Re: [asa] Random and design

A good and reasoned (or I suppose more correctly, resonant!) response.
The question addressed is important.
Newton started out with an understanding that God pushed the planets
around actively, causing them to move in circular (perfect) orbits. At
the end of the (his) day, the gravitational forces were found to
accomplish this motion. That is a microcosm of the fear-generator, to
wit the slippery slope argument concerning where this sort of erosion of
God's involvement could stop. At the limit, a possible answer is "No
involvement".

But isn't it sort of apparent upon some reflection that God's primary
purpose in Creation was not some sort of playground where active but
mindless plate-spinning is required to keep everything in orderly motion
and development? It seems to me that the focus and locus of men's hearts
and souls is that which (as near as I can tell) more likely to hold
God's attention. The rest (the physical) seems by and large to have its
own rules and trajectories (by design), so why resist the idea that it
is doing what it is designed to do without God's sustaining presence to
make it so? [Not saying this is the only way of conceptualization, just
not out of bounds.]

When we hunt for God's guiding hand and insertion into the physical, the
outcomes of the searches tend to be unrewarding and even retrograde as
we learn about things like gravity and germs and DNA. That too suggests
to me that God's purpose and hope and even involvement is likely to be
less in the physical than the "other" realm of existence and activity.

Our inclination is to sort of conflate these two realms, when the clear
and irreducible message of Scripture seems more to be about the latter.
For that reason, I suspect there is a disservice being done in
attempting to make God too much the captain of platespinning, at the
expense of His role as champion of righteousness and redemption and
their realizations in our hearts which in turn operate in the external
context of the physical.

JimA

Don Winterstein wrote:

> If a random system shows no evidence of being guided naturally and we
> insist that it can still be guided divinely, is there really
> any meaningful influence? Or are we just making an untestable faith claim?
>
> These questions IMO epitomize why theistic evolution is not more
> widely accepted by Christians. The belief that God was somehow
> involved can only be a faith-based assertion. The world in principle
> could have turned out the same if God had not been involved. If it's
> possible that God was not involved, why assume he exists? The
> possibility that God was not involved generates deep fear in
> some Christians, fear that leads some to reject findings of science
> and to accuse theistic evolution of being tantamount to atheism. In
> other words, deal with the fear by dismissing the possibility.
>
> If only scientists had come up with firm evidence that the world was
> about 6000 years old! Then practically everybody would believe at a
> minimum that the God of the OT really existed and communicated
> intelligibly to humans. Our faith would have a firm foundation.
>
> (Firm but wrong. A major reason God keeps himself so well hidden in
> nature is to make idolatry difficult: He wants faith to depend on a
> relationship with him, not on some material icon, not even on a Book.)
>
> Big problems started when it became apparent that Genesis 1-11 could
> not be interpreted straightforwardly as history. TEs argue cogently
> that just because evolution looks aimless and haphazard doesn't mean
> God was not involved. (But it doesn't mean he was involved, either.)
> IDs seek proof that God was involved. Concordists spin their
> intricate arguments to show how the revelation can be made to fit
> historical data and thereby salvage God's reputation. But none
> of these are quite as satisfying as being able to take the revelation
> at face value.
>
> All the substitutes for a childlike acceptance of the revelation call
> for raging floods of verbiage that overwhelm the hearers. And all
> those words come without the authority of the original that we used to
> take for granted.
>
> Don
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Randy Isaac <mailto:randyisaac@adelphia.net>
> To: asa@calvin.edu <mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2006 6:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] Random and design
>
> Dave,
> Although I usually agree with you, this time I would suggest
> that, at least for me, the issues are reversed. Though there may
> be hermeneutical questions remaining regarding Gen 1&2, the ones
> you cite don't seem to create a significant problem for TE as far
> as I can tell. Nor does the mechanism. Whether natural selection
> is sufficient or whether other mechanisms play a role doesn't have
> much impact on TE.
> But I do struggle with the randomness question. I've said that
> before and I haven't resolved it yet. I would state it a little
> differently than Gage but I do think that is the core problem. We
> often glibly say that scientific randomness does not preclude
> divine guidance. But wouldn't a system subject to supernatural
> guidance of any kind show, in some small way, a physical deviation
> from randomness? If not, then is there any significance to the
> divine guidance?
>
> Let's think of an example. Consider a collection of
> radioactive atoms. Physics can tell us quite precisely the
> probability that any given atom will undergo a radioactive decay
> in a given period of time. If under divine influence an atom
> decays earlier than it would have without that influence, then to
> keep the divine action 'hidden' there would have to be some
> compensating atom whose decay is delayed so that the aggregate
> stays within the scientific expectations. (ok, so we can't detect
> individual atoms but it's the principle!) Such a scenario would
> indeed be quite indistinguishable scientifically from the case
> without divine guidance. But would it really have resulted in a
> significant effect on our universe?
>
> Another way of talking about it is to speak of systems as
> canonical ensembles. The behavior of the ensemble is well defined
> but the individual elements may have random behavior. If the
> behavior of that system were subject to divine guidance, the
> ensemble would need to be invariant (to avoid scientific
> detection) but the elements might vary. Yet any element whose
> behavior is modified must be countered by another modified element
> to keep the ensemble behavior coherent.
>
> In other words, if a random system shows no evidence of being
> guided naturally and we insist that it can still be guided
> divinely, is there really any meaningful influence? Or are we just
> making an untestable faith claim?
>
> Randy
>

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Received on Thu Nov 16 16:04:15 2006