Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.
@Ron:
First of all, I never said that God was responsible for evolution over billions of years. Remember in our ground rules for discussion we stipulated belief in a special creation about 10,000 years ago. So we are only talking about what happened since then.
We are having this discussion because you have been arguing in favor of LSU science professors continuing to promote the neo-Darwinian perspective on origins while actively undermining the Adventist position on origins – in our own schools. That’s the entire point of this discussion…
Given the acceptance of a literal 6-day creation week within recent history, there is no neo-Darwinism. You see the point?
I don’t see “survival of the fittest” as painful at all. First of all, that was first used to describe social/cultural evolution, not biological evolution. I don’t think it needs to have the connotations that have been given it. For one, the process never requires pain and death. Any and every individual can life out a full and complete life. It only requires that there be two different environments bridged either geographically, or over time by two different populations. One population does better on one environment, while the second does better in the second environment.
In that case, you don’t understand the evolutionary mechanism – you don’t understand how natural selection works. It’s all based on death. There is no natural environment-based selection without preferential death within a population.
I see the development of variation in a population to be very consistent with God’s character. Just look around, He obviously loves variety. I also see a changing environment as natural/consistent with God’s character and not sinister.
Phenotypic changes that aren’t based on changes to the underlying gene pool, that aren’t based on death, are not evolutionary changes. What you’re describing is not Darwinian-style evolution. Darwinian-style evolution where novel information is added or subtracted from the gene pool is always based on death.
Tell me. How do you justify God instigating the murder of Job’s children and servants? How do you justify God ordering genocide? How do you justify God, the Father, permitting His Son to be tortured and killed? What ever answer you give to these questions, just apply it to the pain and death caused by genetic defects as well.
God did not instigate the murder of Job’s children or anyone else. God allows murderers, like Satan, to commit murder for a time, to demonstrate their true character. However, God did not instigate or in any other way cause their acts of murderous rebellion against His will.
Personally, considering the evidence in the Bible, it appears to me that death weighs very lightly in God’s scale of pain. It seems that for God, death is appropriate for even the smallest and most remote of transgressions. For example He gave Eve the death penalty for stealing a piece of fruit while He only gave Cain banishment for murder. That would imply that in God’s mind, a piece of fruit is of more value than the life of a man.
Oh please. It was because the test placed on Adam and Eve was so easy to resist (there was no inherent need for Eve to desire the fruit that was specifically forbidden since she had plenty of good food to eat elsewhere). This is why this test was so symbolic of their allegiance to God. Taking the fruit against God’s direct command was a statement of open rebellion against God.
As far as Cain is concerned, he was also living under the penalty of death just like Adam and Eve. Just because Cain was not instantly killed does not mean that he was not punished or that he ultimately escaped anything for what he did. Cain’s fate will be far worse, because of his impenitence, than the fate of Adam and Eve who did seek repentance and forgiveness.
If it doesn’t bother God to inflict the death penalty for stealing a piece of fruit, while only banishing Cain for murder, and he is willing to order the death of his own son, then why would He worry about death from cancer or any other reason? Death is death. If he allows ANY kind of death, then what does if matter if he allows MANY kinds of deaths?
Again, it is not the matter of allowing pain and death in a sinful rebellious world. The issue is over a God who originally chose to use mechanisms that require suffering and death when He originally created this world and called it “good”…
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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