@Bill Sorensen: Sean, what ever God allows is God’s permissive …

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

@Bill Sorensen:

Sean, what ever God allows is God’s permissive will. It is what He permits. God allows sin. This is His permissive will.

Allowing or permitting something to occur does not mean that God caused it or willed it or is in any other way responsible for its existence.

What God wills is that freedom of choice exist – which means that free moral agents are free to act against the will of God for their lives. God desires freedom more than He desires obedience. Only in this manner is it possible for true love to exist.

Again, however, this does not mean that God therefore willed Lucifer or Pharaoh or any other wicked person to rebel. That’s simply not true. God does not tempt or will anyone to rebel (James 1:13).

So Adam chose sin. It was God’s will that Adam had a free choice. And God permitted Adam to choose evil. It was God’s permissive will. He could have stopped him. But He did not. In fact, He could not and still will for Adam to have his own free will. And in this sense, God is responsible for sin because He did not have to make free moral agents.

You’re logic doesn’t follow. Just because God is responsible for creating freedom of will and for allowing free choices to be made does not mean that God is therefore responsible for the choices of the freewill agents that go contrary to His own will for them. This is like Adam blaming God for making Eve or Eve blaming God for making the snake.

Again, the choice to rebel against God is not of God’s making or responsibility. It is entirely the responsibility of the one who made the choice to rebel. God is only responsible for the good things – for the existence of free will, the option to actually choose between good and evil. God is not therefore responsible for the evil.

So God is responsible for creating the possibility of sin. But God’s responsibility for sin ceases where man’s responsibility begins.

Now you’re making my argument! God is responsible for making it possible for freedom to exist, for people to choose to rebel against His will. But, God is not responsible for the actual choice to rebel. Such a choice is entirely the responsibility of the free moral agent.

In short, I entirely agree with this statement of yours: “But God’s responsibility for sin ceases where man’s responsibility begins.”

This means that God did not “harden Pharaoh’s heart” or cause him to rebel. Pharaoh hardened his own heart and chose, of his own free will, to rebel against the will of God.

There is no paradox here. God is not both good and evil. God is only good. He is not responsible for the origin or action of the evil that He allows, for a time, to exist for the purposes of demonstrating exactly what evil is and does…

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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