Bob: my purpose at the moment is not to argue for or against your "staged
development" concept as a useful heuristic framework, but just to understand
precisely what your concept entails. Let's focus on the last part of your
post:
HVT: To be candid, however, I see no need to introduce a supernatural
intervention at any place in the process. I use the term "supernatural
intervention" in the sense that David Griffin specifies: a divine action
that interrupts the continuity of the creaturely cause/effect system and
supersedes all creaturely action; a coercive divine action that functions as
the sole cause of some occurrence/event.
BOB: Your statement is irrelevant to my position. I do not accept
Griffin¢X¢“s or
your description of my position.
HVT: I didn't intend to impose Griffin's concept of supernatural on your
position. I was merely trying to clarify what I meant by the term
"supernatural." It's clear that I still do not understand what sort of
divine action you're talking about.
BOB: Divine action does not interrupt continuity. Divine action kicks in
when
a given stage has run its course, accomplished its purposes, and prepared
the
way for a subsequent stage to follow.
HVT: Where was divine action while the "stage" was running its course (and
before it "kicked in")? And didn't this conversation begin with the your
proposal that certain important discontinuities had to be recognized? I'm
confused again.
BOB: Divine action does not supercede creaturely action. It uses all
processes and materials that are available as needed from previous stages,
and adds the new dimension that is peculiar to the new stage. In the case
of
the origin of life, the addition is irreducible complexity, purpose, or
teleonomy (as Franklin calls it).
HVT: Bob, I honestly don't know how to understand this. How does irreducible
complexity -- the new dimension in this case -- get added if not by divine
action of the sort that imposes new structures on some system that was,
presumably, unable to achieve that structure by the use of its own
formational capabilities? If that's the way the new structure gets
actualized, then isn't that supernatural action (Griffin sense)?
Howard
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