Re: [asa] Collins' book is reviewed by the Arizona Origins

I think there's a radical difference between creating things that have to
obey the Creator's established laws and creating beings who have freedom.
The former, if they do not come out right, if they need additions or
corrections, reflect the incompetence of the designer. But at least some
of the free creatures will choose contrary to the Creator's purpose. To
posit otherwise means that they are not free. The biblical notion that
the very first such creatures disobeyed suggests that all moral creatures
needed redemption as opposed to the possibility that it would only be
some. Human beings might have reflected what appears to fit angels,
though they are without redemption, some retaining their righteousness
and serving God, some falling away and opposing God.

The entities that do not choose freely may be produced in two different
ways. They can be produced by fiat and act according to their inner
principles. Or they can be produced by development according to the
principles established for the universe. The supposed third way,
modification of entities partly developing and partly initiated and/or
altered miraculously, is a reasonable fit for the activities of beings
like human designers, who don't fully understand how to accomplish a goal
at the start, but have to try various designs and improve them on the
basis of experience. This last matches what ID and OEC ascribe to the
deity.
Dave

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 17:03:22 -0400 "David Opderbeck"
<dopderbeck@gmail.com> writes:
Of course ID folk don't say that God had to "fix it", but
if we take the irreducible complexity (IC) argument seriously,
then it means that at various points, God had to intervene,
as it were, in the creation and change it so that some new
function would appeared. In effect, that means he didn't have
it right in the first place. Far more spectacular and profound
is a creation that God need not periodically "fix" to get right.

I don't think so. There's no reason to assume God "had" to intervene,
because there's no reason to assume God "had" to make a creation with
certain irreducibly complex compnents that would be added by Him over
time. The creation is contingent on God's will and has unfolded
according to His eternal decree. He could have made any kind of creation
He chose, but He chose this one, through His own counsel and for HIs own
purposes. He "had it right" from eternity past, including any
interventions in history that have occurred at specific points in time.
If He intervened in natural history, it wasn't because He was surprised,
it was because He in His perfect forknowledge He had planned to do so
from eternity past.

The same is true for the atonement. Christ didn't die on the cross
because God realized He had messed up in making humans and had to jump in
and fix things. The plan of salvation was part of God's eternal plan
from before time.

And exactly the same thing would be true in the case of theistic
evolution. All of the zillions of tiny changes that have occurred over
time were not "mistakes" God was fixing, if He created through a long
evolutionary process. Every one of them was known by God from eternity
past and happened in accordance with His complete knowledge and perfect
will.

In this regard, there's no principled difference theologically between a
"punctuated equillibruim" OEC or ID theory and theistic evolution.

 
On 10/8/06, Dawsonzhu@aol.com <Dawsonzhu@aol.com> wrote:
David commented

But statements like this -- *"ID portrays the
Almighty
as a clumsy Creator, having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the
inadequacies of His own initial plan for generating the complexities of
life"* -- are bunk. Nothing I've read in the ID literature suggests any
such value judgments about the capabilities or purposes of the
designer. Even if we assume ID is really a religious theory about the
"Almighty," from a Christian theistic perspective, we'd say that if
God did
"intervene" in natural history, that intervention was perfectly good and
wise, fully in accordance with God's character, even if we don't know
the
ultimate reasons for that "intervention."

I have not read Collins' book yet, but we had
similar discussions here before some 3 or 4 years ago.

This is not an argument denying God's intervention in history,
it is an argument against God having to "redesign" the
creation because he didn't get it right the first time.

Of course ID folk don't say that God had to "fix it", but
if we take the irreducible complexity (IC) argument seriously,
then it means that at various points, God had to intervene,
as it were, in the creation and change it so that some new
function would appeared. In effect, that means he didn't have
it right in the first place. Far more spectacular and profound
is a creation that God need not periodically "fix" to get right.

It certainly could suggest that the creation is half baked. God
said "Let the ....", not "now we fix the .... ". God said that it
was "good". Moreover, the all IC doesn't correspond so strongly
with a particular command that God purportedly made in Gen 1:
Though perhaps one can force something there.

I suppose if one can really show that a particular biological
component is irreducibly complex and therefore, Xxx indeed
did have to intervene, well, I suppose that Collins would have
to back off on that point. At least at this point, it does not
look like the IC argument carries a significant weight. Hence,
we might best infer that God didn't have to intervene and the
creation is a truly incredible work of art.

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Received on Sun Oct 8 23:26:12 2006