Regarding Re: Why ICR "wins", Jan de Koning wrote:
>I heard from a theologian, that he was very upset about many translations,
>where the original "sign" is translated with "miracle" or "miraculous
>sign". According to him, it makes too much of a distinction between what
>God in a way, WE consider normal and what we consider not normal. Antway,
>for us Everything that happens is under God's control, so why make
>distinctions?
Jan,
If I may expand on this a bit. Often, too much of how we think of God is
colored by our limitations. We think of Him experiencing time in the same
way that we do, when this is ridiculous (since He created time in the first
place). We think of commonplace phenomena as if we understand them, when
all we really have are models.
Yes, God *is* "constantly performing miracles;" most of which He does in a
regular manner. These constant miracles provide us the comfort of a
rational and reproducible universe to live in. Sometimes He acts in a way
that we have no experience from which to understand. *We* label this a
miracle. The difference is entirely from our perspective and a description
of our ignorance.
While the usual orderly running of Newton's machine points to God's
rationality and reason, His interruptions of the standard processes point
to his superiority over them. We need both the mundane and the miraculous
and need to perceive both as God's work.
Here is where I see that the ID folks seem to be missing something. The
suggestion that there is such a thing as ID science and some other kind of
science makes me laugh. Without an underlying assumption of ID, where do
our assumptions of, among other things, reproducibility come from?
The search for the unexplainable as a search for God's fingerprints on the
world to me seems to miss the point. What, exactly, is "explainable?" We do
not possess explanations of *anything*, only models. How do we know that
these models actually describe an underlying reality, much less describe it
correctly? Only because God, who is not limited as we are, provides
revelation of Himself. He comes from outside our box and meets us inside it.
I wish that Philip Johnson, et al would spend their apologetic efforts at
showing the futility of building an epistemology apart from revelation.
*That* is the swindle of scientism: the hubris that we actually "know"
anything at all.
Bill