Thanks for your cordial response.
Your suggestion to explore the alternatives of 'intelligent selection' and
'natural selection' may be a fruitful strategy.
Let me continue to explore these same concerns. As you know, when I see a
discussion repeatedly running into difficulty I like to try out new
strategies and new bits of conceptual vocabulary. At the moment I'm
thinking that perhaps the term 'selection' might not be the best starting
point. Given my inclination to reflect on the character of the Creation as
a whole, I think of the entire array of viable life forms as distrubuted in
a 'potentiality space' (or genomic phase space) that has been an integral
part of the Creation's robust 'being' from the outset.
The formational history of life forms then represents a movement or flow of
actualized forms through this space of potential forms. In that context I
am curious to know something about the character of this flow. I see at
least two possibilities:
(1) It is like a divinely directed tour through the Creation's potentiality
space (with or without the need for extraordinary gap-bridging acts); or
(2) It is the Creation's free exploration of its divinely provided
potentiality space, this exploration made both possible and fruitful
because the 'being' of the Creation satisfies the Robust Formational
Economy Principle.
I would think that proponents of ID would favor something like (1), while
I, as you know, favor (2).
Comments on this approach welcome.
Howard van Till