Hello George,
> -----Original Message-----
> From: george murphy [mailto:gmurphy@raex.com]
> Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2002 3:22 PM
> To: Keith B Miller
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: Human origins and doctrine
> Well, what is the "satisfactory account" of how
> special creation gives us
> "moral capacity and
> self-determination"? It is simply a statement that God gave us those
> capacities. & of course that's true - just as God gave us
> hands & feet & eyes.
> A Christian understanding of evolution says that God has done
> all that mediately,
> through natural processes - & has to admit that at this point
> there are a lot of
> things we don't understand about how that happened.
> Which is simply to say that pointing to a lack of
> understanding of how
> our moral capacity arose as an argument for "special" (i.e.,
> non-evolutionary)
> creation is just a variant of the God of the gaps argument.
You raise a very important point, and that is that I have inserted God into
a process that has yet to be adequately explained by science. In a sense
this is a God-of-the-gaps argument, which I recognize, but in a different
sense, aren't we all as Christians invoking the same argument whenever we
argue for the necessity of God? Naturalists have frequently accused
Christian apologists of this argument. I would be reluctant to readily
insert God into any gaps we find in science, but in this case, I am arguing
that the naturalistic account seems *inherently* inadequate in explaining
the big questions (s.a. origin of the universe, purpose, self-determination,
morality). So, yes, technically, I am invoking God-of-the-gaps, but only in
a limited way, and in a way not unlike how any apologist would approach such
problems.
Blessings,
Adrian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 25 2002 - 13:10:12 EST