RE: agreeing about a mere creation?

You are overlooking one important fact. Some of these categories contain
zealots pushing an agenda. They want to prove God thereby forcing
reluctant unbelievers to kneel at the alter, accept Christ, join a church
and pay dues. Your big tent approach doesn't give them that.

Also, there still exists impediments to logic in the creationist (and ID)
scenarios. If God intervenes from time to time or all the time in life
processes to bring about new creatures or adaptive features in existing
creatures, what was He doing when flaws and deleterious malfunctions
occurred? Our DNA is replete with imperfections. The true miracle may be
that we survived at all. Maybe we should just thank God for natural
selection and leave it at that.

The other logic flaw is that if we invoke divine intervention in life
processes why not advocate for special acts of creation in physical
processes too? Did God just decide some rocky mountains would look nice in
Colorado and push them up? How about some great lakes for the future
inhabitants of Chicago? Push, pull, click, click. A liitle sand for the
French Riviera, and so on. An intervening Creator has no bounds. And in
the face of that, science can't exist.

> From: Craig Rusbult <craig@chem.wisc.edu>
>
> In what ways do you think Christians with different views -- evolutionary
> creation, old-earth creation, and young-earth creation, plus "intelligent
> design" and variations of each view -- will respond (privately and in
> public) to the concept of a "mere creation" consensus-subview that is
> epistemologically and spiritually humble, like this one:
>
> With the current state of knowledge it seems impossible to know with
> certainty, so instead of criticizing either type of creation -- totally
> natural or with some miraculous-appearing divine action -- as being "less
> worthy of God" it seems wise to adopt a humble attitude. Each of us
should
> admit, like Job, that "surely I speak of things I do not understand,
things
> too wonderful for me to know" and decide that either way -- whether it
> happened with one mode of action or two -- God's plan for
> design-and-creation was wonderful and is worthy of our praise.
> Therefore, a proponent of old-earth creation (or young-earth creation)
> should be willing to praise God for designing a universe that was totally
> self-assembling by natural process, with no formative miracles, in case
> this is how He did it. Similarly, a proponent of evolutionary creation
> should be willing to praise God for using both modes of creative action,
> for cleverly designing nature to produce most phenomena without miracles,
> and for powerfully doing miracles when natural process was not sufficient,
> since this might be the way He did it.
>
> How will various views respond to this minimal IF-then claim?
> If some will disagree, why and with what degree of confidence?
>
> Craig
Received on Thu Jul 28 11:33:08 2005