I know you were not equating creationist with those of us who believe in
a Creator. To paraphrase a verse in Psalm. Only the fool says there is
no Creator.
Moorad
________________________________
From: David Opderbeck [mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 3:50 PM
To: Michael Roberts
Cc: Alexanian, Moorad; Iain Strachan; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: 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 <mailto:alexanian@uncw.edu>
To: David Opderbeck <mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com>
Cc: Iain Strachan <mailto: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
<mailto: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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