Re: agreeing about a mere creation?

Craig R. proposed:
----(begin quote)------
   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.
-----(end quote)-----
 
I'd be happy with Craig's statement.
 
My only quibble would be with the term "totally natural". That could be
misleading if some interpreted "totally" to exhaust all aspects. Probably
somewhere on the page (and maybe it is already there, because I know Craig
appreciates this) it should be clear that Christians believe God is involved
(providence, concurrence, words like that) even in processes that are "totally
natural" from a physical standpoint. I don't have any brilliant idea for how to
tweak the sentence -- maybe just putting quotes around "natural" would help.
It seems necessary to come against the view that "natural" doesn't count as
God's work, and also against the more subtle error that views "natural" as an
inferior way of working, just a fallback position in case God didn't leave
fingerprints like we expect a "real" God to do.
 
Allan
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Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cats"
Received on Thu Jul 28 22:17:43 2005