May the best "hturt" win

- with "Dog's gnisselb"

by Sean Pitman

Are Rules Made to be Broken?

by Sean Pitman

Lynn,

We, in the United States, already have the freedoms you promote. Therefore, how would forming a Church or any other organization without anything addition to these basic freedoms be the creation of anything new or fundamentally unique? While such freedoms are very important for civil society (forming the basis for religious and civil liberties) they aren't the only goal or the ultimate expression of the potential of such a society.

These freedoms make it possible to develop other types of unique organizations within the overall "free" society. In the formation of additional restrictions, restrictions one is always free to shed, additional useful features and even freedoms can be realized that would not otherwise be possible.

A group that is willing to shed a certain amount of individual freedom of expression and action is able to act in a more powerful manner to perform certain tasks that would be impossible for the individual to realize. Yet, at the same time, it is important for the individual to have a choice in the matter; the choice to freely leave the organization without civil penalty if he/she no longer sees the goals of the organization as a good fit with personal goals and desires.

You suggest that good organizations make rules to be broken. Yet, if no organization went beyond this level of control over its own representatives, nothing much would get done. Effective organizations that wish to go beyond this level must have clear rules with clear consequences in place.

While the consequences should never impinge on one's ability to leave the organization (this side of committing a civil crime), all organizations wishing to go beyond what I call low-level anarchy must be able to block or remove representatives from hire or official recognition who decide to go beyond a clearly defined line of expression or conduct. Without such ability to enforce limiting rules as a criterion for official recognition, no organization will be able to get beyond what has already been put in place by the US civil government.

You argue that absolutely no real rules of any kind are needed, much less any sort of enforcement of rules of conduct or expression, beyond those that have already been put in place by civil government. While it seems good to at least recognize the need for the enforcement of civil laws, the argument that only these laws should be enforced as a basis for official recognition by a church organization is a recipe for the complete breakdown of any church that wishes to promote a specific take on any notion that goes beyond civil law.

For example, consider a marriage relationship. The aspects of marriage that make it most special, unique, and even holy are based on some very basic and rather strict rules of expression and conduct. The relationship simply cannot survive if one demands the "right" to say and do whatever one wishes as one was able to do before marriage - this side of breaking civil law. I mean, I know for a fact that if I were to go off and have an affair, I'd be lucky to get away with my life - and I wouldn't even have committed a civil crime!

Even if I stopped telling Sigrid I loved her and started telling her every day that I didn't like her anymore, our marriage relationship would suffer dramatically - again without committing any civil crimes. In other worlds, the marriage organization is uniquely different from the relationships that may exist outside marriage due in no small part to the unique rules that each individual is willing to freely espouse and follow publicly and privately - and with great care.

The same is true of the individual decision to freely join a church organization. Certain personal liberties that are available as an individual must be freely given up when one takes on the church relationship if one wishes to stay in that relationship much less make it flourish.

In short, you are arguing for the SDA Church, as a freewill "marriage" of like minds, to form policies that would turn it into something that already exists on a lower level in society. In other words, you are arguing for the loss of an ability to uphold that what makes the SDA Church novel or unique compared to American society at its most basic level of constraint.

Removing that pillar of additional contraint will collapse all supported by it down to the lowest common denominator. If that happens, we will be left with nothing more than what we had before the SDA Church came along.

Sean

No need to remove the credentials

of those who disagree!

by Lynn

Sean,

The “tone” of the church organization reflects in various ways the political “tone” of the country in which the church was formed but is seldom identical to it. (I only used government/political organizations as an analogy not as an exact one-for-one model). People within an American organization respond to excessive regulation as American citizens generally respond to all excessive administrative regulation whether from government or church.

The unique qualities of an organization are its statement of self-identifying beliefs and purposes. Individuals in the SDA church have always argued about doctrinal issues and fundamental beliefs (Note those in the early SDA church opposed to the doctrine of the trinity). Most individuals left the church when it became apparent that they could not affect change. The SDA church has not needed and does not now need, to remove the credentials of those who argue against various beliefs. These arguments, I believe, have been and are self-limiting.

I do not suggest that an organization makes rules to be broken. What I do suggest is that organizations, as they grow make more rules than necessary, and the rules sometimes are contrary to the original spirit of the organization, thus the bending or breaking of those rules honors the spirit of the original founding organization more than the keeping of the rules…“More honored in the breach than in the observance.” (Hamlet). The one specific idea I am referring to is the idea of an “advancing truth” and the idea of “following the truth wherever it may lead”.

The need to remove credentials and employment of teachers, scholars, and pastors who deeply love the church and have its best interests at heart because they participate in and promote the discussion of controversial issues seems to me unnecessarily draconian.

Those who wish the church harm will be recognized and isolated or they will remove themselves as they see the divergence between what they say and that for which the church organization stands. I also think that, in most instances, the matter can be dealt with on a case by case basis rather than by the use of “loyalty oaths” or a general policy about discussion topics that are not permitted.

As in American politics, open discussion and persuasion is strengthening rather than weakening and I believe would be in the SDA church as well.

Your argument that a person is “free” to leave church employment, it seems to me, ignores the coercive nature of the need for a paying job. The mild and non-destructive attitudes of the participants in these discussions and the love, pride and joy these individuals have for the SDA church…it’s home, it’s family…tends to strengthen rather than weaken the church. I do not think it is wise to put breach of some church policy or fundamental belief above these things.

Lynn

How do you define the church's

The truth is an advancing truth

by Lynn

Adina,

The truth is an advancing truth. Commonly people follow the truth where ever it may lead. That’s why people in an organization argue against some organizational beliefs. In some cases the beliefs have been added after the organization was in existence and members may think the addition was unnecessary. In some cases new evidence appears to point in a direction somewhat contrary to a particular organizational dogma.

I hope that answers the question “why”.

When arguments become so divergent from the majority of believers of an organization especially a church there is a separation almost always desired by both sides and seldom requiring firing. That’s what I mean by self-limiting.

When I speak of people who love the church I’m speaking as an SDA about the people who compose the SDA church and the SDA organization. I am speaking in the context of this particular discussion. I think I mean the “church” you know and love. To love the church is to have respect and admiration for its people, its organization and its founding ideals.

No one in this discussion is participating for the “sake” of argument. We all do it as a way of pursuing clarity and truth.

The church’s best interests are an organization that provides an efficient way for people of like interests and beliefs to pursue evidence leading to ever more and greater truths.

People in the SDA church discussing evolution are not promoting evolution so much as promoting a discussion of evolution/creation. It seems to be that more and more evidence seems to accumulate indicating it may be the “process” that is responsible for much of what we see in the biological world around us. As William James once said (on another issue), “All the juice has not yet been squeezed out of this topic.” Why fire people who want to investigate and discuss it?

Lynn

The Mission of the Church Defined

I see the church as pursuing truth!

by Lynn

Adina,

Indeed we disagree. Truth is true. There isn’t a particular brand of truth.

The difference between “ideas/truth” and “products/services” is what prompted me to change the analogy from a business/product model to a government/political model. While not perfect it is more representative of the persuasiveness of religious and political ideas than is the selling of products and services.

If one has ideas that evidence seems to indicate may be true and the church especially values the search for truth, I see a person “stepping down” as a betrayal of that which the church values most.

We are talking past each other. You see church employees and church members as selling a product. I see the church as pursuing truth. Businesses have to do with products/services, churches have to do with ideas/truth.

Lynn

We are going around in circles here!

by Sean Pitman

Lynn,

We are going around in circles here; saying the same things over and over again. We simply disagree. You think that the rules of the church need not be enforced regardless of extensive counsel for one whole wishes to continue to publically teach or preach against what the church has decided are its most fundamental positions. That, in my view, is a serious mistake.

We aren't talking about concepts that are against the character of the original organization here either. We are talking about concepts that formed the original basis of the very name of the SDA Church and have always formed the bedrock of the SDA Church's most uniquly identifiable positions. Any attempt to undermine these is an attempt to strike at the very heart of what makes the SDA Church special and unique.

Such an individual representative may deeply love the community, but he/she does not love the most fundamental doctrinal positions of the church nor does he/she love the basis of order and organization behind the church as one continues in such public action regardless of the church's position as an organized body or extensive counsel regarding the appropriate course of action.

If such a person is good at what they do, as a teacher or preacher, especially a science teacher in particular, that person should have no trouble at all getting a job elsewhere. Regardless, a church cannot pay someone just because they couldn't easily get a job elsewhere. That's not a good reason to hire or to keep paying an employee that is out to undermine some of your most fundamentally positions regardless of concerted efforts to turn his/her decided pathway aside.

Sean

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Thanks Nic, I don't know about you, but I'm ready to give this topic a rest for a while. A few others have told me the same thing. People's minds seem pretty much made up anyway regardless of any additional arguments that might be presented on either side. I did read through you thoughts and really enjoyed them. It seems to me though that the topic of abortion is a issue all its own. While very important and deserving of its own time, it is hard to tie it in with other topics beyond itself. It also isn't as cut and dried an issue as some make it out to be. There is a bit of understandable confusion over the concepts of what is human life and when, exactly, does it begin and to what degree relative to the value of the mother's life and goals? I personally don't see these issues as easily solved, as we've previously discussed. Now, as far as notions like near term or third trimester abortions go, aside from an attempt to directly save the mother's life, I'm fully in your corner and think something needs to be done about this as a united effort. Sean

Inspired by Sean Pitman's comments and Erv Taylor's original contribution entitled "THE ROPE PEOPLE OF THE KINGDOM OF THE BLIND," which started this thread and which generated the lively exchange of ideas posted above, I decided to write another literary piece and post it on a new thread which you might be interested in reading. Here is the Internet link to this new thread:

Jumping Through the Loop in the Kingdom of the Blind

http://sdaforum.com/page94.html

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The posted allegory is succinct and represents people within the fundamentalist SDA and other christian communities that continue to ignore the real engine of change that occurs through genetic mechanisms. As Francis Collins (director of human genome project and christian) points out, in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are connected to other life forms through DNA it is wrong to take the genesis story literally.

Those who hold such views are certainly welcome to them. However, those who disagree are also welcome to do so - at least in this country. The real question here is if it is morally right for those, such as yourself, who strongly disagree with the most fundamental positions of their employer (the SDA Church in this case), to expect to be paid by such an employer while going about publicly undermining the most basic goals the employer is trying to achieve. If you think the employer is so obviously mistaken, why on Earth don't you go and work for someone else?

Beyond this, I also accept the notion that all living things are in fact "connected" or "related" to each other. Let's face it. All living things are very similar, and some are even more similar than others. This similarity forms a sort of nested hierarchical pattern. It really does. The problem here is that such relationships and patterns can be and are often the result of deliberate design for integrated systems. So, while it could be the result of a non-deliberate process such as random mutation and natural selection (the pattern itself is consistent with such a process) the pattern is also consistent with deliberate design.

Basically then, the type of pattern, by itself, doesn't really help you determine between the two potential options of deliberate vs. non-deliberate origin.

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Its sad to see intelligent people argue for the indefensible.

Yes, it is.

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Life is ordered yet it is random.

So are intelligently designed systems; like the series of paragraphs in this particular exchange - not too ordered and not too chaotic or random. High level information systems are somewhere in between order and chaos - regardless of origin. So, the demonstration of order or randomness is not, by itself, an adequate clue to the deliberate or non-deliberate origin of a pattern or system.

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Just look at firing of neurons and transmitter release at the molecular level. It is ridiculous to argue an organizing hand in the face of biological self assembly.

Really? Do biological systems self-assemble into much of anything without a very high level of pre-established system order? I mean really, what happens if you take all the biomolecules necessary to built a bacterium, but mix them together randomly? Will these molecules for a bacterium all by themselves without the order of a bacterium already there to begin with? - or anything else other than amorphous sludge?

The same is true for any designed system of self-assembly. Where did the original order come from? That's the real question. If there is a limit to the degree of informational complexity that can be achieved outside of deliberate design, then it might just be possible to detect design whenever this threshold is actually crossed. It is at least theoretically possible then, to detect design. I mean really, what do you think forensic or SETI scientists or even anthropologists are looking for?

http://www.detectingdesign.com/meaningfulinformation.html#SETI

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We can observe this process, but what we cannnot observe is the supposed "invisible" underlying our observations. Systems do not seem to need god, but one can always argue that biological self assembly was "designed" by a god.

Exactly . . .

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Fine, but until a god reveals itself in some testable way we are left with faith speculation.

That's true . . . unless there is in fact a testable limit to the potential of what your proposed method of Darwinian-style evolution or any other such non-deliberate process can achieve.

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Indeed the overwhelming evidence that life evolves through natural mechanisms has permeated the SDA academic community and acceptance of this is nearly at parity within that same community. Denying the evidence and insisting a tail is a rope is not rational, but then again that is the nature of faith.

I hear this all the time; the argument that there is overwhelming evidence that the vast diversity of life and its host of high-level functional systems evolves through "natural" (i.e., non-deliberate) mechanisms. I've been actively looking for this evidence now for over 10 years. When it comes to the proposed mechanism of evolution in particular, random mutation and natural selection, I fail to see this so called "overwhelming evidence".

You're right though. The evidence clearly shows that Darwinian-style evolution can happen and does indeed happen all the time. It has been observed in the form of antibiotic resistance, immune system improvements over time, and the evolution of numerous novel enzymatic activities. All of these novel functional changes are/where clearly the result of random mutation and natural selection acting rapidly in real time - no doubt.

There's just one little problem. This mechanism shows a stalling out effect at very low levels of overall system complexity. That's right. All examples of evolution "in action" are low-level examples. In fact, the lower the level, the faster evolution works and the higher the level the slower evolution works - in an exponential manner. Very quickly the proposed evolutionary mechanism stalls out and never produces any novel systems of function beyond those that require a few hundred specifically arranged amino acid residues working together at the same time. For example, there is not a single example in all of literature of any novel system of function evolving that requires a minimum of more than 1,000 amino acid residues in a fairly specific arrangement - not one example. Yet, every living thing has many systems of function that require a threshold of far more, like tens of thousands, specifically arranged residues.

The reason for this "limited evolutionary potential", as professor Barry Hall put it, is what I like to call the expanding non-beneficial gap problem. The higher the minimum structural threshold requirement for a particular type of function, the greater the linear distance between it and the next closest potentially beneficial system that exists in the fastness of structural sequence space. And, each linear increase in distance translates into a many fold increase in the average random walk/random selection time needed to find the next novel beneficial island cluster. Very quickly, well before the level of 1000 specified residues is reached, the average time needed to achieve success has worked its way into the trillions upon trillions of years. And, that's a really big problem for your position - wouldn't you say?

http://www.detectingdesign.com/flagellum.html

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I admire the faith of Dr. Collins as he is able to accept the evidence and preserve his belief system which is nothing more than a hope that there is a god that will in time reveal to us the meaning (if any) of our existence.

I guess it is Ok to admire wishful thinking. I don't. I sympathize with it, but I don't admire it. I admire those who are willing to go wherever they think the weight of evidence is leading. I admire those like Dawkins much more than I admire the so called Christian-evolutionist who does nothing more than hope for the best and call that "religion". These are the kind of Christians that, "Have a form of Godliness, but deny its power."

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The real wonder in all these arguments is that life does exist within the vastness of a cold and random universe.

Yes, that is quite amazing - isn't it?

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But, then again with an infinite number of possibilities rare events such as life are bound to happen. The trick is finding it.

This same argument could also be used for the concept of "God". Given an infinite number of possibilities, a million monkeys typing on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare - or anything else. In other words, this argument supports any notion whatsoever, however ludicrous. It removes the very basis of scientific reason.

Charles Hard Townes, winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics and a UC Berkeley professor makes the following interesting argument regarding this fallacious argument:

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"Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that "Well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right." Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate — it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially." http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/17_townes.shtml

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I have never understood why it is up to us to utilize ancient biblical texts to argue for the existence of god as a designer, define his/her characteristics which are worthy of worship and then placidly accept these arguments as "truth". If it is true that a god wants us to know it as ancient biblical texts suggest, then the burden of proof is on the one who makes the claim. So its gods problem not ours.

Well, it is both God's problem and ours. If God wanted to hide himself, he most certainly could have done that. If God really wants to be found, He can do that in a number of ways which no one could possibly deny. However, what if God wants to be found only by those who really want to find the Truth? - those who earnestly search for it?

I believe that God has indeed provided abundant evidence both of his existence and of his character in the things that he has made and in the inspired Word that he has written.

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"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." (Romans 1:20)

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Now back to real science.

Sorry to remain silent but I have grants in review and papers being readied for publication. Sean raises some good points but once again it is nothing more than argument. He uses the same data to argue an invisible "designer." Fine. Where is it? What is it? Is the complex designer, designed? My point here is that there are no answers to these questions.These questions represent our most basic yearning for meaning. Meaning for existence is not found in science. Science is a tool for understanding the natural universe. It is not a tool that can provide insight into supernaturalism.

In my view, faith assertions give humans a "hope" and allow us to live in a cold universe with the certainty of our death rendezvous and in time the extinction of all life once the sun runs out of fuel. The salvation and creation stories are a hope story and a recognition that there is something greater than naturalism story. But, they are just that, untestable, only arguments within a philosophical framework.

Nick, with regards to me "finding god?" Once again its not my problem. I do not rely on prophets etc to find god. Those ancient texts need to be read within the perspective of the history from which they came. When I read the bible now, keeping in mind that the texts are a combination of story and experience of a people within a historical context, many of the problems disappear.

With regards to undermining an SDA institution because of acceptance of the scientific method and assuming that natural causes are at work. Not so. This institution relies on science to advance the healing reach of evidence based medicine. Our large increase in grant funding for basic biomedical research is a testimony to this goal. SDA theology and education has boxed itself in because it espouses scholarly endeavors and some, but not all, would require professors to ignore the the conclusions that the data support.

I cannot stand before my peers and say that life is not interconnected and that life has not evolved. If this perspective is indeed wrong then advancements in research will show this to be the case. Faith arguments are not going to solve the issue. But, it gets worse for the creationists as we continue to find conserved functional DNA sequences that span from species back to phylum. Hmm, once again a tenet of evolutionary theory is that if a gene is necessary for life function it will be conserved.

Now back to knowing what can be known.

John