Re: random observations on science and the supernatural

michael farley (mifarley@indiana.edu)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 13:34:13 -0500 (EST)

I think that we have hit on an important distinction. I think that many
TEs adopt MN for pragmatic reasons, as you suggest, i.e. the practical
difficulty of deriving testable predictions of ID from biblical
revelation. Many PCs, though,(not to mention YECs) tend to interpret this
as a rejection of an appeal to supernatural divine causation in principle.
I have appreciated the work of Moreland, Meyer, and Dembski
because they are obviously trying to do the hard philosophical work
necessary to lay a theoretical foundation for intelligent design
theories. Dembski's essay in _The Creation Hypothesis_ certainly shows
that inferring a supernatural intelligent cause from empirical data is
not impossible or unreasonable IN PRINCIPLE; however, the relevance of
Dembski's example for the actual research problems facing evolutionary
theories is not at all clear. If only the data from abiogenesis
experiments or paleontological study could be as obvious as Dembski's
pulsar!
I think that biblical revelation should function as a source of
scientific theorizing as much as possible. The Bible certainly clearly
teaches that the universe was created ex nihilo by God, and the agreement
of this teaching with the Big Bang cosmology demonstrates that biblical
revelation can provide direction for some scientific research programs.
It is the big bang cosmology that leads me to reject a strict
complementarian approach to reconciling science and theology. It seems
obvious to me that the Bible makes a clear statement about the natural
world (that it had a beginning) and that there is a univocal core
concept of beginning that biblical and scientific cosmologies share. In
this case, both the Bible and science talk about the same event in the
same way; thus, it is not always the case that science and theology
provide separate, complementary ways of talking about the same
phenomena.
On the other hand, I think that the actual univocal overlap of
scientific and biblical subjects is actually fairly small, and I don't
think that it includes the subjects of abiogenesis or the origin of
higher taxa. The specific prediction that the universe had a beginning is
a prediction that can be clearly derived from the biblical text. However,
I don't see how a testable biblical theory of speciation or the origin of
life can be derived from the creation account. If ID theorists want to make
practical headway in advacing their work as scientific, it seems that
this is what they must come up with, though.
The notion that God's activity cannot be directly demonstrated by
studying biological history seems threatening to some. Phil Johnson
sometimes seems to imply that acceptance of a theistic evolutionary
explanation of biological origins simply concedes that God's activity in
the world is in principle undetectable and therefore belief in God is
completely unwarranted and irrelevant. On the contrary, if some type of
theistic evolutionary theory is true, then the only conclusion that is
forthcoming is that evolutionary biology is not the primary sphere of
God's revelation.

Thanks for your kind words. I hope that it is equally thought-provoking.

By His sovereign grace,

Mike Farley
Indiana University