> However, one reason why complementarity cannot transfer
>easily to the study of origins relates directly to the issue of
>purpose and design. Can a statement about undirected
>evolutionary change be complementary to a statement about God's
>craftsmanship? Can a statement about adaptation to the
>environment be complementary to a statement about intelligent
>design?
The phrase "undirected evolutionary change" actually contains an
unwarranted conclusion: that evolutionary change is undirected. I'm quite
willing to accept the claims of evolutionary biologists that they cannot
see any signs of direction. But when they claim there is no direction,
they are stepping outside of science into metaphysics. And in all fairness
they ought to be criticized as severely as intelligent design advocates are
when _they_ claim design _is_ present.
As I've said before in this forum, one reason I find chaos theory
fascinating is that chaos -- or sensitive dependence on initial conditions,
or nonlinear dynamics -- _could_ be a mechanism a sovereign God may use to
govern creation without that governance being unequivocably detectable.
Lorenz discovered in his simulations of weather that if he stopped a
simulation in the middle and tried to restart it by typing in the state
variables he had saved from the interrupted run, he got quite different
behavior from what he observed by running the simulation uninterrupted.
The problem was that the values he typed were not identical to the state
variables at the point the simulation was interrupted. Truncation and
roundoff error made a huge difference in the result. A sovereign God who
has no limitations on the number of decimal places he can remember
(probably he doesn't do that, but the point is he isn't limited in his
perceptions or in his actions, except by his own nature) can if he chooses
govern nature by making changes that are unobservable by humans. Why would
he want to do that? Perhaps so as not to force himself on individuals who
don't want to believe in him, or perhaps his artistic desire for elegance
and completeness makes him prefer to make a nature which he can direct by
entering small commands rather than having to perform major disruptions.
In any case the Bible seems to agree that he likes to keep some things --
including possibly his own means of governance -- out of sight:
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to
search out a matter. Prov 25:2 KJV
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)