On Sat, 8 Jul 1995 22:11:12 -0400 (EDT) you wrote:
>On Fri, 7 Jul 1995, Stephen Jones wrote:
>GM>ABSTRACT: 1. This is my response to Ashby Camp's critique of my
>whale transitional form post..
>
>SJ> the too brief time-frame of 10-15 million years to effect these
>massive transitions naturalistically
LE>What is the alternative to a naturalistic change?...Is
>there any data or evidence that would distinguish between those two? Is
>it all a matter of philosophical argument? Or of theology?
At the bottom of Jesus arguments establishing His legitimacy was
that supernatural acts are recognisable by ordinary people as such:
Jn 10:25 Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe. The
miracles I do in my Father's name speak for me,
Jn 10:37-38 Do not believe me unless I do what my Father does. But if
I do it, even though you do not believe me, believe the miracles, that
you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the
Father."
Jn 14:10-11 Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the
Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather,
it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me
when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at
least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.
The bottom line seems to be that supernatural works are believed
when: 1. natural causes cannot account for them; and 2. there are good
theological grounds for believing they occurred.
>Suppose you knew for certain that God had directly intervened in some way
>to effect a biological change? How could you possibly know that? Whould
>there be any observable difference (i.e., any data or observations anyone
>could adduce) that would show that this particular change was qualitaively
>or quantitatively different from other biological changes in which God did
>not directly intervene? Or are there no changes in which God does not
>directly intervene? If that is so, does it also apply to all other
>quasi-natural changes? And if that is so, is there then any difference,
>other than a philosophical and theological one, between Naturalism (i.e.
>atheistic naturalism) and Special Creationism?
Denton notes:
"Although the absence of intermediates was acknowledged as an enormous
difficulty, Darwin never weakened in his insistence that evolution
must be a gradual process. For Darwin the term evolution, which
literally means 'a rolling out', always implied a very slow gradual
process of cumulative change (a view which has been subscribed to by
the great majority of biologists ever since). There were two main
reasons why Darwin rejected the saltational solution to the challenge
of the great gaps in nature. Firstly, he considered it axiomatic that
all natural processes always must conform to the principle of
continuity. In his book Darwin on Man, Howard Gruber remarks:
`Natura non facit saltum - nature makes no jumps - was a guiding motto
for generations of evolutionists and proto-evolutionists. But Darwin
encountered it in a sharp and interesting form, posed as an
alternative of terrible import: nature makes no jumps, but God does.
Therefore, if we want to know whether something that interests us is
of natural origin or supernatural, we must ask: did it arise
gradually out of that which came before, or suddenly without any
evident natural cause?'"
(Denton M., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis",1985, Burnett Books, p58)
I would argue that a Cambrian explosion that took only 5 million years
(remember it could have been less) to produce all the living world's
animal phylla (Gould S.J., "The Evolution of Life on the Earth",
Scientific American, October 1994, p67), was a supernatural aqssisted
proces, Glenn's computer models notwithstanding.
I would also argue that a process that produced a whale from a land
mammal in only 10 million years, was also a supernatural-assisted
process. That is, unless Glenn can show plausibly how it happened
naturally.
LE>I'm a non-biologist, so the biological arguments and data mostly
>slip by me. But I was trained in philosophy and theology, and I
>still think that most of the important stuff in these discussions is
>really philosophical at bottom.
Agreed.
Stephen