[A couple of attempts from home have vanished into cyberspace, so I'll try
posting this from work to see if that works. Has anyone else had posts
vanish over the weekend?]
In a message dated 7/7/00 10:49:08 PM Mountain Daylight Time, crossbr@SLU.EDU
writes:
> Also, I asked for substantiation for the claim that
> according to Johnson "macroevolution disproves God". That too
> remains unsubstantiated. The quotation from Johnson listed below
> does not state or imply that if macroevolution were shown to be
> true, God would be disproved. Rather the quotation
> below (from what I can tell) simply claims that those who talk
> about God as having created by natural processes alone are not
> talking about God as He really is. It is a theological
> statement about the nature of God, not a counterfactual statement
> about what would be entailed by the scientific demonstration of
> macroevolution. To read into this quotation that Johnson means
> or implies that were macroevolution shown to be true, God would
> be disproved, is therefore unjustified.
Though Johnson does not use the word "macroevolution", that is clearly what
he means when he talks about an "evolutionary process that was to all
appearances mindless and purposeless." He does not explicitly say that
this "disproves God," but clearly he thinks that it is incompatible with
God being our "true creator". If his "theological statement about the
nature of God" says that the true God does not do his creating through
natural processes, then natural explanations like evolution disprove God,
or at least Johnson's view of God.
That last phrase provides a potential out, of course. One might hope that
maybe Johnson was just saying how he thought God worked, but wasn't
insisting that God *must* have worked that way (being open to the idea that
he might be mistaken about the nature of God, rather than making God's
validity dependent on him working according to Johnson's
preferences). This is another case where Johnson has been given
opportunities to assuage fears about his theology. But when he is asked
which would be the logical response if macroevolution were shown to be true:
A) Become an atheist
B) Abandon his ideas about how God can create
he always refuses to say anything approaching (B), or even to say that (A)
would be incorrect.
Again I come back to my earlier point that, even if Johnson and the rest of
the ID crowd do not believe it, the church hears the (unhealthy) message of
total incompatibility between evolution (beyond little bits of
microevolution) and theism. If that is a misunderstanding of the message,
Johnson has dodged innumerable opportunities to correct the
misconception. Instead, he seems to revel in being the guy who is battling
the natural explanations of science in order to save God from being pushed
out of existence.
>>"I therefore put the following simple proposition on the table for
>>discussion: God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God
>>who is known only by faith and is invisible to reason, or who acted
>>undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was
>>to all appearances mindless and purposeless. That kind of talk is
>>about the human imagination, not the reality of God. I speak of a God
>>who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all over the evidence."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cats"
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