@Professor Kent: Wrong. I think there is ample evidence that …

Comment on Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation by Sean Pitman.

@Professor Kent:

Wrong. I think there is ample evidence that God is real and who he claims to be. I totally disagree with your priority, however. And I’ve made my position clear on many occasions.

That’s my point. You think that faith can and should be able to stand on its own without any evidentiary support. That is why you go around constantly attacking and trying to undermine the evidentiary basis for faith. Your arguments are very similar to those arguing from an entirely secular perspective. The results of your position is that you undermine the faith of many people who do not yet have the background to understand the weight of evidence in favor of the Biblical perspective – who don’t know how to answer your attacks on evidence favoring the Biblical accounts. There aren’t very many people who are willing to accept the rational dissonance between “faith” and reason that you seem willing to accept.

If God says that an axehead can float after a stick has been tossed into the water, and all empirical evidence to date confirms this to be an impossibility, I’ll believe what God says.

Besides the fact that it would be very easy for a God to lift a little axehead to the surface of the water, how do you know that it was really God who inspired this story? How do you know it wasn’t a made up story? Yes, I know, the Bible has the power to change lives and it gives you a nice impression of the Divine. However, the same thing could be said of many moral fables and just-so stories…

You have insisted repeatedly that you would not believe God if the empirical evidence was contrary to his word, and you would abandon both Adventism and Christianity. Yet the fact is you continue to believe that an axehead can float, that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that Jesus died and then his body, days later, came back to life. You know as well as I do that all empirical evidence to date unmistakably contradicts these claims. You’re still an Adventist, and still a Christian.

The evidence that a God-like creative intelligence and power exists in this universe is overwhelming to me. Such a God could very easily cause an axehead to float, or resurrect a dead body. This is not at all inconsistent with the abilities of creative intelligence. In fact, it would be scientifically unreasonable for such things to exist without very very high levels of creative intelligence.

Your argument is equivalent to saying that a chocolate cake is a miracle that conflicts with science. You are correct if you’re talking about the science of what mindless mechanisms can achieve. You’re wrong, however, when you start considering what deliberate intelligence can achieve…

You’re not the least bit clever, genuine, or honest with your claim that evidence trumps faith. And you know it.

Evidence does not trump faith and faith does not trump evidence. Each is dependent upon the other. Evidence and faith must go hand-in-hand for faith to be rational and for science to function. If there were no empirical evidence, outside of the Bible, for Jesus existence, if the credibility of those who wrote about Him could be substantively undermined, if the prophetic statements of the Bible regarding past history could be effectively falsified, if the Genesis account of origins could be disproved, then, yes, Christianity would become untenable…

Fortunately, none of this has happened as far as I can tell. Your arguments that no one can rationally believe in miracles because miracles are opposed to science are misguided. They aren’t opposed to the science of intelligent design even if the level of creativity and intelligence is well beyond anything we humans can hope to achieve. The credibility that the miraculous stories described in the Bible are really true is based on empirical evidence regarding the credibility of those telling the stories… on those aspects of the stories that can actually be empirically investigated and tested in a potentially falsifiable manner. Otherwise, you’d be just as rational to choose the Book of Mormon as the true Word of God and believe that the American Indians were really the lost tribes of Israel… etc. Why the Bible among so many competing options?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Bill Sorensen:

The Bible makes claims about the future. It does not cause the future. It therefore is not “self-validating”. It’s just a book after all. It can be read, but it cannot itself act to perform any tasks. Therefore, it’s claims, if they are to be rationally understood to be “true” must obviously be supported by external evidence based on the historical sciences. In other words, its own claims regarding history are validated by external sources – based on independent evidence that comes from outside of itself. How is this concept not self-evident?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Professor Kent:

Let’s get a few things straight. I have not attacked the claims of scripture regarding the “the recent origin of all life on this planet, created within just six literal days, and the worldwide nature of the Noachian Flood.” All I did was point out that the physical evidence supporting flood geology has serious problems.

That is an attack on Scripture. When you attempt to undermine the empirical claims of Scripture as being contrary to the weight of empirical evidence, you are in fact undermining the rational basis for Scriptural credibility.

Don’t you recognize that in claiming that the weight of scientific evidence clearly favors the neo-Darwinian perspective, a perspective which is diametrically opposed to the Biblical perspective, you do in fact undermine the credibility of the Biblical account? Your faith-only approach, regardless of the evidence, simply doesn’t do it for many people. For many many people such arguments as you are presenting do in fact undermine the rational basis for their faith despite your own ability to be able to have faith despite the weight evidence. Many people see this as irrational – and for good reason.

Faith, without a need for a basis in the weight of evidence, is irrational by definition. It is blind-faith in that it cannot be rationally distinguished from a form of wishful thinking.

And you were the one, not me, who has asserted that the flood did not create all of the layers of the geological column.

Of course. I fail to see why this might be a problem?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Eddie:

By implication Nebuchadnezzar won the battle with Egypt – just as Ezekiel prophesied. Otherwise, it is unlikely that the Babylonians would have recorded the event…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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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).

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