable understanding of the universe – given her limited background and education. Did she understand everything that we know today about the universe? Of course not. But, what she did seem to know is not inconsistent with what we know today…

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Sean Pitman Also Commented

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
First off, I’m sorry but I feel that your latest posts on this topic needed to be combined so that they are located in the same proximity within this thread – so as to better keep track of individual conversations.

As far as the arguments you’ve presented, there seem to me to be numerous significant problems for your position. First off, your suggestion that post-Phanerozoic granitic rocks don’t exist is just nonsense. They do exist – to include granite rocks with “crystals visible to the naked eye”. Even Gentry himself used such rocks in his original paper on the topic. Consider that numerous creationists admit this particular fact and many have argued that Gentry’s claims simply aren’t tenable. For example, in a 1988 paper R. H. Brown, H. G. Coffin, L. J. Gibson, A. A. Roth, and C. L. Webster (Link) argued:

In Creation’s Tiny Mystery, Gentry repeatedly states (pp. 25, 36, 65, 66, 98, 117, 153, 184) that the Precambrian granites represent the primordial creation rocks. Part of the reason for this statement is the presence of pleochroic halos found in them. However, Wakefield (6) and Wilkerson (7) challenge this interpretation, pointing out that the localities where the pleochroic halos are found represent secondary rocks, specifically dikes of granite and even calcite veins that intrude older rocks; hence, they are at least secondary in origin. Wise (8), who has reviewed the literature on the localities where pleochroic halos have been reported, indicates that a majority (15 out of 22) appear to come from veins or dikes (pegmatites), and hence represent secondary and not primary rocks.

Without entering into the argument as to the absolute age of the rocks (either primary or secondary), it would be safe to state that the majority of halo-containing minerals are younger than the host rock and therefore do not represent primordial material.

The presence of non-polonium pleochroic halos found near polonium halos in biotite, fluorite or other minerals weakens Gentry’s case even further. This is especially true when Gentry must invoke a nonuniform increased radioactive decay rate to account for the presence of U-238, Th-232 and Sm-146 halos, while leaving untouched the polonium decay rates! Gentry must invoke a nonuniform rate increase for some of the halos, because at present the half-lives of these other halo-producing isotopes are on the order of hundreds of millions to thousands of millions of years!

If Gentry’s independence assumption (polonium halos formed from polonium which was not produced by the radioactive parent U-238) is found to be incorrect, or even found to be strongly questionable, his whole contention that pleochroic halos are evidence of ex nihilo creation becomes suspect. The fact that the polonium isotopes involved in halo formation in the rocks are only those which are daughter products of systematic uranium and thorium decay forces one to suspect immediately that they are derived from uranium rather than a special creation.

Also, the existence of older xenolith inclusions within granite rocks (even within Mesozoic or Cenozoic granitic rocks) is also inconsistent with Gentry’s notion that God created all granite rocks instantaneosly during the Creation Week. It just doesn’t make sense that God would incorporate such xenolithic inclusions, some obviously from sedimentary rock, within such specially created granite rocks. Consider Collins’ arguments further in this regard:

Precambrian granite bodies in the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Colorado have an erosion surface on which the horizontal, Paleozoic, fossil-bearing sediments are deposited, with the Cambrian Tapeats sandstone at the bottom and the Permian Kaibab limestone at the top. The eroded surface indicates that these granites are older than these sediments, the so-called “Noachian Flood deposits.” On the other hand, the Donegal granites in northwest Ireland intrude and enclose inclusions of sedimentary rocks of Cambrian age, illustrating that the granites are younger than the Cambrian deposits, whose contacts with the granites have a high-temperature metamorphic aureole (Pitcher and Berger, 1972). The same kinds of metamorphic contact-relationships are found in the granites that intrude fossil-bearing sediments in Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island (Harrison et al., 1983). The Narragansett Pier granite in Rhode Island surrounds inclusions of Pennsylvanian metamorphosed sediments containing flora fossils, Annularia stellata (Brown et al., 1978). The flora fossils are now totally carbonized as graphite, indicating the high temperature of the granite body that metamorphosed the sedimentary inclusions. The fact that the granite contains inclusions of these fossil-bearing sediments makes the granite younger than these supposed “Flood” sediments. The Sierra Nevada granite intrusions in California also have intruded and metamorphosed supposed “Flood sediments” in roof pendants containing Ordovician graptolite fossils (Frazier et al., 1986) and Pennsylvanian brachiopod fossils (Rinehart and Ross, 1964; Rinehart et al., 1959). In other places, the Sierran granites have intruded and metamorphosed “Flood sediments” containing Triassic ammonites (coiled cephalopods) (Smith, 1927). A granite in the Mojave desert in California near Cadiz intrudes Cambrian limestone containing stromatolite fossils. At the contact, this limestone is converted to marble with high-temperature metamorphic minerals, but remnants of the stromatolites can still be found (Richard Squires, oral communication, 1998). Thus, it is very clear from the above examples that some granite masses are the same age as or even younger than the “Noachian Flood deposits.” (Collins, 1998)

As another example, consider the Bathurst Batholith which intrudes into fossil-bearing layers of sedimentary rock. At the contact with this granite batholith the host fossiliferous sedimentary strata have been metamorphosed by the heat of the cooling granite batholith (Joplin 1936; Snelling 1974; Vallance 1969). Numerous minor granitic dikes cut across the margins of the Bathurst Granite and out into the surrounding host strata. Good exposures of these dikes are seen in the many railroad cuts between Sodwalls and Tarana. Up to 45 m (about 150 ft.) wide, these granitic dikes have the same composition as both the Bathurst Granite and the Evans Crown dike, often with the same porphyritic texture (Snelling 1974). The granitic bodies making up the batholith invade host country rocks as young as upper Devonian, and on the eastern margin are overlapped by Permian sediments. (Link)

As far as your reading of the SoP, I’ve gone over what Ellen White has to say about origins very very carefully and have discussed these comments with you in some detail already. Suffice it to say that your arguments remain unconvincing to me and I highly suggest that you not press the issue with others or become “dogmatic” in your position on this topic. It simply isn’t fundamental to Adventism.

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
I do believe that God parted the sea for Moses and the Israelites to cross over while drowning the entire Egyptian arm. I also believe that God created the structure of the planet needed to support complex life. And, I believe that He accomplished these feats outside of what mindless natural mechanisms can achieve. The same is true for explaining the origin of a computer or an F-16 or a highly symmetrical granite cube or a chocolate cake. None of these artifacts of intelligent design can be explained by mindless natural mechanisms or “processes” either. Just like we can create beyond what mindless natural laws and processes can explain, so can God – just on a higher level is all.

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
I agree…