@Bill Sorensen: God has an awareness that transcends human comprehension. …

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

@Bill Sorensen:

God has an awareness that transcends human comprehension. Meaning, He is aware continually of every detail of all He has created all the time. And He is actively preserving its ongoing existence momentarily.

So, why do innocent children get leukemia and other forms of cancer and die painful deaths? Why do innocent families get hit by tornadoes and die? Acts of God? Hardly. These are the acts of nature acting blindly according to basic laws that govern matter without any personal concern for humanity – without the direct involvement of God.

As I’ve already explained in this thread, awareness isn’t the same thing as direct causation. Of course God is at all times aware of everything – past, present, and future. He is all knowing. Yet, this omniscience isn’t the same thing as being directly responsible for every event that takes place. God is not the cause of sin or the actions of the sinner – or the results of such actions that naturally follow. Such are the result of the free-will actions of free moral agents. God created free moral agents with the ability to act independent of His own will.

It is for this reason that children get cancer and die painful deaths. Such events are the result of God stepping back from as much personal and direct involvement with His creation as He would like. He allows the basic natural laws, that He has created, to act independent of His will on this planet because of the choice of the human race. He has knowledge of their painful results. He personally feels the pain of these things. He tells us that He feels pain even when a little sparrow falls wounded to the ground! That’s pretty amazing for the God of the Universe to take notice of the suffering of the little sparrows. Surely, then, he notices when each one of us gets sick or suffers for any reason.

So, while God does indeed sustain His natural laws (nothing can exist independent of His sustaining power and knowledge), He is also able to step back from these laws to some degree and let them function on their own without His own intelligent intervention when they might cause suffering and pain – as in the case of this sinful planet.

When anyone asks God to step back from direct involvement with nature, with his/her life, what is the natural result? What is the result of mindless nature working according to the basic mindless laws of nature? – independent of God’s direct guidance? This is what the Great Controversy between Christ and Satan is all about – a demonstration of what happens when God is not involved, in a direct manner, with our lives or with the laws of nature that govern our world. The result is an increase in entropy/decay on every level – thermodynamic, genetic/informational, and moral. Everything starts to decay and die without God’s active involvement above and beyond the mindless natural laws that He has set in place to govern the repetitive mechanistic processes of the universe.

As you get older, you suffer more and more random genetic mutations, around 60,000 of them by the time you’re 60. This is why we humans age and eventually die. Our genome wears out like old clothes. Is God directly causing each one of these mutations? Does God say to Himself, “Which areas of Sean’s genome am I going to mutate today – in an apparently random way”? Surely not! These degenerative random genetic mutations are simply the result of God stepping back from nature and allowing natural laws of entropy to act independent of His sustaining creative power… because of the moral fall of humanity.

Of course, even when Adam and Eve stepped away from God during their moral fall, God did not step completely away from them. If He had, they would have instantly ceased to exist – and we would never have been born. However, God did step far enough away, as requested, to give the universe an example of what naturally happens when God steps away from anything in nature and allows basic mindless natural laws to act on their own… decay, suffering and death.

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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