> Hello. This is my first contribution to this reflector.
Welcome!
> I was talking with Phil Johnson after his presentation at the Cornerstone
> Christian Music Festival a few weeks ago. He told me about a recent
> statement on the definition of evolution published in 1995 by the 8000
> member National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT).
>
> The excerpt below implies that evolution is, by definition, identical with
> atheism. Teachers in the TE camp can teach that God has something to do
> with evolution, but such claims contradict the atheistic meaning attached
> to the word *evolution* by those who actually have the cultural authority
> to define it: e.g. the NABT, Gould, Dawkins, and authors of leading
> Biology texts such as Douglas Futuyma, whose definitions are equally
> atheistic.
As I mentioned in another post, logical positivists once ruled the
cultural landscape of science, and tried to equate logical positivism
(which is antithetical with Christianity) with science.
They were finally refuted, and most scientists today look back on
their non-sequitur pronouncements with embarrassment.
Evolutionary science and "mindless" philosophy (pun intended) are
horribly mixed in too many people's minds. We must disentangle them.
> If *unsupervised* and *impersonal* don't rule out TE, then look at the
> conspicuous absence of the supernatural in the list of that which *affects*
> evolution: natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and
> changing environments.
Let's not forget the _design_ of nature's laws, which establishes
the entire landscape over which stochastic processes operate.
Chance, historical contingencies, and changing environments are all
tools in God's toolbox. (In case you missed it, I posted a "chance
for a theistic perspective" essay about a week and a half ago.)
> So if you're in the TE camp, please consider rejecting TE on the basis that
> it refutes itself. Or at least wait to affirm TE until after you aquire
> cultural authority and use it to change the meaning of the word evolution.
>
> There is a word for God having something to do with the origin and
> devolopment of life: It's *creation*.
Then we'd still need some new term to distinguish between
progressive-creation-with-occasional-supernatural-intervention from
progressive-creation-acomplished-through-providential-oversight.
I hate to see useful technical terms ruined with unnecessary philosophical
additions. I want to fight to reclaim them.
I'm not willing to see microevolution, or even stellar evolution for that
matter, be labeled "unsupervised;" so I'm certainly not going to let
that happen to biological history, WHETHER OR NOT we ultimately decide
supernatural intervention is necessary to account for it.
Loren Haarsma