Re: Cross & ID

Janice -

The correction that you welcome is that you are way off base. I don't feel required to list all the wrong guesses here & would only urge others not to regard what you've said as an accurate description of my views. I do accept what Thomas Torrance (a fairly conservative Reformed theologian) has called "the doctrine of the contingent rationality of the universe" - an idea that is, BTW, included in the ASA Statement of Faith. But why anyone would think that that has anything to do with New Age thought I cannot imagine. Denial of it implies a denial of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in its basic sense.

I suggest that you read some substantive pieces that I've written in the area of theology and science before you start speculating about what I think. I've mentioned some previously in this thread & you can find others listed in the bibilography at my website - or at the ASA one for PSCF.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Janice Matchett
  To: David Opderbeck ; George Murphy
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 12:01 PM
  Subject: Re: Cross & ID

  At 08:21 PM 1/2/2006, David Opderbeck wrote to George Murphy:

    Interesting, George. As to folks like Dawkins who are intelligent and well educated yet don't see evidence for God in creation, wouldn't Paul's comments about God abandoning some people to the hardness of their hearts also have something to do with it?
     
    Just curious -- do you reject the idea of natural law as well?

  ## I welcome George's correction if I'm wrong, but from what he's written, he appears to me to be attracted to one or more of the pantheistic ideas of the new age / process theology movement, so I would think that he probably leans toward holding the belief that nature operates according to general principles or laws and doesn't claim that God temporarily abolishes a natural law in order to perform a miracle, only to reinstate the natural law afterwards.

  Instead, I'd bet that he would say that the laws of nature now in effect are not the only laws that nature might have - that another set of natural laws might also be coherent.

  That he might argue something to the effect that God, whose mind is the ultimate guarantee of the coherence of nature, might change the natural laws if He thought that He could improve the cosmos that way.

  My opinion on the subject is merely that these "new age" ideas aren't new at all; they are merely variations on ideas that have been proposed many times before and are just being re-cycled.

  ~ Janice
Received on Tue Jan 3 13:33:33 2006