He says the "assembled in time" idea of creation (special creation), commits
one to two theological perspectives. I don't think his wording makes it so.
<<(a) An interventionist concept of divine action in the formational history
of the physical world: At the beginning God is presumed to have purposely
withheld from the Creation certain formational capabilities...To say it more
strongly, God is presumed to have forced some members of the Creation to do
something different from, or beyond, what the formational powers given to them
at the outset could have allowed them to do. God is thought to have created
the universe with gaps (missing capabilities) in its formational economy, and
God is thought to have bridged those gaps by acts of "extraordinary assembly"
in the course of time.>>
The gigantic assumption here is that only by empowering creation with certain
formational capabilities AT THE START can God be, what, efficient? Good?
IOW, Howard sees interventionism as per se inefficient or imprecise or "less
than perfect."
I don't know how one can know that without knowing the mind of God. Calvin
College is good, but not that good.
By waiting until 30 A.D. to reveal Christ, wasn't God "withholding" salvivic
capacity? Wasn't there a "gap" in salvation history, especially as related to
the gentiles? If we're going to do theology this way, you can't stop at
creation.
The revelation of Christ was by any account "extraordinary" in the history of
the world. The creation of man was no less extraordinary. I find it consistent
with God's acts in history.
Using "withhold" as a necessarily pejorative term is inappropriate, in my
view. God REVEALS when he decides to, and doesn't want us to presume to hold
him to our own standard of utility. Didn't Job get precisely this message?
<<(b) an evidentialist apologetics:the presence of these presumed gaps in the
Creation's formational economy is thought to be empirically discernible. The
task of Christian apologetics would then be to demonstrate, by appeal to the
empirical sciences, the presences of these gaps--gifts that God chose to
withhold from the Creation at the beginning. The agendas of both Creation
Science and ID Theory are strongly shaped by the desire to demonstrate the
existence of these gaps in the Creation's formational economy, thereby making
evolutionary continuity impossible. And if evolutionary continuity is
impossible, then the comprehensive worldview of evolutionary Naturalism is
also untenable. >>
Hmm, I don't think THE task is to "demonstrate the presence of gaps." Rather,
it is the empirical recognition that gaps are there, and that natural science
is unable to explain them. Nor is it the DESIRE to demonstrate gaps. It is the
DESIRE to find the best explanation for creation IN LIGHT of the gaps.
I've never found the "God of the gaps" tag the devastating monicker so many
others seem to think it is. We do have an unfolding knowledge of our world,
through science, and naturally some gaps get closed. But others do not, and
there is no a priori reason to exclude supernaturalism.
Jim