@Mahabir Ramkhelawan: Imagine a group of people who invade you, …

Comment on Clifford Goldstein: Seventh-day Darwinians, Redux by Sean Pitman.

@Mahabir Ramkhelawan:

Imagine a group of people who invade you, grab your lands, kill your people- even women and children and BABIES in the arms of mothers- and then say that they had come to TEACH YOU ABOUT THE LOVE, MERCY AND COMPASSION OF THEIR GOD! Yeah, I bet that such treatment would really inspire you to want to love and accept their God and convert ot their religion, right?

Imagine a group of Nazis who had terrorized the world with their brutality. Would it not be in love to the world, and even to the Nazis themselves, to remove the Nazis from the planet?

In reading the brutal stories of the Old Testament, you need to consider that the story at hand is not the whole story – that God would not simply give a command to wipe out a group of people for no good reason, or if there were any hope at all of converting them to a more peaceful or holy state of existence…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Clifford Goldstein: Seventh-day Darwinians, Redux
Note that Hosea 4:6 is referring to a deliberate “rejection” of knowledge… not sincere ignorance. There is hope for those who are honestly and sincerely ignorant. There is no hope for those who are deliberately ignorant of what they know or even think might be true…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Clifford Goldstein: Seventh-day Darwinians, Redux
@Eddie:

According to Kevin, “…wrong ideas and wrong practices can and will lead to eternal damnation.” Assuming SDA interpretations of the Bible are true, does that mean that nobody who venerates Sunday as the sabbath will be in heaven, nobody who believes in eternal torment will be in heaven, and nobody who believes in theistic evolution will be in heaven? Is it really that simple? Does God judge us by what we believe–or how we live?

I don’t think that Kevin is suggesting that all who hold or held various doctrinal errors are eternally lost. I think that he is suggesting that ideas that we hold to be true have an effect upon our actions. Mistaken ideas about the value of different ethnic variations of humans, and the true nature and character of God, lead to the horrors of the slave trade in supposedly enlightened “Christian” countries like England and America, and even to the holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Ideas leading to such actions have the ability to so mar the soul that such a person might not be happy in heaven – not being able to appreciate other types of people as on equal value before God and therefore worthy of equal love and care as one’s self.

As distasteful as it sounds, Darwinian evolution forms the basis for the ideas that lead to slavery and the holocaust. Such ideas are very natural conclusions, given evolutionary assumptions. After all, the full title of Darwin’s famous book is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

By “favored races” Darwin is referring to human races which he thought had evolved to a higher level compared to other human races. Such ideas are not now politically correct, but these mistaken ideas have resulted in a great deal of suffering, pain, and death for tens of millions of people since Darwin. After all, the only real “morality” in a system of “survival of the fittest” is survival itself. Whomever survives is right by definition. There is no other morality inherent in such a world view. Therefore, the suggestion that God intentionally created all life on this planet using such a brutal system reflects very badly on the character of God himself…

It is a far different picture when one considers all men and women brothers and sisters through a recent common origin in Adam and Eve – all being direct sons and daughters of loving and caring God who is personally interested in the welfare of each individual (and even of sentient animals as well). This difference in ideology also tends to reflect in how one treats other people and ultimately tends to reflect in one’s moral character before God and therefore one’s eternal salvation.

Of course, only God can judge the heart, but I dare say that those who set up the murderous slave trade or the Nazi concentration camps will be far less likely to be in heaven compared to those who recognize and treat all equally as brothers and sisters…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Clifford Goldstein: Seventh-day Darwinians, Redux
@David Kendall, PhD:

Wegter-McNelly makes an interesting point on p. 253. Again, I am mentioning this point without necessarily espousing it as the final word on the matter; it is nevertheless an interesting perspective on much of our debate here:

“The radical incomprehensibility of God is the beginning point and end of all theology. What we can comprehend is not God. All of our concepts and all of our words come from our everyday experiences of things in this world. They cannot be used of God in any univocal way. We speak truly of God only in stumbling ways and only within the limits of analogies and metaphors from everyday existence.” (253)

While it is true that the fullness of God is beyond anything we can remotely comprehend, it is not true that everything about God is therefore completely incomprehensible.

It is the belief of the SDA Church, and most Christians in general, that God has in fact revealed certain things about Himself that we can comprehend and understand. For the SDA Church in particular, one of those things is the idea that God has in fact revealed to us an authentic account of His creation of life on this planet in 6 literal days – and that there was no original suffering and death for any sentient creature in God’s original creation.

While He obviously hasn’t revealed many of the details of exactly how He did this, He has revealed a few details that do seem relatively easy to at least understand as revealed. After all, the concept of 6 literal days is not beyond human comprehension even though the creative act itself most certainly is. And, the details revealed are consistent with other details that God has revealed about His own character; to include His deep concern and care for the suffering and pain of all of His sentient creatures. He has revealed to us, in very clear language that even a child can understand, the reason for the existence of the suffering and pain in our world as the result of our own rebellion against Him, the fact that this was never His ideal intent for us, and what He plans to do to fix this horrible situation.

All of this “Great Controversy” stuff that is in the Bible is fundamentally opposed by the philosophical and religious implications of the modern Theory of Evolution. As Clifford Goldstein points out, there simply is no common ground between the SDA view of God and any form of mainstream evolutionism. As Cliff noted in his original article, the evils of Nazism are a much snugger fit with evolutionary implications. Who could love a God who deliberately used a very evil evolutionary mechanism to produce life on this planet? I myself would hate such a being. I certainly would not wish to live forever in such a horrible universe. Would you? Really?

No wonder Richard Dawkins and those with similar views can’t stand this distorted idea of God – the only idea that is really compatible with mainstream evolutionary ideas. It would be better to choose oblivion than to serve such a God. In this sense, I’m very sympathetic with Dawkins and those like him.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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