Re: Phil's remarks on Focus on the Family
PHSEELY@aol.com
Sun, 2 May 1999 19:17:08 EDT
<< >Phil: It sure does, and it ought to fascinate everybody. You know, it's
the
>most interesting topic in the world. Are we the products of a mindless,
>material process like the educators are telling us today? Or, are we here
>because a purposeful creator, who cares about us and what we do, brought us
>into existence for a purpose? That's the issue.
David Campbell responded:
<< The initial question is not worded well. Disregarding the issue of
evolution and simply focusing on growth, our bodies are unquestionably the
product of a lot of mindless material processes such as the assembly of
proteins by ribosomes, cell growth and division, DNA transcription, etc.
The real question is whether we are the products of mindless, material
processes ALONE or whether God acts BOTH through and above such processes.>>
Regarding the failure of Dobson and Johnson to surmount either-or thinking,
the theologian B. B. Warfield made a comment in 1908 about a book called
Darwinism Today that seems to apply to both of them,
"Some lack of genuine philosophical acumen must be suspected when it is not
fully understood that teleology is in no way inconsistent with-is rather
necessarily involved in-a complete system of natural causation. Every
teleological system implies a complete 'causo-mechanical' explanation as its
instrument."
Paul