On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Howard J. Van Till wrote:
> Interesting to me is the fact that fine tuning is necessary only in the
> context of presuming that the universe (the Creation) satisfies the Robust
> Formational Economy Principle and has an evolutionary formational history.
> Episodic creationism, on the other hand, should see evidence for fine tuning
> and the Anthropic Principle as surprising, since occasional acts of divine
> adjustment could presumably make up for any lack of original tuning.
>
> Howard Van Till
>
I don't think it is too unusual to see similarities in the arguments of
those advocating extreme opposite positions on an issue. Often we are
influenced by what we would like God to be like or how we would create if
we were God.
Dawkins apparently thinks that he knows what God would be like, and since
he doesn't see in Nature what he would expect to see from such a creator,
he concludes that God does not exist. Phil Johnson may have the same idea
of what God is like, but he thinks he can and must prove it.
At the other end of the spectrum from Johnson we have the Robust
Formational Economy Principle which may be esthetically appealing to us
scientists because of our sense of what is beautiful, but is beauty a
valid basis for a theological doctrine? Characterizing episodic
creationism as God fixing what he didn't get right in the first place
doesn't accurately reflect the thinking of many such creationists who
assume that the Lord had a purpose in acting in this way even if they
can't say what that purpose was.
For a parallel compare Mark 8:22-26, where Jesus touches a blind man twice
before he is completely healed. Wouldn't it have better fit what we want
to believe about Jesus if the man had been completely healed the first
time Jesus touched him? Critics can claim that Jesus made a mistake and
was correcting it with the second touch, but we believe that Jesus had a
purpose in only partially healing the man at first, even if we are not
sure what that purpose was. Perhaps it is deliberately analogous to the
two-step spiritual enlightenment related in the next paragraph (Mark
8:27-29).
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 23 2000 - 10:03:14 EDT