Re: Kansas munchkins (as Gould will call them)

Ted
These are very important points. The whole of idea of ID tends to limit
design to certain things, thus Behe insisted that bloodclotting is designed
and the transport of oxygen by haemoglobin is not and I developed the
absurdity of that in my 1999 PSCF article. Van Til goes further and
describes ID very correctly as Punctuated Naturalism as mostof the time
dreaded naturalism rules OK and then in comes the designer to put in
something irreducibly complex.
This can be seen as God of the Gaps or accepting an Enlightenment Deism but
allowing the odd intervention.
As Ted says it denies concurrence and also the whole theistic stance that
God is involved with all of creation all of the time and not some of the
time as is actually put forward by ID.
I am glad you pointed us back to before 1859. I have also argued that ID is
not Paley revived as Paley and others eg Buckland saw God's design in
everything created.

Meanwhile as after church services I will go off on my bike I hope I do not
fall off and bring the designed mechanism of clotting into play. I simply
hope to make full use of undesigned parts of my physiology - i.e.my aerobic
condition.

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>
To: <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>; <gmurphy@raex.com>;
<michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2005 8:05 PM
Subject: Re: Kansas munchkins (as Gould will call them)

> George's points about the theological shortcomings of IDs are on target.
> Generally speaking, there are very few (if any) theologians involved with
> ID; most IDs don't read contemporary theology except to find places where
> they believe "Darwinism" has "corrupted" theology; they lack discernment
> partly out of ignorance of the large range of modern stuff, which does
> take
> time and experience to sort out, and partly b/c they do want to keep
> things
> in an "us vs them" mentality--that suits their political strategy just
> fine,
> thank you, while it does shortchange the truth.
>
> A good number of them do not understand even something as simple as the
> classical (not modern) theological view of concurrence--that God does
> things
> in and through secondary causes. They seem to me almost incapable of
> understanding such a view, or else they seem to think that this type of
> thinking started only after Darwin, in order to make an "accommodation".
>
> Nevertheless, I still say that many of us perceive the truth differently
> from many of them. They do see things much more simply, which hurts the
> truth when they speak the truth as they see it.
>
> ted
>
>
>
Received on Sun May 22 03:24:59 2005