From: Adrian Teo (ateo@whitworth.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 13:23:31 EST
Hello Walt,
You wrote:
The difficulty is that I am discussing evolution with people
who have IQs as
good as anyone on this list and they do not accept evolution.
Mostly they
are OEC people who feel that:
1.) "Evolution" is an atheistic concept that leaves God out
of the physical
acts of creation because atheists cannot allow for intervention by God.
and
2.) It stretches credibility to believe that simple natural
processes could
give rise to what we see, in contrast to what Genesis 1 describes..
Instead they tend to be OECs who feel that the Bible
correctly defines God
as Intervening at various points and creating life
incrementally as outline
in Genesis 1. If "evolution" is undefined, then nothing you have listed
below would be true of evolution and not true of OEC. OEC is
specific and
could be falsified in several ways:
1.) One discovers an unbroken chain in the fossil record for
the evolution
of one species from another.
2.) An example of evolution takes place in our lifetime, induced in the
laboratory by nothing other than changing environmental
conditions of some
creature like rats.
AT: There are many different takes on OEC, depending on one's
metaphysics and epistemology.
I consider myself in the OEC camp (perhaps incorrectly,
depending on your definition), but I hold to an understanding which
is quite different from the one you outlined. The OEC stance that you
describe assumes that there are two mutually exclusive categories:
natural causes and divine action. If one is able to expose a natural
cause, then God is ruled out. This is not my understanding.
Evolution, to me, is not an atheistic concept (i.e. not
theological), but a scientific one. Divine action and natural causes
are not mutually exclusive. To put it simply, while all physical
events may have natural causes, their ultimate cause for existence is
God. This understanding is more in line with Aquinas than Hume. In
this view, there is no need to search for some window of opening in
the natural world (s.a. quantum indeterminancy) for God to act. All
natural events and entities owe their existence to God, and God works
through secondary natural causes.
I consider myself a creationist in the sense that I believe
that in the immanence and providence of God. It is through His power
that all of creation is sustained.
Adrian.
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