On that logic you should not have any issue with

Comment on Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution? by Sean Pitman.

On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”

Indeed. I have no problem with working on the Sabbath as a policeman or a firefighter, etc. I work as a doctor on the Sabbath as well. Some jobs simply have to be done by somebody – even on the Sabbath. Jesus himself commented on this situation noting, “Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? (Matthew 12:5). The Sabbath command is not against doing necessary work for the service of others, but doing purely personal work or otherwise unnecessary work that could wait for another day.

You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.

You’re the one trying to have it both ways! – not me. I think that those who claim that some jobs are necessary in this world, but who aren’t willing to do these jobs themselves, are being inconsistent. I for one would not ask anyone else to do what I’m not personally willing to do.

2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets.

Yes.

This is where it gets really strange. 3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.

Intelligent design is no more “magic” for God from his perspective than it is for you from your perspective. The fact is that the Bible is very very clear that God does in fact step in and act, on occasion, above and beyond what the mindless natural laws themselves can explain. You do the same thing. You can create using your own powers of intelligent design to produce artifacts which cannot be explained by any mindless natural mechanism. There is no “magic” here – unless you want to call your own abilities to create beyond what natural law can explain “magical” – which in a sense it is.

The fact of the mater is that the universe does contain artifactual features – to include the precisely balanced fundamental constants of the universe as well as the machines of living things that function at a very very high level of informational complexity. Such machines cannot be explained by mindless natural processes at all – period. They do in fact require intelligent input to explain their origin – intelligent input that occurred well after the origin of the universe.

This is a very Biblical concept and not at all “strange” from a truly Christian perspective.

4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.

Again, the science in hand strongly supports the contention that life could have have either arisen according to the mindless laws of nature nor could it have evolved any diversity beyond extremely low levels of functional complexity – without the additional input of very high-level intelligent design (or “creative intelligence” if you prefer). Those are the facts in hand.

Beyond this, I really can’t believe that either you or Rogers would deliberately equate a “process” involving inanimate materials with a process that requires suffering and death for sentient creatures. Morally speaking, these are not remotely in the same ballpark! Only a true sociopath wouldn’t be able to see the difference…

5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.

Oh please. The entire medical science of forensic pathology takes into account both natural laws and processes as well as the very real potential for deliberate and intelligent manipulation of those laws in a very artifactual manner. There is no “incongruity” here at all. The notion that the detection of true artifacts of deliberate design is beyond the realm of science is absolute nonsense. Such concepts are used everyday in medical science as well as many other mainstream sciences. The only difference when such concepts are applied to the origin of living things or the origin of the fundamental constants of the universe is that it is known that humans weren’t involved. Otherwise, the scientific arguments are identical.

6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.

I think you do actually recognize that there’s a problem with the suffering and death of sentient animals. You don’t like it. A true sociopath would either get pleasure out of animals suffering or be completely indifferent to it. And, it sounds to me like you are painting God as a sociopath – someone who deliberately creates a painful world from the very beginning in order to highlight His own goodness. To me, that would be something only an evil monster would do. I could never love or respect a God like that. And, you yourself are not comfortable with the problem of suffering. You don’t like it. You just think it is somehow a necessary evil that is unrelated to any moral fall of mankind. You think that it is somehow necessary to teach us to appreciate the good – and therefore God had to create an evil world to teach us this lesson. Again, that’s a very Mormon way of thinking.

I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.

Let’s see here, you’re the one claiming a title of “Christian” while arguing that God is the one who deliberately created an evil world in order to teach us to appreciate the good. You’re the one claiming that there was no moral fall of mankind that explains the evil in this world – that it was all God’s doing from the very beginning. You’re the one equating a process involving only mindless matter, like a bunch of rocks rolling down a mountainside, with a painful process involving the suffering and death of sentient creatures – like there’s no moral difference or that such a comparison isn’t any big deal. You’re the one suggesting that mindless natural processes can actually explain the origin of machines that function at an extremely high level of informational complexity – despite the complete lack of demonstration or logically tenable evidence along these lines outside of intelligent design. You’re the one who claims that if God did act above and beyond the mindless natural laws that He originally created that this would be equivalent to an appeal to “magic” – despite your own abilities to create beyond the powers of these very same natural laws and despite your own claim that God does in fact exist and was likely responsible for the origin of the universe and its fine-tuned features (but somehow can’t do anything else? not even what you yourself can do?).

Talk about living in the twilight zone! I think you’re seriously confused and very inconsistent in your thinking. I don’t think you really understand the implications of much of what you’re saying here…

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Sean Pitman Also Commented

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
First off, I’m sorry but I feel that your latest posts on this topic needed to be combined so that they are located in the same proximity within this thread – so as to better keep track of individual conversations.

As far as the arguments you’ve presented, there seem to me to be numerous significant problems for your position. First off, your suggestion that post-Phanerozoic granitic rocks don’t exist is just nonsense. They do exist – to include granite rocks with “crystals visible to the naked eye”. Even Gentry himself used such rocks in his original paper on the topic. Consider that numerous creationists admit this particular fact and many have argued that Gentry’s claims simply aren’t tenable. For example, in a 1988 paper R. H. Brown, H. G. Coffin, L. J. Gibson, A. A. Roth, and C. L. Webster (Link) argued:

In Creation’s Tiny Mystery, Gentry repeatedly states (pp. 25, 36, 65, 66, 98, 117, 153, 184) that the Precambrian granites represent the primordial creation rocks. Part of the reason for this statement is the presence of pleochroic halos found in them. However, Wakefield (6) and Wilkerson (7) challenge this interpretation, pointing out that the localities where the pleochroic halos are found represent secondary rocks, specifically dikes of granite and even calcite veins that intrude older rocks; hence, they are at least secondary in origin. Wise (8), who has reviewed the literature on the localities where pleochroic halos have been reported, indicates that a majority (15 out of 22) appear to come from veins or dikes (pegmatites), and hence represent secondary and not primary rocks.

Without entering into the argument as to the absolute age of the rocks (either primary or secondary), it would be safe to state that the majority of halo-containing minerals are younger than the host rock and therefore do not represent primordial material.

The presence of non-polonium pleochroic halos found near polonium halos in biotite, fluorite or other minerals weakens Gentry’s case even further. This is especially true when Gentry must invoke a nonuniform increased radioactive decay rate to account for the presence of U-238, Th-232 and Sm-146 halos, while leaving untouched the polonium decay rates! Gentry must invoke a nonuniform rate increase for some of the halos, because at present the half-lives of these other halo-producing isotopes are on the order of hundreds of millions to thousands of millions of years!

If Gentry’s independence assumption (polonium halos formed from polonium which was not produced by the radioactive parent U-238) is found to be incorrect, or even found to be strongly questionable, his whole contention that pleochroic halos are evidence of ex nihilo creation becomes suspect. The fact that the polonium isotopes involved in halo formation in the rocks are only those which are daughter products of systematic uranium and thorium decay forces one to suspect immediately that they are derived from uranium rather than a special creation.

Also, the existence of older xenolith inclusions within granite rocks (even within Mesozoic or Cenozoic granitic rocks) is also inconsistent with Gentry’s notion that God created all granite rocks instantaneosly during the Creation Week. It just doesn’t make sense that God would incorporate such xenolithic inclusions, some obviously from sedimentary rock, within such specially created granite rocks. Consider Collins’ arguments further in this regard:

Precambrian granite bodies in the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Colorado have an erosion surface on which the horizontal, Paleozoic, fossil-bearing sediments are deposited, with the Cambrian Tapeats sandstone at the bottom and the Permian Kaibab limestone at the top. The eroded surface indicates that these granites are older than these sediments, the so-called “Noachian Flood deposits.” On the other hand, the Donegal granites in northwest Ireland intrude and enclose inclusions of sedimentary rocks of Cambrian age, illustrating that the granites are younger than the Cambrian deposits, whose contacts with the granites have a high-temperature metamorphic aureole (Pitcher and Berger, 1972). The same kinds of metamorphic contact-relationships are found in the granites that intrude fossil-bearing sediments in Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island (Harrison et al., 1983). The Narragansett Pier granite in Rhode Island surrounds inclusions of Pennsylvanian metamorphosed sediments containing flora fossils, Annularia stellata (Brown et al., 1978). The flora fossils are now totally carbonized as graphite, indicating the high temperature of the granite body that metamorphosed the sedimentary inclusions. The fact that the granite contains inclusions of these fossil-bearing sediments makes the granite younger than these supposed “Flood” sediments. The Sierra Nevada granite intrusions in California also have intruded and metamorphosed supposed “Flood sediments” in roof pendants containing Ordovician graptolite fossils (Frazier et al., 1986) and Pennsylvanian brachiopod fossils (Rinehart and Ross, 1964; Rinehart et al., 1959). In other places, the Sierran granites have intruded and metamorphosed “Flood sediments” containing Triassic ammonites (coiled cephalopods) (Smith, 1927). A granite in the Mojave desert in California near Cadiz intrudes Cambrian limestone containing stromatolite fossils. At the contact, this limestone is converted to marble with high-temperature metamorphic minerals, but remnants of the stromatolites can still be found (Richard Squires, oral communication, 1998). Thus, it is very clear from the above examples that some granite masses are the same age as or even younger than the “Noachian Flood deposits.” (Collins, 1998)

As another example, consider the Bathurst Batholith which intrudes into fossil-bearing layers of sedimentary rock. At the contact with this granite batholith the host fossiliferous sedimentary strata have been metamorphosed by the heat of the cooling granite batholith (Joplin 1936; Snelling 1974; Vallance 1969). Numerous minor granitic dikes cut across the margins of the Bathurst Granite and out into the surrounding host strata. Good exposures of these dikes are seen in the many railroad cuts between Sodwalls and Tarana. Up to 45 m (about 150 ft.) wide, these granitic dikes have the same composition as both the Bathurst Granite and the Evans Crown dike, often with the same porphyritic texture (Snelling 1974). The granitic bodies making up the batholith invade host country rocks as young as upper Devonian, and on the eastern margin are overlapped by Permian sediments. (Link)

As far as your reading of the SoP, I’ve gone over what Ellen White has to say about origins very very carefully and have discussed these comments with you in some detail already. Suffice it to say that your arguments remain unconvincing to me and I highly suggest that you not press the issue with others or become “dogmatic” in your position on this topic. It simply isn’t fundamental to Adventism.

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
I do believe that God parted the sea for Moses and the Israelites to cross over while drowning the entire Egyptian arm. I also believe that God created the structure of the planet needed to support complex life. And, I believe that He accomplished these feats outside of what mindless natural mechanisms can achieve. The same is true for explaining the origin of a computer or an F-16 or a highly symmetrical granite cube or a chocolate cake. None of these artifacts of intelligent design can be explained by mindless natural mechanisms or “processes” either. Just like we can create beyond what mindless natural laws and processes can explain, so can God – just on a higher level is all.

Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
I agree…