@Ron: God could have made things however He wanted. …

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

@Ron:

God could have made things however He wanted. However, it is indeed my argument that He did not make things able to evolve as neo-Darwinists envision. Evolution beyond very low levels of functional complexity (i.e., 1000saaa) has never been observed in real time and statistically is very unlikely to happen this side of trillions of years of time.

You say that this is an “unproven scientific assertion”, but it seems like you’re asking for absolute proof here – something that is not part of science. As I’ve pointed out to you before, nothing is absolutely provable in science. However, my theory has very very high predictive value.

If you think I’m more likely wrong, well, go ahead and present the falsifying evidence. After all, my position, like any valid scientific hypothesis, can be definitively falsified quite easily. All you have to do is find an example of RM/NS producing anything that requires a minimum of at least 1000 specifically arranged amino acid residues to work. If you can do this, my ID hypothesis will be falsified.

You may turn out to be right. But it seems like a long stretch. I am very leery of underestimating the power and cleverness of God.

I do not underestimate the power and/or cleverness of God. However, this does not mean that I cannot therefore figure out the difference between an amorphous rock and a highly symmetrical polished granite cube – that one was most likely the direct result of deliberate design while the other was not.

From your position, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference because God could always have been clever enough to program some mindless natural process that produces highly symmetrical polished granite cubes, or jetliners, or the works of Shakespeare, etc. From your perspective there would be no basis for anthropology, forensic pathology, or SETI. You simply would not be able to detect deliberate design behind someone carving the letters “Hi there” into the paint on your car vs. God programming the tree beside your car to do it…

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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