You wrote:
"Why not "a little bit of Intelligent Design"? :-) "
It's all intelligently designed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can a Biblical theist say otherwise?
If God is intimately involved in the moment-by-moment workings of the
universe and if "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy
counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes
to pass" (WCF III, 1; Eph. 1:11), then God is designing and purposing even
if the matter can be explained by a scientific description, either by
lawful behavior, by chance (which is lawful behavior), or by some
contingent event.
Why is this so hard to get across?
There may come a point in our scientific investigation in where we say
given what we know now, we can't imagine how this could happen. Maybe God
did contravene his ordinary means of creational rule. Of course I can say
this. But if my students were to explain their lab results in terms of
some supernatural intervention, I'd probably mark them down. The nature of
the scientific explanation is the look for "ordinary" explanations. But
science has a limited scope; science is not the source of ultimate truth;
there is such a think a divine revelation and divine action that may not be
explainable in terms of science (if so then it must merely be accepted as a
creational given). I don't think that there is anything methodologically
wrong with do this, but my point is and always has been that what we know
seems quite capable of explaining the things that need to be explained for
most things. Appeal to the miraculous seems to be motivated by a
theological perspective. I do this myself wrt to human origins. But, I do
it because I believe the scriptures force me to that conclusion and not
because I've concluded that a scientific explanation is impossible. I
don't see any necessary theological motivation to do it anywhere else and
so I'm free to anticipate "ordinary" means operating under the providence
of God to explain what we see.
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