On Tue, 23 Jan 1996 13:26:39 -0500 you wrote:
[...]
>In my private response to Stephen (sent privately because I was still
>thinking about what he said and wanted to get a bit farther in my thoughts
>before I made a public fool of myself) I acknowledged that he had a point.
>The claim that the design is "in" the properties is easily misconstrued.
>What I was trying to convey is that I believe God has put a great deal of
>creative effort into devising the minutest properties of the objects in
>nature to make nature a mechanism that responds to His commands smoothly
>and exactly in the way He wants it to. (Stephen, if I'm contradicting
>anything I said in my private note to you, I'll be glad to try to clarify.
>How's that for sticking my neck out?)
OK. But such "creative effort" on God's part does not limit His
freedom to supplement to, or even override, these "properties of the
objects in nature to make nature". Also, these properties may be at a
micro level and it is IMHO a reductionist fallacy to assume that macro
level effects are just micro level causes extrapolated. AFAIK few if
any macro level
laws and events are discoverable and/or predictable at the micro
level. Finally the "mechanism that responds to His commands smoothly"
may not be "exactly in the way He wants it to" be. For example, the
world as created was "very good" (Gn 1:31), yet it needed further work
by man to "subdue" it (Gn 1:28). IOW, a smoothly functioning
mechanistic world may appeal to an engineer (<g>) but it may only be
the flat drawing board upon which the Engineer-in-Chief built his new
designs.
[...]
BH>No, I don't really fit comfortably in the TE community -- although
>some of my best friends are TE's :-). I'm probably more of a progressive
>creationist.
Is this a type of "coming out"? :-)
DT>I may have misunderstood Bill, in which case I am willing to be
>corrected. But from what I read in your post, it seems to me
>that you are advocating a form of continuous PC. Is this the
>case?
BH>Probably. As I've said before, my position is simply that I don't
>reject evolution.
Bill, "evolution", (ie. Darwinist macro-evolution), means:
"All livings things, past and present, are descended with modification
from a common ancestor, by a fully naturalistic process, involving
random mutations and cumulative natural selection mechanisms" (my
definition).
If you are "probably more of a progressive creationist" then IMHO you
*cannot* also claim "I don't reject evolution". Darwinist
macro-evolution hangs together as a *system*. If you take *any*
element out of the above definition, then you don't really have
"evolution".
This is Dawkins' point:
"At first sight there is an important distinction to be made between
what might be called 'instantaneous creation' and 'guided evolution'.
Modern theologians of any sophistication have given up believing in
instantaneous creation. The evidence for some sort of evolution has
become too overwhelming. But many theologians who call themselves
evolutionists...smuggle God in by the back door: they allow him some
sort of supervisory role over the course that evolution has taken,
either influencing key moments in evolutionary history (especially, of
course, human evolutionary history), or even meddling more
comprehensively in the day-to-day events that add up to evolutionary
change.
We cannot disprove beliefs like these, especially if it is assumed
that God took care that his interventions always closely mimicked what
would be expected from evolution by natural selection. All that we
can say about such beliefs is, firstly, that they are superfluous and,
secondly, that they assume the existence of the main thing we want to
explain, namely organized complexity. The one thing that makes
evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized
complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity.
If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the
organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by
guiding evolution, that deity must already have been vastly complex in
the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an
educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of
prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow
ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without
offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply
postulate the existence of life as we know it!"
(Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", Penguin: London, 1991, p316)
While I don't agree with Dawkins extremist conclusion (a Creator is
not compelled to create instantaneously), he does have a point. Once
you accept divine intervention, then the whole raison d'etre of
Darwinist macro-evolution, is gone.
In the end, to be consistent, when two systems are antithetical, as
creation and evolution ultimately are, one must choose between one or
the other (Josh 24:15; 1Ki 18:21; Mt 6:24).
God bless.
Stephen
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