Re: [asa] Cosmologial vs. Biological Design

I note the useful contributions that Ian and Ted have made on this
thread , but I return to the top of the thread to insert my two cents
worth of discussion.
I would not push the analogy that I am now suggesting too far, but it
may help. When applied mathematicians model physical processes they
often formulate a set of partial differential equations (PDEs) to be
solved subject to certain initial conditions (ICs) and boundary
conditions (BCs). The PDEs incorporate the basic physical processes, and
for the mathematician these do not change. The BCs provide constraints
appropriate to the particular situation, and the ICs specify the initial
state of the system.
I suggest that the "fine tuning" of physical constants (cosmological
design) is something of the IC type, and that biological arguments are
more of the PDE and BC type.
A deist puts God into the ICs. A theist sees God involved in everying --
ICs, PDEs, BCs. An intelligent design argument is essentially one of
periodic deism. ID proponents see God as resetting the ICs from time to
time.
Don

David Opderbeck 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?

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Received on Wed Oct 4 16:36:23 2006