John E. Rylander asked on Thu, 15 Jul 1999:
> IF I could just ask the various interlocutors on this thread one question,
> and request a very short answer from each of them:
OK - I would like to prefix my response by saying that I do not think
the term "supernatural intervention" is helpful. I think the
biblical teaching on "providence" is that God is continuously active
in his creation - no less active in sustaining as he is in creating
or in performing miracles. However, I understand your question and
provide the requested brief responses below.
> In your view, is God's -supernatural- intervention into a natural system
> something that is theoretically in the realm(s) of:
> (1) physical science?
Only in a way analogous to forensic science.
> (2) reason?
>
> (3) philosophy?
>
> (4) theology?
yes to all three.
> (5) Blind faith?
Blind faith is not something the Christian knows much about - because
faith is a response to a person; it is coming out of darkness into
the light. It is not divorced from reason or philosophy, although it
involves the renewing of our minds.
> My point for years has been that if ID advocates want to move it into 1, all
> they need do is come up with not philosophically or rationally compelling
> argument, but EMPIRICAL arguments, new, detailed, intersubjective/objective
> theories that make unambiguous, novel, and successful predictions even
> according to those with no prior commitment to ID. That'll make it not just
> TRUE, but SCIENCE.
>
> I can imagine their eventually doing this; but I don't think they're too
> close just yet.
It seems to me that IDers have been saying some interesting things
for years: the discontinuities in living things are at least as
important as the continuites and ought to be studied in their own
right; Junk DNA has functions and is not Junk; the fossil record is
not Darwinian and makes far more sense in the context of intelligent
design; studies of natural variation (and artificial variation) show
that Darwinian mechanisms operate in the realm of
ecological fine-tuning and not in the realm of origins of complexity
(analogous to darwinian design in engineering) - the origin of real
complexity appears to be explicable only by presupposing intelligent
design.
Best regards,
David J. Tyler.