Re: agreeing about a mere creation?

    Allan says,
>I don't have any brilliant idea for how to tweak the sentence

    The two paragraphs I posted are not intended to be stand-alone, so they
would have to be tweaked (as suggested by Loren and Allan, and in other
ways) to make a "statement" that would be more satisfactory.

>somewhere on the page... it should be clear that Christians believe God is
>involved (providence, concurrence, words like that) even in processes that
>are "totally natural"

    Yes, it is. For example, the beginning of the page emphasizes that
"natural" does not mean "without God." Later, I criticize "A Bad Argument
against Theistic Evolution" and connect it with one type of "God of the
gaps" theology:

   "What are the justified criticisms? First,... Second, an "only in the
gaps" view -- which asserts (or implies) that God works ONLY in nature
gaps, that God is not active in natural process, that "natural" means
"without God" so "if it isn't a miracle then God didn't do it" -- is
theologically unwise. { My gaps-theology has been influenced by Allan
Harvey, who asks "What does 'God of the Gaps' mean?" and warns against
believing "that 'natural' explanations exclude God,... [so] if God did not
do some things...via direct action, he didn't do them at all" and "setting
up a 'scoring system' in which any increase in scientific understanding
counts as points against God." } An explicit statement of only-in-the-gaps
is rare, but it is implicit in a common argument and it can be implied by a
failure to clearly deny it. All theists should deny this implication by
emphasizing -- in our doctrines and in our actual personal worldviews (the
practical theology that we actually use for daily living) -- that God is
active in the normal-appearing natural events of everyday life, not just in
occasional miracles, and that evidence for the operation of natural process
in formative history is not evidence against God's activity in this history.
    What are the unjustified criticisms? First,... Second,..."

Craig
Received on Sat Jul 30 10:49:56 2005