This has been, to me, a most interesting thread of discussion so I'll chime
in for once.
I think it boils down to one of the very basic questions that is involved
in most of the discussions on this list: How does God interact/influence
the physical world and, especially, how is God's interaction congruent with
or divergent from science (both as a body of knowledge and a way of
investigating)? While I certainly can't purport to answer such a big
question (I'm no philosopher) I think it important to make a point of
maintaining the notion of God's sovereignty in our thinking on this issue.
We have this tendency to separate phenomena into miraculous events and
natural ones. There is, I think, something to such categorization but we
should bear in mind that God's action in the natural world is not only
through miracles. Or maybe better stated, there is some sense in which all
happenings are miraculous, whether common like masses attracting or
uncommon like the healing of arthritic hands on the occasion of prayer. As
I read them, Psalm 104 and Mathew 6 give this impression most distinctly
but I also get that same impression from the bible as a whole (though more
subtly). This view, of course, has limitations. It leaves little room for
free will and lends itself to the erroneous notion that God is responsible
for our sins. Still, it is an important idea and we should be careful not
to leave it out.
On a related note, this discussion also touches very heavily on the problem
of saying what science is. I offer for consideration that science does not
provide explanation. It is, rather, a system for recognizing patterns and
linking patterns that, otherwise, seem disjoint. For example, conservation
of energy (Bernoulli's equation) does not explain why airplanes fly. It
simply re-phrases the observation that airplanes fly. The power of it
(Bernoulli's equation) is that it (i) allows us to talk about flying
airplanes in a more specific way (design them to fly better and so forth)
and (ii) allows us to see flying airplanes and Nolan Ryan's curve balls as
following a similar pattern.
The culmination of this would be something like "The reason why airplanes
fly is God. The reason why science can describe flying airplanes is God's
faithfulness."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 13:44:09 EST