Brian Harper wrote quoting S.J. Gould:
>Remember Gould's "... paths that a
>sensible God would never tread ...", which, IMHO, is a slam against
>theistic evolutionists every bit as much as it is against creationists.
I agree that Gould comment is a slam against TE as much as against
creatiionists (as if TE's weren't creationists!), but Steve's theology is
as bad as Darwin's. Gould has created his own God (as Romans 1 tells us he
must), and then he argues that that God that he himself has created would
never create life in a way that looks like evolution. We TE's just
disagree with Gould's theology, not necessarily his science, and also the
theological conclusions he draws. [God would never do it that way; it
happened that way, therefore God was not involved. The premise is wrong.
Who's to say that God would never do it that way.]
I hope that other Biblical theists will disagree with his theology too.
Thus, I can go with Gould a great distance. It's only the metaphysical
conclusions that he draws from his faulty theology that makes some of what
he says erroneous. In fact most of what Gould says concerning contingency
is highly compatible with a Christian perspective as long as contingency is
viewed as being something from a human perspective and not something that
God is subject to. Thus, even though from a human perspective, if you play
the tape over again, you'd think you might get something different, from a
divine perspective, if you play the tape over again, you get just what you
got the first time, since all the contingent events are providentially
directed.
I have claimed all along that our common enemy is not evolutionary biology,
but the religion of some evolutionary biologists, evolutionary naturalism.
I would welcome the opportunity to close ranks against that enemy and let
all of our disagreements concerning evolutionary biology be friendly and
academic debate. But, for many out there in reflectorland, including Dr.
Johnson, there seems to be no separating the evolutionary biology from the
evolutionary naturalism.
Terry G.
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 40546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt