[asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

After reading Francis Collins' new book, and seeing some of the reviews of
it, I'm trying to understand the distinction he apparently makes between
cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one hand, he says
the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and reason in humans,
and the human moral sense are not explainable only by naturalistic causes,
and support belief in a creator-God. On the other hand, he says that
arguments from the appearance in design in biology are merely worthless
God-of-the-gaps arguments.

I can't see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from
human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap
argument.

I suppose the cosmological/moral arguments can be seen as teleological. The
point is not so much that there are gaps in our understanding of how
naturalistic processes alone could result in the finely-tuned cosmological
constant or in the emergence of human mind and morality, but that, even if
we were to understand all those naturalistic processes completely, the
extraordinarily low probability of how they played out suggests an
intelligent purpose beyond mere chance. But the same could be said of
biological design arguments such as the argument from irreducible
complexity. And even the probabilistic-teleological argument itself is a
sort of gap argument -- we can't conceive of how something of such a low
probability could have occurred in nature, so we fill in our inability to
grasp that happenstance with God.

I also don't understand Collins' criticism of some ID / design /
OEC arguments on the basis that they present an inept designer who was
forced to repeatedly intervene in the creation. The same can be said of any
TE view that retains any concept of God as a sovereign creator. If God
sovereignly superintended ordinary evolution, then he repeatedly and
constantly "intervened" (and still "intervenes") in the creation, making
myriad trial-and-error adjustments, arguably at great cost in terms of
"wasted" organisms.

The answer to this criticism of TE, of course, is that God is perfectly
good, wise and knowing as well as perfectly sovereign, that his direction of
evolution was fully in accordance with His goodness, wisdom, and
foreknowledge, and that it accomplished exactly the purposes He intended,
even if we as humans don't always fully understand them. But that same
answer applies to Collins' criticism of the "meddling" ID God. There's no
reason to assume God was "fixing" some kind of "mistake" if He intervened in
the creation apart from the working of natural laws. His intevention is
equally consistent with a perfectly good, wise, previously known and
established plan by a sovereign creator-God. (Likewise, the same criticism
and answer applies to criticisms of the Atonement -- why did God have to
"fix" human sin by becoming incarnate and dying on a cross?) (The other
answer to this criticism is open theism, which Collins doesn't seem to
espouse. But again, that would equally be an answer in the case of an ID /
OEC paradigm).

So what am I missing?

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Received on Wed Oct 4 11:06:51 2006