On this we do agree then. We disagree of course …

Comment on Ted Wilson: No Room for Evolution as Truth in Adventist Schools by Sean Pitman.

On this we do agree then. We disagree of course on what is the lovely lie and the ugly truth.

You believe with supreme certainty that all empirical evidence and science rightly understood points to the Adventist God, a life of perfection without death in the biology we know and experience here and now, a short chronology of life on earth interrupted about 2000 BC by Gods displeasure and destruction of all life save in one small boat, a God of Love and Grace who knows when a sparrow falls and has written His royal law of love on every mans heart but calls you to take up lethal weapons and in the name of God’s own country once more start killing people whose only fault is to belong to another Abrahamic faith, a restoration of that edenic life of immortality by the simple expediency of access to a tree of life, a heaven where the rule of overwhelming force is the basis of peace and order and where if someone rebels there will be war in a real place with real weapons and destruction all absolutely and confidently verifiable by empirical evidence.

I do believe that the empirical evidence that I know and think I understand quite well does in fact support the overall credibility of the Bible – to include the Bible’s claims about empirical realities past, present, and future.

I know you think that all force is evil, but that’s simply not true. Sometimes the only way to stop evil is with the use of force. What would your plan have been to stop the Nazis from murdering all the Jews of Europe? Hmmmmmm? To pass out daisies and sing “kumbaya”? The same thing happened before the Flood when things got so bad that every thought in the hearts of everyone on the planet (save for one small family) were “evil continually” and the world was filled with murder and bloodshed (Genesis 6:5). Given such a situation, what would your solution have been? – to let the entire world head into irretrievable darkness, pain, suffering, and death? What about your own police force over there in Australia? – you’re not grateful for their work I take it? I think you’re very naive – but in a good way.

The ugly truth to me is that we do not know. We can never know. We can only live in hope with attendant and almost insuperable uncertainty and doubt. We have the option of only hope of a transcendent reality or of nihilism and meaninglessness. The new atheism’s optimistic and utopian idea is to me not realistic or sufficient for hope; that all selfishness will disappear with knowledge based on empirical evidence and that an ethic based on the Golden Rule or an appeal to empathy with “how would that me feel if it happened to me” is a sufficient foil to the HPTFTU and the psychopathy that is lurking in the soul of every man.

I agree. Sin cannot be overcome by appeals to “do the right thing”. Sin can only be overcome by a complete surrender to God who is the only One who can supply the power to overcome the evil that is within one’s self. And, there is excellent evidence that this is possible on an individual basis – empirically detectable evidence.

Empirical evidence is not supreme.

Without empirical evidence, you have no basis for hope in God or in His ability to solve the sin problem within you or within anyone else.

A revelation of the transcendence is to me the Hope that comes through the revelation of God who is implicit in the message of the prophets but is revealed in Jesus who was God incarnate, God made flesh who we can only understand through the mind of the community of faith, the body of Christ and the writings blessed by that community in the form of the Canon.

If the “revelation” is entirely subjective, based on some internal feeling or “gestalt” of truth, it is no more useful than wishful thinking. However, if the “revelation” produces real empirical results, then it gains credibility. That is why the “revelation” of Jesus after the resurrection in the flesh, an empirical demonstration, was required to produce real faith and hope in His disciples. Without this empirical demonstration as a solid revelation that went beyond and trumped their subjective feelings, they would never have realized any kind of hope in Jesus as the incarnate God who offers a better life to come. And, without such empirical evidence you and I cannot have such a solid hope either. As Paul says, without the empirical reality of the Resurrection, “your hope is in vain.”

We come to God when He reveals Himself to our minds and heart in an intuitive and life changing and asks us to live a life of Faith as a disciple. A disciple who overcomes evil with good. Who practices the kenosis of God in a practical way with both an ethic and a politic that is one of peace and deference to the other. We can only retrospectively justify all this through logic and reason in a utilitarian way by virtue of the fruits of the Spirit. The ugly truth is we live by faith not by knowledge. The lovely lie is that we have certainty and can be absolutely confident we understand the Bible completely in a naive reading, that all knowledge supports our position and that everyone else is wrong and of course inferior.

I agree that the motive of love, to include the “love of the truth”, must come first. I also believe that this motive of love can only come from God as a Divine gift – which is in fact “life changing”. However, there is very good evidence that such a motivation can be realized by non-Christians and heathen who have never read the Bible or even heard the name of Jesus. The knowledge that the Bible is in fact Divinely inspired and that God did in fact become man and walked our planet in bodily form in the person of Jesus Christ is not automatically derived when one asks for and receives the “love of the truth”. What happens is that the motive of love for the truth causes one to use one’s mind to search for truth and accept it with joy once the intelligent mind hears and appreciates the evidence for truth of all kinds – moral and empirical.

Your problem is that you confuse the existence of moral truth within yourself, and the ability to identify with good moral stories, with the ability to determine which religion or religious ideas and stories are empirically true – such as the story of eternal life described in the Bible. That’s not the case. While following internally-derived moral truth will in fact save you, it is the realization of empirical truth that has the power to give one a rational conscious hope in a bright future while still in this life. There will be many who will enter the gates of Heaven one day who never had the assurance of salvation while in this life because they were never given such empirical knowledge. They had a love of the little bit of truth that they had, but the didn’t have enough knowledge of empirical truth to realize that they would one day receive an empirical reward for their demonstration of love for their fellow man. One may have many empirically-wrong ideas and have hopes for things that will never come true (such as the hope of my LDS and Muslim friends for many things that will not happen). However, despite their erroneous hopes and beliefs, if they live according to the Royal Law, they will still be given the very real reward of eternal life with God in Heaven and the New Earth someday.

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Ted Wilson: No Room for Evolution as Truth in Adventist Schools
As I’ve pointed out before, there are a lot of books claiming to be “The Word of God”. How do you know that the Bible’s claim, among so many competing options, is true? – based on a feeling? That’s how you know? Did an angel show up and tell you that the Bible’s claims are true? – or how to interpret it? Were you born with this knowledge? or did you have to learn it? If you had to learn that the Bible’s claims are true, upon what did you base your learning? – and how did this basis of your learning help you distinguish the true from the false?

At first approximation, the Bible is just a book making a bunch of claims. How can you tell the difference between the origin of the Bible and the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an? In order to determine that God had anything to do with its creation, you have to read it and make judgments about it. If you base your judgments on some kind of deep feeling or gestalt sensation of truth, I say that this isn’t a reliable basis for a leap of faith. However, if you base your acceptance of the claims of the Bible on rational arguments that make sense given what you already think you know to be true, then you have yourself a much more useful and helpful basis for faith… as the Bible itself recommends.

God does not expect us to believe or have faith without sufficient evidence to establish a rational and logical faith in the claims of the Bible. Have you not read where the Bible challenges the honest seeker for truth to “test” even the claims of God? (Judges 6:39; Malachi 3:10; John 14:11; etc…). We are not called to blindly accept anything as true, not even the Bible. The claims of the Bible must be tested to see if they truly are what they claim to be – i.e., the Words of God.


Ted Wilson: No Room for Evolution as Truth in Adventist Schools
I haven’t changed my mind. I still see atheism as the most logical alternative to Christianity and any other view of God if such views of God are only based on a wishful-thinking type of fideistic faith. Why should one be a Christian or believe that the Bible is anything more than a good moral fable? – or believe that God exists any more than Santa Claus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists? For me, it’s because I see real empirical evidence for God’s existence as well as His Signature within the pages of the Bible and within the universe and the world in which I find myself.

You see, we are called to have an “intelligent trust” in God’s Word – a trust that is based on something more than a deep feeling or internal gestalt. Otherwise, you’re really in the same boat as my LDS friends with their “burning in the bosom” argument for faith in what is or isn’t true.

Now, it is possible to doubt the Divine origin of the Bible while still recognizing the Divine origin of the universe – based on the weight of empirical evidence. This is where quite a number of modern physicists are in their view of God. And, it is a reasonable position given the honest conviction that life and its diversity can evolve via the Darwinian mechanism of random mutations and natural selection over long periods of time to produce what we have today on this planet.

So, there are different “levels” of recognition when it comes to seeing God’s hand behind various phenomena. And, once His Signature is recognized at a different level, the implications and responsibilities change for us. It’s a “first step” toward God to recognize a Divine Signature behind the origin of the universe and the natural laws that govern it. However, once one recognizes the Divine Hand behind the origin of the Bible and the credibility of the Bible’s empirical claims, one is called to experience different responsibilities and privileges in a higher level walk with God – “in Spirit and in truth”.


Ted Wilson: No Room for Evolution as Truth in Adventist Schools
Again, there are somethings that, if seen in vision, cannot be easily misinterpreted. If you see that “there was light” then “there was darkness” and that this pattern of was used to mark off a series of seven days, that’s pretty hard to get wrong or misinterpret. Mrs. White also confirms these biblical claims by arguing that God specifically showed her that the creation week was a literal week “like any other”.

So, what needs to happen now is see which claims among competing claims are most likely true. Where does the “weight of evidence lie”? If the claims of neo-Darwinism are true, then the claims of the Bible aren’t just a matter of honest misinterpretations – they are either completely made up fabrications or they are outright lies – from God.

I will say, however, the Darwins observations did help to shed light on the Bible. For example, there were those who believed in the absolute fixity of the species – that nothing could change and that no new species of any kind could be produced by natural mechanisms. Darwin showed, quite clearly, that this interpretation of the Bible was false. So, Darwin’s discoveries did shed light on the Bible’s comments about reproduction “after their kind”. However, the Bible sheds light on Darwin’s claims by showing the clear limitations of Darwinian-type evolution – to very low levels of functional complexity over a short period of time (i.e., not hundreds of millions of years of evolution).

Again, we have science and Scripture shedding light on each other…


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I fail to see where you have convincingly supported your claim that the GC leadership contributed to the harm of anyone’s personal religious liberties? – given that the GC leadership does not and could not override personal religious liberties in this country, nor substantively change the outcome of those who lost their jobs over various vaccine mandates. That’s just not how it works here in this country. Religious liberties are personally derived. Again, they simply are not based on a corporate or church position, but rely solely upon individual convictions – regardless of what the church may or may not say or do.

Yet, you say, “Who cares if it is written into law”? You should care. Everyone should care. It’s a very important law in this country. The idea that the organized church could have changed vaccine mandates simply isn’t true – particularly given the nature of certain types of jobs dealing with the most vulnerable in society (such as health care workers for example).

Beyond this, the GC Leadership did, in fact, write in support of personal religious convictions on this topic – and there are GC lawyers who have and continue to write personal letters in support of personal religious convictions (even if these personal convictions are at odds with the position of the church on a given topic). Just because the GC leadership also supports the advances of modern medicine doesn’t mean that the GC leadership cannot support individual convictions at the same time. Both are possible. This is not an inconsistency.