Dr. Ervin Taylor: ‘A truly heroic crusade’
@ Ken with just a quick note:

Why is truth progressive but faith fixed? Why did mankind proceed from polytheism to monotheisn?

First of all, I notice that Sean wrote very precisely –not writing that truth is progressive, but that our understanding of truth is progressive. Big difference.

I believe that in any particular culture understanding of truth is generally progressive, but I don’t believe that’s true for all of man’s history. (I have a feeling that we don’t understand truth nearly as well as Enoch did.)

Secondly, I believe it is incorrect to assume that man proceeded “from polytheism to monotheism.” That’s an evolutionary concept, because the Bible clearly teaches that man originally worshiped the one Creator God.

We can see how that original faith became corrupted and developed into polytheism. The original offerings that were meant to prefigure the death of the incarnate Creator became corrupted into various kinds of sacrifices to appease the gods. (Even the Jews lost sight of the significance of the sacrifices.)

By the way, your last post confirms your “postmodern” mind set in that it is apparent that you apparently do not believe that absolute truth exists.

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Dr. Ervin Taylor: ‘A truly heroic crusade’
@ Ken

Thanks for your response 🙂

I understand and appreciate your entreaty to let go of the intellect to experience God.

I obviously didn’t make myself clear.

I do not encourage letting go of your intellect to “experience God.” Quite the opposite. I encourage making an intelligent decision to “taste and see” that God is good. He encourages us to “try” (test) Him. But the only way to do it is on His terms. That means a surrender to His way. Then you can “test” Him. You can’t do it fully from the outside looking in, though God does act to reveal Himself to honest seekers who are willing to surrender. There is an instance in the gospels where Jesus said to a doubting father, “All things are possible to them who believe.” The father recognized the Jesus saw his heart, and in desperation cried out, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief!” He knew there was some unbelief in his heart that he couldn’t overcome on his own, and the Lord answered his prayer. His son was healed.

If you are willing to be made willing, the Lord will do it for you.

Eastern religions encourage you to let go of your intellect. God encourages us to “come now and let us reason together.” Big difference.

This is a zen like concept that may have some merit. When I run long distances I often feel a connectedness with everything. Quite peaceful actually. Query: if experiencing God is an individual experience who is to say I am not doing so when I am high on endorphins and communing with nature? Or is it just physiological well being?

Yes, I know that endorphin rush, though it took a day of hiking three “day hikes” end-to-end to experience it. At the end of the day, I felt like I could still run up the nearest mountain. 😉 (A delusional state, I’m sure. 😉 )

While we may each have an individual experience/relationship with God, there are objective measures of the reality of this experience. Jesus says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” A change of heart that makes us love to do God’s will is an objective measure of a conversion experience. We may still fail to live up to what we know to be truth, but we will recognize it and feel genuine sorrow over the doubt that caused our fall into sin.

If there is no change in the outward life, that is objective evidence that there is no real relationship with God. Those who do have a relationship with God will continually grow to be more like Him, and objective observers will see the transformation — however slowly it may happen.

I wonder if certain people are genetically predisposed towards faith whereas others like me are predisposed towards perpetual curiosity?

Chuckle. “Perpetually curious” is probably how my husband would describe me. 😉 Perpetual curiosity is no hindrance to a Christian experience, as long as we are willing to let God be God in His sphere. The prideful wish to “have the last word” (i.e. doubt) or the wish to possess ultimate knowledge are hindrances, though. They are part of a wish to be complete master of our own destiny that gets in the way of accepting Jesus as Lord and Master.

The paradox is that in surrender to Jesus Christ, we experience the highest kind of freedom possible. We experience freedom from the chains of sin that bound us — fears, worries, and habits of thought and action. How constantly we experience this depends on the constancy of our connection with Christ. The way I see it, growth in Christian experience is a matter of growth in the proportion of time we are truly “connected” to Him. Because, when we are truly connected, we shall act like Him.

I remember asking ontological questions in Sunday school class right from the get go. No one has ever satisfactorily explained a rational bases of theodicy to me.

I believe that a good understanding of the war between Christ and Satan goes a long way towards a rational explanation. Also think about what true freedom of choice means. Could God both allow true freedom of choice and prevent all evil?

Apparently true freedom — which makes true love possible — was of such ultimate importance to God that He risked being misunderstood by allowing real freedom of choice.

I see a pattern in Man’s iteration of God(s) throughout history. Likely such folks were people of strong faith as well. Were they right or relative in their understanding for their time?

Paul says that “spiritual things are spirituall discerned.” So you may have to content yourself with not getting all the answers ahead of time. 😉

What will Man’s understanding of God be in a thousand years time. Will there be a melding between quantum mechanics and religion. All matter is part of God and as we better understand matter we better understand God?

That “all matter is part of God” is a competing philosophy to that of Christianity which affirms that the Creator is distinct from and outside of nature.

Does evolution which seemingly runs on natural selection have a deeper hidden design- an essence of life that drives it?

Have you paid attention to Sean’s posts on the limits of evolution in biology? Evolution is not a godlike mechanism.

The evolution that actually happens consists of relatively small adaptations of living organisms to the environment. In the majority of such changes, the possibility for such changes was already inherent in the original organism, and the adaptation is simply a matter of expressing a subset of characteristics. Sometimes, it’s a loss of genetic material. At other times, it’s a matter of mutations resulting in different genetic material that has some advantage in a specific environment. But there are very clear limitations to such changes. (Go to Sean’s website for more details.)

If we study history with any kind of objectivity, it’s fairly clear that humanity has not “evolved” to some higher form of being kinder, gentler, more loving or more moral. Quite the opposite. History bears out a continuous “falling” into a deeper and deeper morass of moral and social disintegration, only interrupted now and then by the overthrow of one “civilization” by another that still had the value of self-discipline. Right now, though, there’s no other civilization in sight to “take over” for another few hundred or a thousand years. It seems to me that the next one to take over is the one that Nebuchadnezzar saw as a stone that smashed the great image and grew to fill the whole earth.

Forgive me Inge but I think it would be impossible for me to stop asking such questions and jump on an established faith wagon. All religions appear to me to be evolving social constructs.

Said like a true social evolutionist. 😉 You are giving away your deeply embedded bias here. 🙂 And that’s going farther than most evolutionary biologists who do not necessarily subscribe to social evolution.

Does this disparage the individual’s experience with God? No, I don’t think so because it is individual for each person. That is why I respect your experience of faith, as I do my Catholic friends, my Muslim friends, my Buddhist friends, my Adventist friends, etc.

Spoken like a true “post-modern.” 🙂

I pray that in your “real life” you may meet up with Christians who truly demonstrate the Christ life in their own life. As it did to a former atheist (now pastor) of my acquaintance, that could make all the difference to you. And by the way, this young pastor is every bit as intellectually alive and curious now as he was in his days of atheism/agnosticism. Only now he sees much more room for his intellectual explorations. 🙂

What I hope is that the agnostic viewpoint can help to provide a bit of reflective perspective for those of faith so they can better understand and appreciate each other. Time will tell if my goal is quixotic.

I think you’re doing a great job of providing perspective and asking good questions. 🙂

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Dr. Ervin Taylor: ‘A truly heroic crusade’
@ Ken
Thank you for your feedback. 🙂

I enjoyed your insight regarding the cultural power of charismatics to attract masses to their words. This applies not only to religion but secular movements as well.

Indeed. Thanks for confirming my point.

I am glad you chose your faith and science has reinforced it for you. I presume from your comments that you were brought up in an Adventist household with an Adventist education.

Yes to the first … sort of. 😉 And mainly No to the other.

I think I mentioned somewhere that my father was an agnostic. He died as an agnostic, as far as I know. He didn’t want to talk about religion, saying simply, “I just can’t believe.” However, he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time supporting his inability to believe — time worthy of a better cause. (He could be seen surfing for anti-Adventist and anti-Christian sites. Much of his reading was authored by skeptics.)

I did not attend any sort of Christian schools until my final year in high school.

My step-grandfather was an elder in the church. Unfortunately his practical living did not match his profession — which was evident not only to my father, his stepson, but also to me, a child of less than 10. (We emigrated from Germany to Canada when I was 10.) This is the background to my profound questioning.

Have you ever wondered what you would have believed if you had been raised and schooled in another faith?

I never gave “another faith” (Christian faith, that is) all that much thought. Adventist beliefs seemed too firmly grounded in the Bible. My wondering went beyond that. What if I were born in Mongolia, for instance? What if the Bible was just a story made up by people — the way some of my “progressive Adventist” friends now question in their advanced years.

Like I said, I figured I had to make a choice. I chose to act on belief and “test” God, as He invited me to do. He said He’d answer prayer. He said to “prove me” in the matter of tithes and offerings. I tested His promises and, over the years, found Him abundantly faithful to His Word.

I believe He is particularly attentive to the prayers of children — both those young in years and those young in the faith. He says “Yes” an awful lot, when later, He often says “No” or “wait a while.” (Or so my experience tells me. 😉 )He knows just what we need and when we need it. And, of course, I was impressed by the fulfillment of prophecy.

I remember deciding to test out a “prophet.” You’ve probably heard of her — Ellen White by name. In school I learned all the signs and “causes” of cancer. Germs weren’t considered a cause. Yet Ellen White said that meat was infected with “cancerous germs.” So I wrote away to the “Book of Knowledge Information Service” regarding “cancerous germs.” Of course, they said there was no such thing. Actually, they sent me a print-off of an encyclopedia article on “germs.” When I asked for verification that “sugar clogs the system,” they sent me a print-off of an article on sugar metabolism. No, I didn’t lose my belief in the prophet, but I certainly lost my belief that this “answering service” was of any possible value! After all, I could read the encyclopedia articles without them printing them for me!

(I trust you realize that viral causes of cancer are becoming more and more recognized. [The word ‘virus’ is fairly new. So “germs” covered them.] And sugar does, indeed “clog the system” — it clogs the circulatory system with plaque, contrary to the original theory pointing to fats as the main culprit.)

Do you think eventually you would have become an Adventist because of creation science?

A correct understanding of creation could have led me to the Creator God of the Christians. Then a careful study of the Bible could have led me to Seventh-day Adventist beliefs — all with the Holy Spirit’s leading, of course.

On the other hand, I believe there are those in other cultures who believe in the Creator God and have a relationship with Him, without ever coming in contact with Christianity, much less Seventh-day Adventism.

Oh and in anticipation of the potential return cultural question I was raised and confirmed as an Anglican and in my teenager years went to a Baptist church.

Your curious agnostic friend

My dear “agnostic friend,” I challenge you to take God up on his terms. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” From your background, I trust you know that it’s an all-or-nothing deal. You cannot “know” God from a purely intellectual perspective. He asks for total surrender — a “new birth,” as He put it to Nicodemus. That means being willing to become like a little child again, in terms of simplicity of belief. To the intellectual Greeks, Christ was an offense. To the self-righteous Jews, He was an object of hatred. But to those who choose to believe, He is salvation. Even more, He becomes a personal God and intimate Friend.

But there’s no way to “know” from the outside looking in. Education is of no help. Intellectual power fails. Only total surrender will do. Only then can you “taste and see.”

PS How could you know what a chocolate cake tastes like if you only studied its recipe and listened to the stories of people who ate it?

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Northern California Conference Votes to Act Independent of the General Conference
Sean, while I don’t currently have time to address all the issues in your post, one thing concerns me greatly – that, as head elder, you would recommend that your church members should use their tithe as a tool of political action.

If your recommendation were followed by others, hundreds of thousands of people would be justified in not turning in tithe at all because they believe that the General Conference is out of line, being manipulated and controlled by a very small number of people. (But that’s another story.) And, really, anyone who disagrees with something done in the conference or the GC would be justified to withhold or re-direct tithe, following your reasoning. I do hope that you will decide that you “just cannot go there.”

When Jesus commended the widow who gave her last two coins, the “church” was as corrupt as it ever was or will be. Yet God recognized the gift as given to *Him,* and He blessed her and millions of people since then.

When we return our tithe to the Lord, I believe we must do it in faith, letting go of any control of how it is used. If administrators misuse it, they must answer to God. When we don’t return to God what already belongs to Him, we must answer for it. The way I see it, since the tithe already belongs to God, it is not ours to manage.

Offerings are another matter. If you feel your local conference is out of line, you are free not to send them the usual percentage for the conference budget and send it elsewhere.

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God, Sky & Land – by Brian Bull and Fritz Guy
The direct URL for Cindy Tutsch’s article is http://ssnet.org/blog/2011/09/does-it-matter-how-long-it-took-to-create/

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God, Sky & Land – by Brian Bull and Fritz Guy

Lydian: There is something else I would like for someone to tell me—

Where in the world is the GRI in all of this? I have searched the internet and find virtually nothing there that would attract anybody to what it has to say–if it has anything to say.

Good question.

There are a number of Adventist sites that deal with science supportive of the biblical world view, Sean Pitman’s among them.

It seems that the only Adventist university that has a site supportive of a biblical world view in science appears to be Southwestern Adventist University.

Their Earth History Research Center features research papers as well as material quite understandable to lay persons. I recommend clicking through their links to see what is there.

Perhaps this is where we should look (and perhaps send our dollars) instead of the GRI. You will see that Ariel Roth, former director of the GRI (when it was more supportive of a biblical world view) is part of the Earth History Research Center.

May God abundantly bless the efforts of all who are connected with this project.

PS Currently http://ssnet.org is featuring an article by Cindy Tutsch entitled, “Does It Matter How Long God Took to Create?”

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The Heroic Crusade Redux

Professor Kent: This is but only the faith of Sean Pitman’s straw man. This is not the faith of the Adventist who accepts God’s word at face value.

Sean is correct in his characterization, because that seems to be the kind of “faith” that has been championed here by a number of individuals who have faulted Sean for presenting evidence in favor of creation having happened just thousands of years ago.

If you accept the interpretation of evolutionists who believe (by faith) that life began on this planet some billions of years ago and then “by faith” believe that God created the world a few thousand years ago, you are essentially asserting “faith” in what you intellectually recognize as being a falsehood. That’s a good sight worse than a child’s “faith” in Santa Claus, because the child doesn’t “know from evidence” that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

I do accept God’s Word at face value, and because I accept it at face value, I know that all the evidence, rightly interpreted, will support the historical account in God’s Word. It is an intellectually consistent stance, whereas asserting belief in both evolutionism and biblical creation contravenes all rules of logic and intellectual integrity.

If you really do believe that the Genesis account is a true account of history, why do you characterize Sean’s presentation of scientific evidence to support the Genesis account as being anti-faith??

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La Sierra University Granted Window to Show its Faithfulness to Church’s Creation Belief
This is encouraging, IMO.

However, the survey of students probably presents a more favorable picture than is realistic, since a significant percentage of the students may not even know what the Adventist position on creation is — considering the kinds of homes they are coming from. But even if they all knew, a 50% rate of believing that SDA views were presented is pretty dismal. That’s a failing grade, after all ..

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