Comment on Adventist Review: Pastors Who Don’t Believe by Sean Pitman.
That’s right, Sean. I’m not God. Therefore I can not know what a person may or may not do in the future. But just because I can not know the future, does not mean I can not know, at least in some cases, the present.
What do you do with Mrs. White’s statement that, “Since you cannot discern motive, you are incapable of judging another.”?
I’m sorry Bill, but you simply can’t know, for sure, even in the present, the motives of another person’s heart or their true understanding of a given doctrinal position that is not intuitively knowable – such as the reality and importance of the literal 6-day creation week. You are not a very accurate mind-reader in such cases my friend. Only God is. You can suspect all day long, and you may be accurate on occasion, but you cannot absolutely know the mind or motives of another like God can – not even in the present.
You also seem to have a different definition of a “moral” judgment than I have. A moral judgment is a judgment of someone’s character as being “good” or “evil” – of being or not being in a state of conscious rebellion against a known and understood truth. It is in fact an assertion that you know the condition of a person’s soul and that if that person remains in their current “evil” condition, as judged by you, that they will be lost.
When it comes to differences on doctrinal issues, like the understood importance of the literal 6-day creation week, there is absolutely no way that you can be perfectly accurate in your judgments. It is the height of arrogance for any human to claim otherwise – to claim the ability to be able to accurately judge the motives of another human’s heart when, for example, they don’t believe in or understand the significance of a literal 6-day creation week. There is always the possibility that you could be wrong. The exceptions to your “rule” demonstrate this very likely possibility quite clearly. Therefore, you should refrain from making such declarations of moral judgment in such cases where you cannot be 100% sure and leave such judgments up to God.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
Adventist Review: Pastors Who Don’t Believe
In any case, any further comments concerning the morality or lack thereof of those involved with the LSU situation will no longer be posted here on Educate Truth. However, You are free to send me a personal E-mail if you wish (my E-mail can be obtained by visiting my website listed below).
Sincerely,
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Adventist Review: Pastors Who Don’t Believe
@Ron Stone M.D.:
Well, Sean, atheists have written books explaining what, why, and how they have rejected God’s Truth. Those at LSU have explained what they believe and why they have accepted Man’s word and rejected God’s Truth. You say we can never know anything about this, and they must not really “understand†what they are doing.
I don’t know if they do or do not really understand what they are doing; and neither do you. Only God knows for sure…
Not only would I and others here disagree with you, but I believe the atheists would disagree. The idea that church members cannot be “judged†by their words and actions is simply not biblical.
And the soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross would have claimed at the time that they knew exactly what they were doing too… but did they really? Jesus prayed for them saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” – Luke 23:34 NIV
It is quite possible that even if a person is very adamant that he/she knows exactly what he/she is doing, that this person may not really know. This is a possibility that only God knows for sure. You simply cannot make this particular type of moral judgment with complete accuracy. You and I can judge the rightness or wrongness of the word or act (specifically regarding a doctrine like the literal 6-day creation week), but we cannot judge the rightness or wrongness of the heart; the motive.
There is a difference between being mistaken and sinning. Sinning requires a deliberate rebellion against known truth – something that you cannot tell for sure in cases of doctrinal disagreements on such things as the literal creation week or the true origin of the Sabbath or any other such commandment that deals specifically with man’s relationship with his or her God and God alone.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Adventist Review: Pastors Who Don’t Believe
@Ron Stone M.D.:
Sean says Moses and the Prophets are “empirical†evidence then says they are not!
Moses and the prophets are only “empirical evidence” in support of the Bible’s credibility if they actually say something true regarding the real world in which we all live (which I think they clearly do).
However, if Moses and the prophets did in fact clearly contradicted the real world (i.e., real history), the hypothesis that the Bible’s credibility is supported by them would be effectively falsified (as is the case for the Book of Mormon, for example) in such a situation.
It is in this sense that things like biblical prophecy must be held up for testing before biblical prophecy can be rationally accepted as credible (at least any more credible than the Book of Mormon).
In other words, biblical credibility is dependent upon the empirical evidence. Without the empirical evidence, there would simply be no greater rational reason to believe the Bible as any more credible than some moral fable that someone simply made up as a “cleverly invented story”. – 2 Peter 1:16 NIV
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
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