@Geanna Dane: I totally agree with her. The evidence is …

Comment on EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN by Sean Pitman.

@Geanna Dane:

I totally agree with her. The evidence is based on testimony from those who have had a personal encounter with God. For some reason God did NOT leave rocks sitting around that are stamped with “Made in Heaven”, your fsaar out claims notwithstnding.

The evidence isn’t just in the form of the personal testimony of other people Geanna. If it were, how would you decide who was telling you the truth about God? There are a lot of people claiming to have direct revelations from God that are very contradictory. Which people do you believe?

You have to make your choices based on the best weight of evidence that is available to you – and that includes physical evidence.

The biblical authors themselves tell us to “test the spirits” to see if they are from God. God also calls us to come and “reason together” and even to “test him” and see if He is not who he claims to be and does what he claims He does – a very scientific concept.

“Those who desire to doubt will have plenty of room. God does not propose to remove all occasion for unbelief. He gives evidence, which must be carefully investigated with a humble mind and a teachable spirit, and all should decide from the weight of evidence.”
—Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 3, p. 255. 2

“God gives sufficient evidence for the candid mind to believe; but he who turns from the weight of evidence because there are a few things which he cannot make plain to his finite understanding, will be left in the cold, chilling atmosphere of unbelief and questioning doubts, and will make shipwreck of faith.”
—Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 232, 233.

Explaining some implications of the historical event of the flood, White notes that during the Flood humans, animals, and trees were “buried, and thus preserved as an evidence to later generations that the antediluvians perished by a flood. God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in inspired history; but . . . the things which God gave them [i.e., to us humans] as a benefit, they turn into a curse by making a wrong use of them.”
– Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1890, 1958), 112.

Note especially the passage where Mrs. White claims that “God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in inspired history.” Clearly then, Mrs. White supports the idea that such physical evidence does indeed have the power to increase faith in God and the reliability of his Word. Faith is not simply based on the testimony of people without any aditional physical testible potentially falsifiable evidence with which to determine the reliability of such testimony. In other words, the physical evidence itself has its own testimony…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:

Um, I think the evolutionists are the ones who informed us about ice ages.

You’re mistaken. Evolutionists were not the first ones to propose ice age theories – theories which were around well before Darwin published Origins in 1859.

For example, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) was one of the top chemists of his day with an international reputation as a meticulous scientist, a prolific writer and an effective teacher. But he was also one of those brilliantly versatile men of science in the early 19th century. In 1829 he published A New System of Geology in which he proposed some new theoretical ideas for the reconstruction of earth history, one of which was one of the earliest conceptions of an ice age, which he speculated would have resulted from the Flood. One of the author’s he quoted was Jens Esmark (1763-1839)

Jens Esmark also argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages well before Darwin. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in the Earth’s orbit. Adding to Esmark’s work, Bernhardi, in a 1932 paper, speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones around the globe.

http://creation.com/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Esmark

They have given us more information about ice ages than creationists have and nothing, I repeat nothing, is going to change that. They have no problem with ice ages whatsoever.

They have no problem with ice ages, true. But, they do have a definite problem with the idea of very rapid, even catastrophically sudden, formation and regression. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that scientists began to realize that glacial melts can happen many times more rapidly than they tought possible just 10 years ago – to include the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap as well as the Antarctic ice. No one thought that such rapid melting could ever happen as rapidly as it is taking place today.

www.DetectingDesign.com/AncientIce.html

What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.

It is often a very good way to get important statistical concepts across to those people who don’t usually deal with numbers and the scientific usefulness of statistical odds analysis… like you ; )

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:

So…ice ages are scientifically impossible and therefore could only result from a global supernatural flood. The arctic seas became hot which caused very high precipitation. Then an extreme cold spell came along that made an iceberg out of high elevations and high altitudes, decreased the ocean sea level and dried out the Mediterranean basin. I assume these explanations fit within the 1000 gsaar threshold (geologically supportable argumentative age reasoning) of explanatory complexity

Ice ages are not scientifically impossible. They are certainly consistent with a global catastrophe that involved massive volcanic activity. And, massive meteor impacts may indeed have provided the sudden release of the huge quantities of energy needed to produce the initial catastrophe on a global scale. Also, it is well-known that ice ages would indeed reduce ocean levels quite dramatically – easily below the level needed to maintain water in the Mediterranean basin (which is known to have been dry during the last major ice age).

I fail to see what it is about this scenario that you find so “complex” and unbelievable given the starting premise of a sudden massive release of energy on this planet?… What would you expect to happen? Orderly weather as usual? The whole surface of the planet was broken up by the massive impact that set the whole catastrophe in motion… the aftershocks of which we are still feeling to this day.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:

So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?

It really doesn’t matter if they died directly because of the cold or indirectly because of starvation (though I favor the former idea). Either way, the evidence suggests that they, along with millions of other types of animals, died out very suddenly in line with a sudden global cold snap. That’s the key point here. The cold snap would result in a rapid decrease in the ocean’s water level, resulting in an opportunity to dry out the Mediterranean basin…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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