Bob,
I'm still trying to understand what you envision as the extra divine action
that initiated each "stage." You wrote:
> Let me add some details to the idea of staged developmental creative
> activity. Each stage had its own purposes or goals and the means to
> accomplish them. Also its own time frame. In general the goal of each stage
> was to provide the raw material and fundamental conditions needed for the
> next stage.
What is the basis for these concepts? Do they come primarily from biblical
considerations? theological? scientific? other?
> With some new ingredient, (which someday we may be able to
> discern), the next stage was able to accomplish its own goals.
Could you give me an example of "some new ingredient"? New material? New
formational capabilities? New configurations that, once present, would
reproduce? Would atoms and molecules, for example, behave differently after
the introduction of a "new ingredient"?
> I think the
> stages are not hard to discern--prebiotic, unicellular life on earth; complex
> metazoan life, sentient life in the image of God.
What is it that makes it "not hard to discern" the divisions between these
stages? What are the traits of these boundaries that make them so easy to
recognize?
> I take it you will permit
> a divine intervention in the last stage?
My permission is, of course, not at all necessary :)
To be candid, however, I see no need to introduce a supernatural
intervention at any place in the process. I use the term "supernatural
intervention" in the sense that David Griffin specifies: a divine action
that interrupts the continuity of the creaturely cause/effect system and
supersedes all creaturely action; a coercive divine action that functions as
the sole cause of some occurrence/event.
Howard Van Till
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