@Bill Sorensen: In response to my question about God’s role …

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

@Bill Sorensen:

In response to my question about God’s role in childhood leukemia, you said:

So, yes, God does bring sickness at times that goes beyond the natural law curse of sin.

I’m not asking about an additional supernatural act of God above and beyond natural law. This isn’t a question of if God may, at times, work beyond the basic laws of nature. As I explained above, these special acts of God are called “miracles” in that they go well beyond what mindless natural laws of nature can produce.

What I’m asking is if you are charging God with responsibility for all evil in this world? such as all the thousands of cases of childhood leukemia that strike every year? or the hundreds of tornadoes that destroy lives and property every year? Are these tragedies all “acts of God”? – above and beyond natural law? Do you stick by your claim that, “It is God who creates human beings in this broken condition.”

For one thing, Sean, you are mixing natural law with moral law. There is a natural law degeneracy and a moral law degeneracy. And while they are closely related, they are not one and the same thing.

I’m not mixing these concepts beyond their natural relationship. The fact is that there would be no physical degeneracy on this planet if it were not for the moral Fall of mankind. There would be no separation from God on either the physical or moral levels.

As far as natural law degeneracy is concerned, yes, God ordained it, for He said, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake.”

You’re confusing the natural consequence of stepping farther away from God into natural law with a deliberate act of God against the choice of a free moral agent. God simply allowed Cain to experience the natural consequences of his choices. He didn’t intervene and protect Cain from the physical results of his moral choice to move even farther away from God’s will…

This is not some natural consequence of sin. God could have easily sustained the physical being of man even while he was a moral degenerate.

Physical decay and ultimate death is a natural consequence of sin… of a choice to separate one’s self from God on any level. Certainly God could have prevented the physical degeneracy of mankind (as He has done so far with Satan and his evil angels), but this would not be a true reflection of the natural consequences of sin. After all, we are told that, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) – not just moral death, but physical death as well. It is only natural that if one chooses to separate one’s self from the Source of Life that the physical life of the individual will decay and eventually die.

Is it possible for God to prevent the natural decline and eventual death of the wicked? Could He force the wicked to live on forever? Absolutely. But, would this be in line with natural law and the free moral choice of the wicked? No. Not at all.

And yes, in some cases, God actually caused physical sickness and even death as in the case of Uzzah who touched the Ark. Uzzah did not die from some natural law degeneracy.

These examples of yours where God acts beyond natural law are Red Herrings in this discussion. We aren’t talking about miraculous acts of God that clearly go above and beyond His natural laws…

This is not to deny that there is a natural law degeneracy that is followed by sickness and physical afflictions. If a person smokes, they may get cancer. And cancer is part of the physical natural law punishment that follows disobedience to the laws of nature.

Young children who get leukemia didn’t smoke or do anything themselves that would merit “punishment”. Why then do they get leukemia? – sometimes before they are even born? “Acts of God”? – please…

God did not create moral corruption. But He did create us in it. If a baby is born with cancer, wasn’t God active in the creation process? We see two parts in the creation of a new human life. The parents, the human part, and God, the divine part.

As I’ve explained before, God is active in providing the breath of life and in sustaining His natural laws. However, He is not active in producing the broken condition of the child on any level. He is only directly responsible for that which is good within the child. He is not responsible in any way shape or form for that which is broken within the child. God does not create that which He is actually working to fix. Such would be counterproductive on the part of God – not to mention evil.

God does not cease to create just because sin is present. So babies are born in sin. Not just physically degenerate, but morally corrupt as well.

You mean God does not cease to create good things just because evil is present. However, just because God makes good things to appear within Satan’s realm does not therefore mean that God is the one who created all the bad things as well. He simply allows them to exist for a time, to function according to the basic laws of nature, while He works to resolve the sin problem once and for all.

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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