Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

*However the choosing of physical constants isn't a stepwise process - they
really did all come together at once and haven't changed since the Big Bang.
*

But isn't this really saying "we don't know how they all came together at
once" -- a gap -- so it looks like God? Isn't it possible that some string
theory / multiverse / oscillating universe, etc. idea will some day close
that gap?

On 10/4/06, Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I can have a stab at one of your questions.
>
> As regards "cosmological design", the problem is that the physical
> constants are just "given" numbers tha happen to have the values we observe,
> and those values appear to be very precisely chosen to make anything
> interesting at all happen in the universe. There is nothing in physics that
> attempts to explain how those numbers got to have those values - they are
> just empirically observed parameters. With biology, it is different,
> because evolution is an explanatory process that shows how complex objects
> could have built up from something simpler by a series of small steps. ID
> critics will say that it is incredibly unlikely for all these elements (of
> an irreducibly complex system) to come together at once. But an
> evolutionist would be able to counter that we just haven't imagined the
> steps that were taken to reach the final product. However the choosing of
> physical constants isn't a stepwise process - they really did all come
> together at once and haven't changed since the Big Bang.
>
> The emergence of the moral law is on more tricky ground, and Collins could
> perhaps be accused of God of the Gaps here. I guess one answer could be
> that it doesn't actually give us any advantage naturalistically because we
> all continually break it & our conscience tells us when we obey and when we
> break. See Romans 2:14-15:
>
> 14(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things
> required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not
> have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are
> written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their
> thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)
>
> Iain
>
> On 10/4/06, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -----------
> After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
>
> - Italian Proverb
> -----------

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Received on Wed Oct 4 11:38:51 2006