On Thu, 27 Jul 1995 13:25:48 -0500 you wrote:
>I said
>
>BH>Stephen, your observation cuts both ways. Those of us who accept
>evolution are frequently puzzled by the question of just what it is
>that a PC objects to about evolution.
>
>Stephen Jones wrote:
>SJ>In a nutshell, it denies that God can (or has) intervened directly in
>biological history. Theologically, TE seems a different view of God
>that one reads about in the Bible.
>
BH>I was about to respond to this when Terry's response popped up. I
pretty
>much agree with Terry's response, and I just want to add this:
>
>Not only do I believe that God has intervened directly in history, I
>believe that He _does_ intervene directly in history. And I have seen Him
>intervene directly -- in the form of numerous answered prayers. Let's be
>clear: this is a disagreement about _how_ God does things, not over
>_whether_ He does things, or whether He is personal, or whether He cares.
Agreed. PC would not limit "how God does things". It would be open to
God intervening directly in biological history in much the same way as
He
has intervened directly in human history.
BH>Really, I doubt that God sees a whole lot of difference between
causing a
>kingdom to be lost by the loss of a nail from a horse's shoe[1] and zapping
>the kingdom's armies with lightning on the battlefield -- except that
>perhaps the first way is more elegant. Churchill, in "History of the
>English-speaking peoples" notes a number of instances in English history
>where seeming coincidences of ordinary events caused unlikely things to
>happen, and these happenings contributed to the development of limited
>government and religious freedom. Churchill didn't believe these were
>coincidences, and I don't either.
Heartily agree! One who believes only in natural causes could look at
these
same events and say "cooincidence". A supernaturalist would be open to
the possibility that God could have intervened directly by
manipulating
events, perhaps at the quantum level.
By analogy, it seems that TE would say of the "cooincidences" of
biological
history that they were perferctly explicable by purely natural causes.
I read
this the other day, re Acanthostega:
"Most important, Clack and Coates also take with them a deeper respect
for the waywardness of evolution, the habit it has of avoiding what
looks to us like the simple path. Open an evolution textbook and
you're likely to find phrases like "The Conquest of Land," as if it
were manifest destiny that our ancestors came ashore and evolved our
anatomy. "Just because we use our limbs this way now, we can't assume
that that's how they were used in the first place," says Coates.
"There's a kind of horrible foresight to that kind of thinking:
'Better grow myself a limb because my children are going to need
it.' That's why we suggest that limbs evolved in the water for use in
the water, and then they were hanging around on land, and they were
useful there too."
This principle of evolution is sometimes called preadaptation.
There's no foresight involved, though-simply the lucky coincidence
that a feature that evolved to do one thing may turn out later to do
another thing even better. Bone, for example, probably began as a
place where animals could store extra phosphorus; only later did it
support their bodies. Acanthostega, loping around underwater with a
body prepared from head to foot for life on land, may be one of the
strongest demonstrations that we humans owe our existence to
preadaptation's unpredictable nature.
"One gets the impression when reading popular accounts that there was
some kind of imperative, as if tetrapods felt they had to do it, to
embark on the Long March Toward Man," says Clack. "It was much more
accidental than that."
(Zimmer C., "Coming Onto the Land", Discover, June 1995, p127)
I see the "accidental" development of a limb from a fishes' fin
(if that is indeed what happened), as evidence for God's direct
manipulation of genetics and/or the environment. Eveolution seems
to be full of these happy "accidents"! :-)
God bless.
Stephen
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