>
>I detect an affinity for the idea that there exists *laws of life* which are
>naturalistic, but not ultimately reducible to the laws of physics.
>
>Comments???
Yes, a few quick comments.
"Physics," as a representative of the natural sciences, cannot explain:
1. The existence of something in place of nothing.
2. Why the something that exists has the particular set of properties and
capacities that "physics" is attempting to describe.
3. Why the developmental and functional economies of the existing something
is as robust as it appears to be.
4. How it could be that the universe's developmental economy might even be
(as I suspect it is) sufficiently robust and gapless to make
macroevolutionary development (from humble quarks to human questioners)
possible.
5. How it is possible for one species of creatures with material bodies to
have tha capacity for contemplating the meaning and purpose of it all.
I am not, however, inclined to speak of "laws of life". I don't find this
legal metaphor particularly fruitful. I prefer to speak of the remarkably
robust developmental and functional economies with which the Creator has
gifted his Creation.
Neither am I inclined to speak of God's temporal action in the Creation in
the Aristotelian vocabulary of "cause and effect." (That language soon
degenerates into speech of God as being like a Demiurge who overpowers the
Creation to force it to do something beyond or different from what it was
originally enabled to do.) I prefer the royal metaphor (commonly employed in
the Scriptures) of "authoritative word and obedient creaturely response." The
authoritative word can come only from the Creator, it is uniquely a _divine_
action; the response of the creatures is limited to what those creatures
have been gifted by the Creator to do. In this context, the sort of
overpowering "intervention" that is presumed by most special creationist
scenarios unnecessary, perhaps even out of character for the Creator.
Cordially,
Howard J. Van Till