RE: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

David,

Isn't there a clear distinction between a creationist and one who
believes in the existence of a Creator?

Moorad

________________________________

From: David Opderbeck [mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 12:30 PM
To: Alexanian, Moorad
Cc: Iain Strachan; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

Thanks Moorad. These two quotes from that article are particularly
interesting:

        The anthropic principle is an observation, not an explanation.
To believe otherwise is to believe that our emergence at a late date in
the universe is what forced the constants to be set as they are at the
beginning. If you believe that, you are a creationist.

And:

        We will soon learn a lot. Over the next decade, new facilities
will come on line that will allow accelerator experiments at much higher
energies. New non-accelerator experiments will be done on the ground,
under the ground, and in space. One can hope for new clues that are less
subtle than those we have so far that do not fit the standard model.
After all, the Hebrews after their escape from Egypt wandered in the
desert for 40 years before finding the promised land. It is only a bit
more than 30 since the solidification of the standard model.

So, we are *all* creationist God of the gappers, who lack adequate faith
in human capacity and science.

On 10/4/06, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu > wrote:

        Interesting article in Physics Today.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-10/p8.html

        "Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus
practical knowledge" by Burton Richter

        Moorad

        
________________________________

        From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
[mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Iain Strachan
        Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 11:31 AM
        To: David Opderbeck
        Cc: asa@calvin.edu
        Subject: Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

        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, 15 since 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
<mailto: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 14:15:54 2006