>"Mediate creationism is a way out of the impasse for scientists who
>are Christians..."
I hesitate to enter this fray since I may not have a lot of time to follow
up. I had some of these reactions to Stephen's original post on mediate
creationism.
Without slipping into the morass of demarcationism, I'd like to suggest
that "mediate creationism" is fundamentally a theological notion rather
than a scientific one. From a Christian perspective in my opinion, every
scientific explanation has a "divine action" *behind* it. In systematic
theology, this is the ideas providence and concurrence. I can readily
explain projectile motion in terms of "mediate divine governance" but that
doesn't take away from the need to discuss laws of physics. In my view,
the biological theory of evolution IS a form of "mediate creationism".
Mediate creation is the "divine action" *behind* the evolution explanation.
The biological theory of evolution still stands as an explanation in terms
of creational structures and behavior.
Now if we are talking about acts of special creation (also a theological
notion) of the YEC or PC type, then the observational data would be of a
negative sort, i.e. there is NO prior evidence of any such thing existing
or coming into existance from pre-existing things or that the complexity of
a thing is such that it COULD NOT have come by the operation of creational
structures and behavior. The latter is the agenda of the ID folks. It
seems to me that even some of them are willing to say that the scientific
evidence (as the view it) merely calls for the existence of an intelligent
designer without appealing to any theological notions of who or what that
might be.
The bottom line is that mediate creation is not a way out of the impasse
for Christian scientists. We've already used theological language to
describe our notions whether it's mediate creation or some other version of
creationism.
TG
_____________________________________________________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 49546
Office: (616) 957-7187 FAX: (616) 957-6501
Email: grayt@calvin.edu http://www.calvin.edu/~grayt
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