Re: Ohio Votes 13-5 to Adopt Lesson Plan Critical of Evolution

On 3/15/04 3:31 AM, "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:

> I don't know how God has done his creating, but (1) I perceive God as being
> intimately involved in his world and (2) my life-long experiences of the world
> give me no confidence that it can do a lot of constructive creating on its
> own, at least, not when it comes to living organisms and their interactions.
> In other words, apart from the Bible, just gut feelings.
>
(1) but ³intimately² does not at all necessarily imply ³coercively² or
³supernaturally.²

(2) This is called the ³argument from personal incredulity² and carries no
weight outside of yourself.
>
> I'm working on an interventionist creation scenario that is consistent with
> God and the data (to the best of my knowledge), and someday I may present it
> here for criticism. But of course it's based to a considerable degree on
> speculation, so the only chance it would have of acceptance is if it strikes
> enough people as more plausible than the alternatives.
>
Questions for clarification:

a) Does your version of ³interventionist² entail the idea that God is both
willing and able to act on the world in such a way as occasionally to impose
new forms on material systems, forms that the universe was never (by divine
choice, presumably) equipped to actualize?

b) Do you envision the character of God and of God¹s relationship to the
universe to be such that God is both willing and able to intervene on some
occasions by directly re-arranging atoms and molecules into new or different
structures?

> Just as people have always needed myths of origins even if absurd, it would
> help to have plausible scenarios of creation even if speculative. They would
> provide a basis against which to compare ongoing experience. In fact, Howard
> Van Till's fully robust world is one such speculative scenario that some find
> plausible, just not I.

Creation myths appear most absurd, I would suggest, when their figurative
elements (elements that had profound meaning to ancient and non-Western
cultures) are concretized by Westerners who have no appreciation of ancient
non-Western cultures..

As a scientific or meta-scientific principle, the RFEP (Robust Formational
Economy Principle) is not is not really comprehensive enough to qualify as a
myth, which ordinarily speaks of far more than the material world alone.
One of the reasons that I find the RFEP to be credible is that its adoption
as a working principle has functioned to launch the historical natural
sciences into their most productive era ever. That¹s not proof, of course.
But it is, I believe, more than a mere personal whim.

Howard Van Till
Received on Mon Mar 15 09:43:15 2004