[asa] knit in womb/was Theological Naturalism - 'The Nature of God' = Naturalism

David O wrote:

Charles, it's very interesting that you mention the "knit together in the
womb" argument. I once made that same argument on an ID forum -- that we
can describe the development of a fetus in naturalistic terms and don't need
to point to "gaps" in the development of a fetus in order to consider each
new human life a special act of God's providence. One apparently
knowledgeable person, however, responded that we know almost nothing about
fetal development, in particular about how zygotic cells begin to
differentiate into specialized cells to create the different parts of the
human body. He suggested that this question of differentiation represents a
huge "gap" in fetal development and that it is premature to assume that we
will be able to ever come up with a satisfying naturalistic explanation for
it. I don't think he was suggesting that there is a clear act of miraculous
intervention in fetal development, but he was suggesting that this might be
the kind of mystery that natural explanations alone can't fully crack.

But isn't part of the point about birth/development that we can observe it
in real time, whereas one of the arguments against evolution is that we
can't observe the past. We may not know the exact reasons how/why zygotic
cells begin to differentiate but that is certainly within the realm of
scientific inquiry and there's no reason to believe it's something
scientists could not eventually crack. It seems like grasping on that guy's
part to come up with holes in science and act like that is a flaw of science
itself, when it's just the nature of science to have unanswered questions.
It's what drives scientific inquiry! Reconstructing past events, what
happened in evolution, is more difficult than something scientists can
actively observe because we have no shortage of new births in the world.
But I love the "knit together n the womb"
 argument by the way - good point!

Wendee

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Received on Tue Jul 24 12:17:26 2007