Comment on Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation by Sean Pitman.
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
@Wesley Kime:
Thanks Wes. 🙂
Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Ron:
I actually agree with you here…
Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
@Professor Kent:
Of course God can produce miracles such as an axe floating on water, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the resurrection of a human body several days after death. I never said they were impossible, for God can perform miracles which defy all understanding and simply cannot be explained.
God can also perform miracles that can be explained and understood – as easily as we can understand how to make a chocolate cake or a space ship. Such things might seem miraculous from the perspective of those who don’t know how to make such things – like striking a match in front of people living in the dark jungles of Africa.
Miracles are a matter of perspective. What seems perfectly natural to God might seem quite amazing and miraculous to us. It’s only different in degree or level of knowledge and creative power – that’s all.
That is why such miracles are not beyond the power of science to detect as requiring the input of very high levels of creative power and intelligent design.
Even someone who can’t make a match or a chocolate cake knows that such things require creative intelligence to produce when they see them…
If you want to insist that science can explain these claims from the Bible as readily as my claim that Mrs. Kent can make a chocolate cake, you’re not only delusional, but you have every one of your readers wincing about such a ridiculous claim.
As I’ve explained many times, these things are all relative. I never said that they were all on the same level of creativity or design. What I said is that science can detect the need for intelligence, at various levels, to explain such things.
Beyond this, the notion that these stories really happened as described, that they aren’t just “cleverly invented stories” (2 Peter 1:16), isn’t based on faith alone if you want your faith to be something more than mere wishful thinking. You need some kind of evidence to support the credibility of the story teller. A fantastic story demands fantastic evidence that God not only exists but that He really did act in the manner described.
There’s no comparison between God’s remarkable miracles and the human accomplishment of making a cake. You are denigrating your creator.
Hardly. I’m pointing out that God’s creations, while often vastly superior to our own, are detectable in nature and in the written Word (using scientific methodologies for detecting design on various levels of creative power) as requiring very very high levels of deliberate design and creative power.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Recent Comments by Sean Pitman
Science and Methodological Naturalism
Very interesting passage. After all, if scientists are honest with themselves, scientific methodologies are well-able to detect the existence of intelligent design behind various artifacts found in nature. It’s just the personal philosophy of scientists that makes them put living things and the origin of the fine-tuned universe “out of bounds” when it comes to the detection of intelligent design. This conclusion simply isn’t dictated by science itself, but by a philosophical position, a type of religion actually, that strives to block the Divine Foot from getting into the door…
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Why is it that creationists are afraid to acknowledge the validity of Darwinism in these settings? I don’t see that these threaten a belief in God in any way whatsoever.
The threat is when you see no limitations to natural mindless mechanisms – where you attribute everything to the creative power of nature instead of to the God of nature.
God has created natural laws that can do some pretty amazing things. However, these natural laws are not infinite in creative potential. Their abilities are finite while only God is truly infinite.
The detection of these limitations allows us to recognize the need for the input of higher-level intelligence and creative power that goes well beyond what nature alone can achieve. It is here that the Signature of God is detectable.
For those who only hold a naturalistic view of the universe, everything is attributed to the mindless laws of nature… so that the Signature of God is obscured. Nothing is left that tells them, “Only God or some God-like intelligent mind could have done this.”
That’s the problem when you do not recognize any specific limitations to the tools that God has created – when you do not recognize the limits of nature and what natural laws can achieve all by themselves.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Bill Sorensen:
Since the fall of Adam, Sean, all babies are born in sin and they are sinners. God created them. Even if it was by way of cooperation of natural law as human beings also participated in the creation process.
God did not create the broken condition of any human baby – neither the physical or moral brokenness of any human being. God is responsible for every good thing, to include the spark or breath of life within each one of us. However, He did not and does not create those things within us that are broken or bad.
“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ ‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?'” Matthew 13:27-28
Of course, all humans are indeed born broken and are in a natural state of rebellion against God. However, God is not the one who created this condition nor is God responsible for any baby being born with any kind of defect in character, personality, moral tendency, or physical or genetic abnormality. God did not create anyone with such brokenness. Such were the natural result of rebellion against God and heading the temptations of the “enemy”… the natural result of a separation from God with the inevitable decay in physical, mental, and moral strength.
Of course, the ones who are born broken are not responsible for their broken condition either. However, all of us are morally responsible for choosing to reject the gift of Divine Grace once it is appreciated… and for choosing to go against what we all have been given to know, internally, of moral truth. In other words, we are responsible for rebelling against the Royal Law written on the hearts of all mankind.
This is because God has maintained in us the power to be truly free moral agents in that we maintain the Power to choose, as a gift of God (Genesis 3:15). We can choose to accept or reject the call of the Royal Law, as the Holy Spirit speaks to all of our hearts…
Remember the statement by Mrs. White that God is in no wise responsible for sin in anyone at any time. God is working to fix our broken condition. He did not and does not create our broken condition. Just as He does not cause Babies to be born with painful and lethal genetic defects, such as those that result in childhood leukemia, He does not cause Babies to be born with defects of moral character either. God is only directly responsible for the good, never the evil, of this life.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:
Again, your all-or-nothing approach to the claims of scientists isn’t very scientific. Even the best and most famous of scientists has had numerous hair-brained ideas that were completely off base. This fact does not undermine the good discoveries and inventions that were produced.
Scientific credibility isn’t based on the person making the argument, but upon the merits of the argument itself – the ability of the hypothesis to gain predictive value when tested. That’s it.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
Don’t be so obtuse here. We’re not talking about publishing just anything in mainstream journals. I’ve published several articles myself. We’re talking about publishing the conclusion that intelligent design was clearly involved with the origin of various artifactual features of living things on this planet. Try getting a paper that mentions such a conclusion published…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
