> Subject: What does the creation lack?
> Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 ...
> From: "Howard J. Van Till" <hvantill@novagate.com>
> To: george murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
>
> Thanks for your comments on the Ruest
> proposal to place God's creative and
> providential work in what I might call
> the "shadows of scientific ignorance"
> where we could never be certain whether
> it was the Creator or some creature that
> did the acting. As such, you are correct
> to place it in the same camp as earlier
> proposals by Wm. Pollard, Bob Russell
> and John Polkinghorne.
>
> For the purpose of getting comments from
> other perspectives on this type of
> proposal, I didn't offer much in the way
> of critical evaluation in my earlier
> post. The one thing I did, however, was
> to place it in the context of all
> proposals that are built on the
> presumption that the creation is lacking
> something so that divine compensation
> becomes necessary. Where Ruest's
> proposal differs from the more common
> episodic creationist approaches is (1)
> that it does not build on the idea of
> capability gaps in the creation's
> formational economy, and (2) it
> includes the theologically motivated
> expectation that divine
> creative/providential action be
> non-coercive or non-miraculous.
Re. "the presumption that the creation is lacking something":
(a) act(s) of creation: No!
(b) product(s) of creation: Yes!
God develops (continually, providentially) what he has created (e.g. God
creates [bara'] a human individual: God's action certainly is perfect,
but the fertilized ovum, embryo, newborn baby, child, adult just as
certainly is unfinished at the given moment - by God's design).
> Actually, (1) needs to be stated more
> carefully. Although Ruest says there are
> no capability gaps (the creation is able
> to do the things that need to be done)
> he then adds the idea that the
> capabilities that are present are too
> inefficient to get the job done. In
> place of capability gaps Ruest seems to
> be proposing improbability barriers. I
> am inclined, however, to see these
> improbability barriers as a subclass of
> capability gaps. In either case, God
> must act in order to compensate for what
> the creation is unable or unlikely to
> accomplish.
>
> Howard Van Till
The scientific viewpoint: can information emerge out of nothing? To a
very limited degree, some information about the environment is, by
natural selection, slowly transferred to a species, but this process
is insufficient for complex novel functions accessible via non-selected
intermediates only. Improbability barriers are, in principle, scientific
observations (or scientific judgments of feasibility, based on
observations on both sides of an argument).
The theological viewpoints:
(a) acts of creation and products of creation have to be distinguished
(the word "creation" covers both). What argument would deny the
possibility of an unfinished product of a perfect act of creation?
(b) Capability gaps are primarily theologically defined. Interpretations
of scientific observations are linked with probability margins. A
presumed gap cannot be defined scientifically - there may always be
missing information, possibly provided by further observations.
Thus, improbability barriers cannot be compared to capability gaps.
Peter
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