Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.
@Ron:
I did not say that God causes all events in His universe to happen. That is your misunderstanding of what I am saying.
Interesting. So, what events are not the result of God’s action or will?
I am saying, that you don’t have to be afraid of that. That God can handle it if you screw up. He won’t abandon you or leave you without light and understanding. If you are wrong, He will draw even closer to to you than He was before, and reveal even more truth to you, just as he did Satan, and Adam, and Eve.
The problem isn’t with God. He isn’t the one to fear. The problem is with sin itself and its effects upon those who yield to its call to follow the path of evil and rebellion. The fear is that we will actually give in to the call of insanity – and actually rebel against God. God cannot do anything for those who refuse to get help. That’s the scary thing about evil.
Sean Pitman: There is good reason to be fearful of rebelling against God.
I agree. Rebellion has serious consequences. But not all rebellion is incurable, otherwise Christ’s sacrifice would have no point. Sometimes, as in the case of Adam and Eve, rebellion is only the result of ignorance and fear which has a remedy in Christ.
Acting in true ignorance and/or fear is not sin. Adam and Eve did not act in ignorance or fear when they rebelled against God. They acted with plenty of knowledge of who God was to know better and to have chosen the right. There was no lack on the part of God when it came to providing them adequate knowledge to make the right decision.
It is for this reason that their rebellion was so evil… because there was no rational cause or reason for it.
You’re trying to explain their actions as being rational or logical. You’re trying to excuse or lighten the significance of what they did. If you were actually right, Adam and Eve would have been innocent of sin… of a conscious rebellion against that which they knew to be true and right and good.
Sometimes rebellion is the result of determined resistance in the full light of complete knowledge as in the case of Satan, in which case there is no remedy. This is an important distinction.
Agreed. There is hope for us given additional revelations of God’s character. However, there will still be humans who reject even these additional revelations – all because of what Adam and Eve did.
That is why you should not say that you “affirm Eve’s decision” – as if she performed some heroic act of independence. That’s not what she did at all.
I think it is this fear that is the root of the problem. It is fear that makes “you” (I am using the generic you now, including the church at large) react the way you do to the teachers at LSU, and the fearful response, censoring teacher’s, creates in the system even more fear, which only exacerbates the problem.
Not true. Some of my best friends are neo-Darwinists. Some of these are agnostic and a few are atheistic. Yet, we get along great.
The problem with LSU is not “fear” of considering opposing ideas. The problem at LSU is an organizational problem – a problem of having paid representatives of an organization attacking the primary goals and ideals of the organization while on the payroll. That is self-defeating for any viable organization.
The SDA Church has a certain perspective on reality that it, as an organization, considers vitally important to share with the world. It would be completely impractical, therefore, to hire people who believe and promote completely opposing ideas. That would not an viable organization make…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:
Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…
Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:
“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”
Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113
http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html
So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.
The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.
In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?
Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
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