Re: RATE Vol. II

Keith is right. I've apparently dumped the original post & don't know who the quote is from (Dembski?) but it seems to assume that "theistic evolutionists" start from science & then try to figure out some way to tack "God" onto the scientific description. Some may but the proper procedure is to start from the belief that the God revealed in Christ is the creator of the world & then to embed what science discovers about the world into a theology that expresses that belief.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Keith Miller
  To: American Scientific Affiliation
  Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2006 7:13 PM
  Subject: Re: RATE Vol. II

    <quote> Design theorists find the "theism" in theistic evolution superfluous. Theistic evolution at best includes God as an unnecessary rider in an otherwise purely naturalistic account of life. As such, theistic evolution violates Occam's razor. Occam's razor is a regulative principle for how scientists are supposed to do their science. According to this principle, superfluous entities are to be rigorously excised from science. Thus, since God is an unnecessary rider in our understanding of the natural world, theistic evolution ought to dispense with all talk of God outright and get rid of the useless adjective "theistic."</quote>

  This is a sad statement, and one that emphasizes the conflation that both YEC and ID make between scientific description and theological truth. Both try to make science do the heavy lifting that only theology can do.

  Theistic evolution (I prefer the term "continuous creation") is NOT a scientific theory. It is a theological proposition about the nature of God's creative and sustaining activity in the natural world. An appeal to God IS unnecessary for the narrow scientific description of the natural world. But it is also unnecessary to appeal to God's action when doing auto mechanics. Christian theology has the much more vital task of making sense of the world and ourselves in light of the self-revelation of God in Christ. No amount of physics, biochemistry or geology will get us there. Why do ID proponents (and YECs) so intensely believe that theology must be held up on the shoulders of scientific verification?

  Keith

  Keith B. Miller
  Research Assistant Professor
  Dept of Geology, Kansas State University
  Manhattan, KS 66506-3201
  785-532-2250
  http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
Received on Mon May 22 11:07:07 2006