Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

And the vocal materialists seized on that and now tar anyone who believes in
a creator-God as a "creationist," implying that any such belief is the same
as believing in a 6,000 year old earth. (Moorad, I wasn't suggesting that
characterization is right.)

On 10/4/06, Michael Roberts <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
>
> There shouldn't be but in the 1960s YECs hijacked the term Creationist to
> mean only those who believe in a literal 144 hour creation. They did so to
> grab the moral and theological high ground. It is a good but dishonest
> debating tactic as it implies that us traditional theists don't believe in
> creation.
>
> As a result I can fairly claim to be a Biblical and Scientific
> Creationist.
>
> Michael
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu>
> *To:* David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
> *Cc:* Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> ; asa@calvin.edu
> *Sent:* Wednesday, October 04, 2006 7:14 PM
> *Subject:* 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> 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 15:50:23 2006