At 03:45 PM 10/17/98 -0600, John W Burgeson wrote:
>Bill Hamilton recently wrote: (This note also to Glenn & anyone else
>interested):
>
>" A third answer might be that the ID er is continuously at work.
>This might be a troublesome question for Mike. If he answers that the
>future development is encoded in the original design, then he's have a
>hard
>time distancing himself from views like Howard Van Till's functional
>integrity view (which I presume he would want to distance himself from).
>The other two views ( periodic and continuously) might be taken to imply
>a Creator always fooling around with His creation -- like an engineer who
>can't make up his mind."
>
Burgy wrote
>Interesting perspective. You propose a three-part set of possibilities --
>the ID er (God, we might presume, although this is not a necessary
>assumption) creates the earth and makes changes to it:
>
>1. With Functional Integrity (Van Till's position)
>2. Periodically (progressive creation)
>3. Continuously
>
>Isn't position 1 and Theistic Evolution pretty much the same?
To me they are pretty close. However, Functional Integrity looks like
deism to some people. After reading some of what Howard has written and
some conversations with him, I know that's not what he's driving at. But
that's how it looks to some observers.
I'd think
>so. Likewise position 3?
Position 3 may or may not be equivalent to theistic evolution. Position 3
could as well be an extreme form of progressive creation.
I'm going to toss this idea out and see if anyone responds to it. Back in
my creationist days, what repelled me about theistic evolution was that it
seemed to make God very impersonal, or perhaps very distant. It seemed to
say He was involved with everything that occurred, but in a very (to human
perceptions) tenuous way. But as a Christian I knew that God was deeply
engaged with humans in a very personal way, and I had come to associate all
of the beauty I respond to -- both in nature and in the art of humans --
with God the artist. Saying that everything we see in nature was only
connected to God through some processes that allowed Him to keep creation
at (a long) arm's length troubled me. Now, how is it that I, as one who
finds some level of attraction to functional integrity, progressive
creation and theistic evolution, am no longer repelled by these concepts?
The answer as I see it is that God's character is a given. Scripture says
He is love (I Jn 4:8), that He so loved the world that He gave His only
son, and I could go on .... Whether he gifted nature with all its
properties from the very beginning, or intervenes periodically (where the
length of the period might approach zero) He is still the One who loves
the world enough that He gave His only son. And He is still the one who
sent the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. Beside these
considerations, arguments about how God functions in time seem (to me)
pretty inconsequential.
>
>It's the second possibility that interests me the most, since it is
>definitive of my own position. You say "an engineer who can't make up his
>mind," but that is only one possibility. Call it 2a. Here are others:
>
>2b. An engineer who is just fooling around, for his own amusement
>2c. An engineer who is not omnipotent, but who creates, and having
>created, sees room for improvements and changes after he sees ho the
>creation is performing.
>2d. ...
You left out my favorite: 2x. An engineer who interacts with His creation
for the sheer joy of seeing it respond to Him in the way He designed it.
Or perhaps He's like an artist who paints a series of paintings of the same
subject, emphasizing something different in each one, because He has more
than one message to communicate.
Because I see God purposefully and lovingly engaged with His creation at
all times, some people would categorize me as a progressive creationist,
and I'm confortable with that as long as it isn't interpreted to mean that
God had to step in to fix things that broke (at least if the implication is
that He didn't plan for them to break). So I wasn't trying to belittle the
PC position. Rather I was trying to suggest how I thought Mike might react.
>
>We speak of God being omnipotent, but that's just in our terms. Maybe He
>is not. Or maybe he deliberately limits himself in the creation process
>to see what happens!
We have documentary proof that God deliberately limits Himself. After all
He chose to deal with sin by going to the cross. He could have just zapped
all the sinners. Or had he wanted to leave anyone living, he could have
just rewired our brains so we wouldn't sin. But he chose a far more costly
-- and weak-appearing -- means of dealing with sin. Omnipotence is a
difficult concept to deal with (there are the conundrums about whether God
can make a stone so big He can't move it, etc.), so I don't think arguing
about it is going to get us anywhere.
>
>I can live with those possibilities.
>
>Why else am I a PC? Two arguments come to mind; there are others, I
>suspect.
>
>1. God HAS communicated with me on occasion. As a result, my course of
>action was changed -- history took a different course than if He had not.
>
>2. God HAS communicated with others on occasion -- scripture has many
>examples. As a result, people did different things -- history was
>changed.
>
>The communication, in the sense used above, is clearly non-natural. There
>is no causation (atoms bumping into other atoms) going on to cause it. So
>God is clearly interacting with his creation, at least sometimes. This
>rules out Functional Integrity.
I hope Howard responds to this. I don't see that functional integrity
rules out God communicating with His creatures and intervening in the
affairs of the created world. Functional integrity says some things about
the mechanisms God created, but if you remember in the article where Howard
discusses what St. Augustine and St. Basil said about creation, he quotes
one of them (I believe it was Basil) as saying in essence that He created
nature to respond to His commands. IOW He built (or built the components
for) a very sophisticated somewhat self-organizing system whose purpose was
to provide a home for and support his interaction with men. If these were
his purposes, then I don't see that intervening to communicate with men
violates anything.
>
>But it is also periodic -- not continuous! I don't "hear" from him all
>the time, just sometimes. I suspect it is only when I am thinking deeply
>on some scripture passage by the way -- but that's a secondary idea.
>"Periodic," of course, isn't the best word -- it implies a cycle.
>"Spastic" comes closer.
Hmm, when our capricious nature connects with His constant nature, perhaps.
OH, perhaps you might want to know where I'm going the next two weeks.
Linda and I are going to Hawaii to celebrate our 25th anniversary (which
was actually in April).
Bill Hamilton
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
Staff Research Engineer
Chassis and Vehicle Systems MC 480-106-390
GM R&D Center
30500 Mound Road
Warren, MI
hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com / whamilto@mich.com (home)