@ Ken Thanks for your response :) I understand and appreciate your …

Comment on Dr. Ervin Taylor: ‘A truly heroic crusade’ by Inge Anderson.

@ Ken

Thanks for your response πŸ™‚

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. πŸ˜‰ (A delusional state, I’m sure. πŸ˜‰ )

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. πŸ˜‰ 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. πŸ˜‰

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. πŸ˜‰ You are giving away your deeply embedded bias here. πŸ™‚ 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.” πŸ™‚

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. πŸ™‚

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. πŸ™‚

Inge Anderson Also Commented

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

Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ. Romans 10:17 (NIV)

Probably the more accurate reading, rather than “the word about Christ” (NIV) is “the word of God,” as the more literal translations read. Thus, the reference is to the recorded Scriptures then extant.

That may be good enough for a lot of people, but when I was young, I wondered about the evidence for the existence of God and the dependability of the Bible itself. Not being sophisticated enough at the time, I didn’t even realize that this text of “faith comes by hearing the word” [whether of chairman Mao, the Koran, the Book of Mormons or the Bible] is equally true, no matter what our source of the “word” might be. After all, it is psychologically true that we are changed by our focus (by beholding Christ, we become like Him, by beholding evil, we become evil].

In my teens, I did have the gut feeling that I had to choose what to believe. (My father was a closet agnostic, and I sensed it, while my mother was a third-generation Adventist believer.) At the time, the alternative of agnosticism didn’t seem all that attractive, and I tentatively chose to believe in God and the Bible.

However, if that initial choice had not been confirmed by my experience of testing [according to the scientific method, as Sean so often explains it], I would not have arrived at the settled faith I now hold.

So Romans 10:17 may be good enough in a specific cultural context, but it is no help at all in choosing between belief systems such as communism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Mormonism, Mohammedanism, etc. In each case, “faith” comes by “hearing”/reading the “word” of the founder/leader. Millions of adherents demonstrate that this is so.

Many young people in Western society grow up without a specific belief system, and they are faced with choosing between a confusing array of world religions. Your repetitive mantra of “only faith” is no help at all. By contrast, Sean’s reasoned apologetic in behalf of the Creator God of Christianity invites investigation and belief.

Furthermore, we cannot take for granted that the young people who attend our colleges have a settled Christian belief of their own — particularly those who “inherited” their belief system. Not having had to wrestle with questions of belief, they are still in the time of critical decision-making, as is demonstrated by those who become agnostics as a result of attending science classes in an evolutionary framework.

For me, understanding the shakiness of the evolutionary claims of naturalism, as clarified in my “Philosophy of Science” class at AU, helped forge my faith in the Creator God who “spoke and it was done.”


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.


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

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. πŸ˜‰ 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. πŸ˜‰ )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?


Recent Comments by Inge Anderson

An apology to PUC
While history cannot be undone, I do believe that this is a good move.

Since Bryan Ness’s lecture/discussion has already been given exposure, it cannot really be recalled. Even if every scrap of it were pulled from the web site, the context in which it was given makes a whole lot of difference.

For instance, if everyone knew Dr Ness to be a strong believer in the Bible account, even when he did not have all the empirical evidence, the lecture would have a decidedly different impact than it does in isolation. (I have reason to believe that this is actually the case.)

It may even be, as I suggested earlier, that he gave more emphasis to the arguments against creation science because he was confident that the students in the discussion were sufficiently grounded in the creation approach but needed a bit of challenge to understand the ideas they would meet in the world.

Since the original lecture cannot be effectively recalled, the best thing, at this time, is to provide more context. And I’m hoping that the PUC administration will see fit to do that.

This site receives a fair bit of traffic, and word of mouth travels quickly too. So any information released by PUC will actually give them free publicity and may persuade more students to attend there.

In the meantime, I would hope that those commenting on the entries regarding Dr Ness would take their focus off his person (especially when they don’t know him) and his teaching (for which the one video is an inadequate example) and continue to discuss how to approach the issues surrounding the interaction of science and faith.

I may have mentioned it before, but I believe that Leonard Brand’s book, Beginnings: Are Science and Scripture Partners in the Search for Origins? (Pacific Press, 2006) provides some real guidance and food for thought in this direction. It’s a small, readable book and should be available in all our college & university libraries.


Why those who hate the Bible love blind-faith Christians
Professor Kent cites statements from Edward Zinke as authoritative exposition of Adventist doctrine, but I accept Seventh-day Adventists Believe … “ as considerably more authoritative, considering that it results from the work of over 200 Adventist leaders and teachers, rather than just one individual. And I find that volume to corroborate the approach of Dr Pitman in statements such as these:

“[God’s] self-revelation stands rooted in real events that occurred in a definite time and place. The reliability of the historical accounts is extremely important because they form the framework of our understanding of God’s character and His purpose for us.” (p. 10)

This sounds to me very much like what Dr Pitman has been writing all along.

In the same source I read:

“the Bible’s writers viewed all the historical narratives it contains as true historical records, not as myths or symbols. Many contemporary skeptics reject the stories of Adam and Even, John, and the Flood. Yet Jesus accepted them as historically accurate and spiritually relevant.” (p. 11)

It is transparently obvious that it is impossible to accept both the origin-by-evolution scenario and the Bible as historically accurate accounts of our origin.

Dr Pitman has consistently defended the accuracy of the biblical narrative, in harmony with Adventist beliefs, and has been just as consistently attacked by certain posters for doing so. In the process Dr Pitman has been accused of not having sufficient respect for the Bible, not sufficient faith, etc.

That is high irony indeed.

Apparently these posters object to the rational/scientific defense of the biblical account, characterizing such defense as contrary to faith while also implying that the teaching of the evolutionary scenario as factual in our universities should not be questioned or even exposed to the public.

Jesus told a parable of two sons — the first at first refused to do as the Father wished, while the other appeared to obey. The first, in fact, did as the Father asked, while the latter did not obey.

It seems to me that those professing “faith” in the Bible, while arguing strenuously against Dr Pitman’s defense of the biblical account are very much like the second son who appeared to obey but did not. They characterize Dr Pitman as “heretic” (i.e. disobedient), which is an epithet that more accurately describes their own postings.

Perhaps those foremost in attacking Dr Pitman, could profitably reflect on what Jesus said to those who acted like the second son: “Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you.” (Matthew 21:31 NIV)


Why those who hate the Bible love blind-faith Christians
@Professor Kent

And here is yet another quote from the same source (Edward Zinke), published by the Review and Herald Publishing Association:

Also, I failed to grasp the authority of the Bible when I wanted to take the “truths” discovered in the natural world and synthesize them with the truths from the scripture.

It seems to me that Edward Zinke was attempting to do what the professors in some of our schools (notably La Sierra) have actually done – “synthesized” “truths” of science with the Bible, not recognizing that the Bible is, in fact, accurate in its historical narrative. In their “synthesis,” they reinterpreted the Bible to accommodate science (falsely so called).

It is highly ironic that anyone should attempt to use Dr Zinke’s confession to attempt to put down Dr Pitman’s spirited defense of the historicity of the biblical narrative.

Dr Zinke confesses to having used an approach that is foundational to Catholic theology — that of regarding tradition (or science) as being of equal authority as the Scriptures. That is actually a self-serving twisting of the true meaning of “primacy of the Scriptures,” which means that Scripture is “above all,” and that all other sources of spiritual authority must be tested by the Bible.

Dr Zinke makes very clear below that he was unconsciously using the Catholic approach:

Without realizing it, I was using a method that came from the major theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. For him, theology rested upon the Bible AND nature, the Bible AND reason, and the Bible AND church tradition.

I believe Dr Pitman has been saying that if we reject the historical/scientific accuracy of Genesis, which other Bible writers regarded as accurate history, we undermine the very foundation of biblical authority. If the Bible is not accurate regarding the things we can see, how can we trust it regarding things we can not see?

So Dr Pitman has been actively defending the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. It is ironic that those who actively oppose his defense appear to try to wrap themselves in mantles of “faith.”


Adventist Education–at the crossroads?
I was intrigued by Jan Long’s remark:

Jan&#032Long: We know, for example, that Jesus introduced his own paradigm shift. It was a radical departure from business as usual.

It seems a bit presumptuous to compare what Sean Pitman and Shane Hilde are doing to Christ’s “paradigm shift.” But there are distinct parallels.

Jesus called His hearers back to the truths originally revealed by God through Moses and the later prophets. these truths had been contaminated beyond recognition by the interpretations of the theologians and scholars of the day — the pharisees and the scribes. Jesus removed the accretions of the millennia to allow truth to be revealed in its purity.

It seems to me that Sean Pitman and Shane Hilde are on a similar mission. They promote the view that what Moses originally recorded regarding the beginnings of life on this planet is actually true — not only by faith, but by evidence visible to the scientist. They dare to challenge the reinterpretations of Scripture by “progressive Adventists” to fit the scientific paradigm of the day, declaring that there is good evidence that genuine science confirms what God has revealed. In other words, God’s written word is trustworthy as a source of truth rather than being a collection of Pinocchian tales mixed with some wise sayings.

They could do worse …


The Heroic Crusade Redux

Professor&#032Kent: 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??