Re: "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds" by Phillip E.

Allan Harvey (aharvey@boulder.nist.gov)
Wed, 03 Sep 1997 08:36:01 -0600

Adrian Teo wrote:
>Terry M. Gray wrote:
>
>[much deleted]
>
>> I'm not one who believes that faith in God is irrational or that the
>> Christian faith is invisible to reason (although I do want to be careful
>> not to elevate reason to a position where creaturely reflection passes
>> judgment on the Creator--that's the real original sin!) However, for God
>> to call my belief that God operated through secondary causes that can be
>> analyzed by scientific methods "the human imagination, not the reality of
>> God" is simply a provocation that calls into question centuries of
>> reflection on how God interacts with the world and Phil Johnson's sincerity
>> in bring all theists on board.
>
>Terry, can you please elaborate on what exactly you meant by "secondary
>causes"?PJ's point was that the actions of God in creation are not
undetectable,
>and that they would not show up as mindless and purposeless. Are you
disagreeing
>with that?

I can't speak for Terry, but I suspect that what most bothers him is not
Johnson's conviction that God has acted in creation in scientifically
discernable ways, but rather his insistence that God *must* have acted in
such ways, or else theism is false. That is certainly the main problem I
have with Johnson -- the position that theism is only compatible with
"interventionist" models of God's creation, which implies that those who
picture God as having created in more providential ways (ways that would
appear "natural" to the scientist) are not real theists. Making the
truth of theism dependent upon a particular model of God's creative
activity is unwise both theologically and apologetically. It is as
presumptuous of us to insist that God *must* have created in an
interventionist way as it is to insist that he *can't* have created in
that way.

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