gordon brown wrote:
> 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).
>
Your argument is correct but you don't carry it far enough. I Corinthians
1:18-31 is a key here.
Jews & Greeks (i.e., everybody) have pre-determined ideas about what kind of deity
God is, & thus
of what God should do in the world. The cross confounds those expectations
because it reveals a God quite different from our expectations. & if the cross
really is revelatory of God's character then we ought to expect God's actions in
the world in general to be consistent with that character. The God who is active
in the world though hidden, & participates in the suffering of the process of
natural selection, fits this criterion far better than does a God who has to show
off by "leaving his fingerprints all over the evidence."
Shalom,
George
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