Comment on Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science by pauluc.
Sean Pitman:
“You don’t know all the factors involved in such decisions – except for the claim that the world before the Flood was evil beyond repair”.
No Sean it is written in the Scriptures. According Genesis 6 account the flood was all about the spiritual beings or Angels (bənê hāʼĕlōhîm) mating with human women and generating men of renown that manifest some of the supernatural; the risk of course being that they would perhaps eventually become immortal maybe by a process of back-crossing which would remove all traces of mortality. then Earth itself would be populated by the same evil as was manifest in heaven according to your literal and non-contextual reading. This was more than your simple eisigesis of good men mating with bad women would suggest. Indeed the message by your interpretation would be we always have to be vigilant about male headship and keep those temptress women in their place. God intervened in this debacle both by limiting human life to 120 years and killing the progency of this unholy union in a deluge. All very logical and rational; You dont have to speculate it is all there if you read it without your biases and devotion to empiricism. You do of course believe in spiritual being, angels and demons? These biblical concepts of course inherit their scientific validity according to empirical evidence applied to other parts of the Bible. The Pitman doctrine of inherited scientific verification of untestable events. You are of course the company you keep. No need to test empirical claims directly you can do it vicariously and give the total enterprise the seal of empirical validity en mass.
The difference between Paulus and Dr. Kime is that Dr. Kime says that it takes both faith and empirical evidence whereas Pauluc says that it only takes fideistic faith in your fantasy world without any need to worry about the empirical evidence at all
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And you wonder why I suggest you do not parse me correctly. How can you imagine I have no concern about empirical evidence when I have said repeatedly that I work as a scientist and have applied that method to understand the world using a process of hypothesis testing experimentation and publication which are the core activities of science. I have looked at the biblical account and concluded that it cannot be verified by such methods and have asked myself how do I hold a scientific methodological view of the natural world in tension with the claims of the spiritual and supernatural aspects of life. I conclude that there are other tools for understanding the meaning of the world outside the enterprise of science and a demand for empirical evidence. Faith is just such a tool. I have formed a view of what is fodder for scientific approaches and what is not. You in contrast having become enamoured with the hammer of hypothesis testing and empiricism and imagine that everything there is must therefore be a nail. That is the philosophical naturalists trajectory to atheism as I have repeatedly said.
You don’t understand that both you and mainstream scientists are affected by philosophical biases that are equivalent to any religious bias out there. It is best to at least be aware of such biases and consider that they can affect one’s efforts to think rationally and scientifically
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Indeed Sean that is sage advice. Something you should take to heart while you confidently assert;
It would not be rational to go against the scientific consensus unless you’d done some of your own study and research for yourself that cause you to conclude that the consensus was wrong. However, this is in fact possible to do…
You either have to have a very lay superficial knowledge of everything or your genius must be astounding to have read the primary literature in all relevant fields of knowledge.
Beyond that you are being a little duplicitous to suggest that post-modernisms of subjective nonsense when you are yourself are using post-modern arguments in your criticism of any aspect of the enterprise of science with which you disagree. In you enthusiastic attack on “conventional” science you claim that there are biases and a world view involved in the practice of science. Indeed there are as has been recognized both by Kuhn and by a post-modern writers such as Lyotard.
You imagine that a post-modernist who discounts the value of dominant meta-narratives must per se discount the value of the scientific enterprise with its search for models of reality based on naturalism and empirical evidence and discard it as simply subjectivism. This shows your lack of appreciation of what science is as a human enterprise or the eclecticism of post-modernism.
I know logically since you have sufficient knowledge to disregard any expertise in any field there is no need to actually read any of the books I suggest but for others I suggest Lyotard’s “The post-modern condition: A report of knowledge.” http://www.amazon.com/dp/0816611734/ref=rdr_ext_tmb as a useful introduction to post-modernism and science. As you will see from reading the text there is not really much distance between Kuhn who you seem to enthusiastically accept and Lyotard.
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pauluc Also Commented
Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science
Sean
It seems we have descended once again into the impasse of unedifying conflict mired as it is over understanding of dogmatic literalism.
I apologize if I have offended in mounting a defence of Christian faith and belief that is independent of science and impiricism. I can do nothing better than to pray that you will not in fact follow your supposed trajectory into non-Christianity. And I should go back to doing something useful that is more faithful to the Christian tradition that asks us to bring the Grace of Christ and his Kingdom politics into our daily lives and the life of others
Grace
Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science
@Sean Pitman:
And yet, yet for all that you would reject what you proclaim as the richness of Christianity if life is not literally 6000 years old. It somehow gives the lie to all other non-empirical claims you may make about Christianity being anything but baggage to be thrown away when you have a concrete contradicting fact.
The time I have wasted on this site is because of this claim about empirical reality and the worthlessness of Christianity without empirical and scientific support. I am just amazed that a person educated in Adventism and supposedly scientifically aware should have so dramatically missed the point of the good news of the Incarnation of God as a rich faith tradition that gives meaning and illuminates all of life and our ethical and moral behaviour.
Believing the Disproven – An Adventure in Science
Sean Pitman: Are you trying to compare a belief in Jesus, His life, death, and literal resurrection, to a child’s belief in Santa Claus?
No I am suggesting that you show no more maturity in your Christian belief that is fragilely dependent on the reality of a 6000 year life history than a child who may imagine Christmas is synonymous with and totally dependent on a literal Santa Claus. In doing so you are suggesting the history of Christianity with its richness and deep thought can be condensed into one verifiable fact.
Recent Comments by pauluc
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.
You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.
Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath
On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”
You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.
Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?
1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.
I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.
Grace
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.
And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…
Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.
Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.
That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.
