@Ron: Sean sees the universe functioning by natural law independent …

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

@Ron:

Sean sees the universe functioning by natural law independent of God’s ongoing support. Therefore any significant evolution is unacceptable because it would discredit God as the Creator. God’s distance from His creation allows for Man to be freely evil without God having any responsibility.

God is not “distant” from His creation just because He allows humans and other free will agents to choose to act contrary to His will. All of nature is dependent upon Him for existence. This does not mean, however, that everything that happens in nature is God’s will or under God’s direction.

I on the other hand see God as being immanent in upholding His creation. As a result, for me evolution is OK, because it is the logical observation one would expect to see if God is still actively creating. Evolution for me is a way of affirming God as the creator whereas Sean’s position seems to deny God’s creative activity in our current world.

Theistic evolution would be perfectly fine if it were not for certain facts of reality. One is that, as previously discussed, evolution produces far more harm than good. Even the very rare “good” mutations are limited in effect to very very low levels of functional complexity.

Your perspective means that God is directly responsible for and actually causes all the bad “evolutionary” changes – like the mutations that result in cancer in children and the like. It is God who is the ultimate cause of evil itself.

The immanence of God in upholding His creation seems to place a greater moral and ethical burden on God by the presence of sin.

It makes God out to be a sort of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde character – completely schizophrenic. God simply does not work at odds with Himself like you’re suggesting.

I resolve this dilema through the atonement of Christ. God remains good even though he gives man a choice that causes pain and death in the short run because the burden of the choice ultimately falls on Christ, while to speak crudely, man is in a sense compensated for the pain God allows by ultimately attaining a higher status, and a closer union with God than would have been otherwise possible. Within this framework both choices remain valid choices given by a good and loving God from which Man can truly an honestly and freely chose. Both choices are within the boundaries and will of a good and loving God. Evil is truly evil, sin is truly sin, man is truly responsible for his choices, his choices are real choices, with real consequences, either good or bad, and God remains truly good, and truly sovereign.

Evil choices are never “within the boundary and will” of God. God never wills for anyone to do evil – never. It is always the will of God that we do that which is just and right. Those who choose an evil path are always walking outside of God’s desire and will for them. God allows for this because He has created us free moral agents with the ability to actually choose to reject Him and His will for us.

Also, Jesus was not morally or legally bound to save humanity. He was in no way responsible for our moral Fall and therefore did not have to come and die for our sins in order to maintain His own goodness and moral standing.

God also is not in any way required to “compensate” us for the pain we inflicted upon ourselves. We gain the gift of a closer walk with God, not because we deserve it or because somehow God is trying to compensate us for something that He did to us, but because of His completely unmerited grace and love for us…

Such love is a mystery. That God would love those who in no way deserve His love, who are in active rebellion against Him and His will, is absolutely amazing. Not even the angels quite understand it. Yet, we are in fact beneficiaries of His crazy love for us, however mysterious, and for that I am deeply grateful…

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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