@Ron: God sustains, He does not control the actions of …

Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.

@Ron:

God sustains, He does not control the actions of free moral agents. There’s a significant difference. If He did control things as you suggest, God would Himself be evil.

Actually, evolution isn’t responsible for cancer. Evolution selects against cancer. Evolution is a way to cleanse the genome of the degredation caused by sin.

Oh really? So, why do people get cancer if not via the evolutionary mechanism of random mutations and function-based selection on a cellular level?

If Darwinian-style evolution is a way to “cleanse the genome of degradation” as you claim, you would never get old and die as a result of accumulating tens of thousands of detrimental mutations over your lifetime. Evolution would just wipe them all out for you.

You really don’t seem to draw a distinction between natural processes and those that require active intelligent intervention. Disease and death do not require active intelligent intervention on the part of God or anyone else. They are part of the way the machine naturally decays over time when not constantly repaired by intelligent manipulation.

Cancer is not the result of intelligent design any more than your car breaking down and wearing out is the result of God deciding to slowly destroy your vehicle. It is just the way things are when when they are not constantly maintained. It’s a form of informational entropy over time. Things naturally wear out and degenerate when God is not constantly involved in maintaining them. That is why Adam and Eve grew old and died after they decided to separate themselves from God’s constant care.

Let me ask you one more question: Let’s say you had before you an highly symmetrical polished granite cube and an amorphous granite rock. Would you be able to tell which one was most likely the result of deliberate design? If so, upon what basis did you make your deduction?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:

Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…

Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:

“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”

Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113

http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html

So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.

The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.

In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?

Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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