Re: [asa] YEC and ID arguments

On 10/20/06, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steven, thanks for this very thoughtful response. Alot to chew on. One
> quick (well it's become longer than I intended) side note, which I want to
> mention because I've seen it brought up before. Ted and George, I'd
> appreciate your thoughts here too, because I've notice you employ this quote
> from Pascal as well: *"What meets our eyes denotes neither a total
> absence nor a manifest presence of the divine, but the presence of a God who
> conceals Himself. Everything bears this stamp." *
>
> This has been attributed to the Pensees, but I can't find it there.
> George, I saw an old article of yours that cites #602, but that's not it in
> my Penguin Classics version. Searching on the phrase in an online
> searchable Pensees didn't turn it up. I'm sure it's there, I just can't
> find it or its context.
> **
> Anyway, if Pascal is really saying God is "hidden" in terms of not being
> revealed in nature, this seems to contradict scripture -- e.g. Psalm 19
> ("The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his
> hands.Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display
> knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not
> heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of
> the world") and Romans 1 ( "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven
> against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by
> their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them,
> because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world
> God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been
> clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are
> without excuse.").
>

Perhaps I could interject something from my own academic discipline of
probabilistic modelling and machine learning. A term we commonly use is Latent
Variables. These variables are quantities we cannot directly measure, but
which we infer from a set of observations. The probability distribution of
the observed variables depends on the value of the latent variables, so
given a sufficiently large number of observations, we may infer the value of
the latent variable. The (somewhat whimsical) example I gave in my PhD
thesis is that of whether a racehorse was "in form" or "off form". It is
said that by "studying the form" you can do well in placing bets. But in
fact you don't directly study the form - it's not something you can directly
measure for a given beast. All you can do is study the recent history of
results of races that it took part in & you can then get a good idea of
whether it is in form or not & whether you have a good bet.

The important point here is that you can't prove the value of the latent
variable - you can only infer it. Similarly I think you infer a "Latent
God" by looking at nature: "The heavens declare ..." means they speak of
it, but they don't reveal the face of God - but by their very existence and
their beauty etc, the psalmist infers the Creator behind it.

I think the problem, by contrast, with the ID method is that we say "There
is no way this could have occurred naturally" therefore it PROVES that a
Designer did it. And on top of that, we only apply this to particular
examples in nature, whereas the psalmist is looking at the WHOLE of nature.

Iain

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Received on Sat Oct 21 06:45:05 2006