Re: Nature article on ID

Iain Strachan wrote:

"...God's interventions in nature are more to do with revealing Himself to us, rather than helping nature over the tricky bits...."

I fully agree that it would be aesthetically satisfying for nature to be so well endowed that God could bring life and all living beings into existence without violating any laws of nature. And maybe it is so endowed. But to believe this requires a faith that is amazing but not saving. That is, no one's salvation depends on this kind of faith. On the basis of my own experience and knowledge of nature, I conclude this faith is also unjustified: Nothing I know of nature leads me to believe that life, etc., could come into existence without God's having to violate laws of nature (i.e., intervene). Of course, my skepticism could be simply the fruit of ignorance, but at this point it seems less so than such faith would be. I'm not a molecular biologist, but Francis Crick was.

The question here concerns nature more than God. Just how well endowed is nature? For nature to be inadequately endowed would be no stain on God's reputation as creator. The consequence would in fact be simply egg on the face of a humanly desired aesthetic. It would also impact science, as it would mean that we could never come up with correct scientific explanations of certain origins. But as it is there are many important phenomena we'll never have scientific explanations for, so what would be the big deal?

And maybe it's impossible to construct a world so well endowed and still have it accomplish the more important things for which it was intended.

God's interventions that are important for salvation indeed involve his revealing himself, but other kinds of intervention are clearly not therefore precluded.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Iain Strachan<mailto:igd.strachan@gmail.com>
  To: D. F. Siemens, Jr.<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 1:22 PM
  Subject: Re: Nature article on ID

  Dave,

  OK, maybe the power/program analogy is stretched a little too far. God is clearly more than a power supply! [ Maybe God is the computer on which the program runs .. ? No let's not even go there ... :-)]

  Would you accept my main point however, that God's interventions in nature are more to do with revealing Himself to us, rather than helping nature over the tricky bits? (I think Richard Dawkins used this phrase in an article in the UK Daily Telegraph). God creates a universe in which inevitably intelligent creatures are going to evolve - it seems fantastic that this could ever happen knowing the amazing complexity of life, but God's a much better designer than anyone else. And when these creatures evolve, they are going to ask deep questions Who am I? Where do I come from? Is it all a huge fluke? etc. And God intervenes, often "supernaturally" at this point, inspiring men to write down scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, by performing miracles of healing, showing his compassion, and ultimately by his sacrificial death on the Cross. It seems to me that all the points in scripture where God has intervened are so that we might know that he is God (e.g. the healing of the man born blind - John 9:3).

  Iain

  On 5/2/05, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com>> wrote:
    Iain,
    I know you don't intend to be a deist, but splitting power and program has that tendency. My point is that the work of God in creation and providence is seamless, that power and program cannot be sundered as they are in human devices. This does not mean that he does not intervene in creation. This involves time, but does not place God in time. Human beings were not present in the original creation though foreknown. Though Moorad seems to think I make God temporal, I know better. But we are so totally children of time that eternity is difficult to express. In John 1:1-3, the use of the past tense would normally indicate a previous time. But the Word was not in time until he became flesh.

    To note your alternate version, I do not believe that God intervenes when the "unfolding gets stuck." Nothing gets stuck when God is totally present in the entire process. Or, to note a later item, there is nothing to fix. That's where IDers makes a god a little smarter than they, but not bright enough to get it right. Even the old deists did better with a universe that ran properly without divine tinkering to keep it working.
    Dave

    On Mon, 2 May 2005 13:46:42 +0100 Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com<mailto:igd.strachan@gmail.com>> writes:
      Thanks for all the replies - I don't have time to address all of them, but I'd like to respond to this one..

        But the point I was trying to make is that there are no "cliffs" when God
        is on top of everything every yoctosecond. You get the possibility of
        "cliffs" when the program with all its algorithms has to be specified so
        that it can run without supervision. This latter is essentially deistic,
        not theistic. Omniscience is competent for this task, to be sure, but
        denies the Lord's constant providential care.
        Dave

      I certainly would not consider myself to be a deist (in the sense of God lighting the blue touch paper at the start and then standing well back - a position that also implies that God is constrained in time). But I don't see God's "providential care" as helping evolution to scale the cliffs by lending a miraculous helping hand now and again (not sure if that's what you meant, but that's the way I took it when you said there were no cliffs when God is on top of everything all the time). This sort of view of God is one of a fallible software programmer who releases his product on the public (like Microsoft Windows XP) and then continually provides bug-fixes as problems occur. But this, it seems to me is in direct contradiction of Genesis Ch 1, which I do take seriously, that in the beginning God created everything there is and it was "very good". The creating and the unfolding are two separate processes, and I don't find it a helpful idea to think that God intervenes when the unfolding gets stuck.

      Instead I see God's providential care in that the universe keeps on running ("creator and sustainer") - if you pursue the algorithm analogy, it's what supplies the power to the computer that's running the algorithm. Or as Stephen Hawking put it in the last chapter of "Brief History of Time" : "What is it that breathes fire into the equations?".

      But more than that, surely God's providential care is exhibited in the fact that he has revealed himself to us through Scripture, and in the ultimate intervention, as Jesus Christ, giving us the gift of everlasting life. But these interventions are to do with His relationship to us, and not in fixing an imperfect creation so that we might come about. I would suggest that he got that bit right, right "in the beginning".

      Iain.

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  There are 3 types of people in the world.
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Received on Tue May 3 04:40:53 2005