Re: [asa] God as Cause

----- Original Message -----
  From: Janice Matchett
  To: George Murphy ; Jon Tandy ; asa@calvin.edu
  Cc: 'Bill Hamilton'
  Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 11:29 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] God as Cause

  At 09:58 AM 1/5/2007, George Murphy wrote:

    Just a note on 1 section of Plantinga's article snipped below. Christian opponents of MN & proponents of ID (they are often the same of course), in arguing against MN, almost always ignore distinctive Christian arguments for MN. Plantinga below & the Appendix in Dembski's Intelligent Design are good examples. (& in fact I don' t know any counterexamples, but I haven't read anything. The article I noted yesterday at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2001/PSCF3-01Murphy.html is an example of such a distinctively Christian pro-MN argument, though there are plenty of others.
     
    My point now isn't that such arguments must be accepted, but that anti-MN folks ought at least to acknowledge that they can be made, & should try to deal with them.
     
    & please note - I'm not saying that Plantinga et al ignore all pro-MN arguments by Christians but that they ignore distinctively Christian arguments. The quote below from McMullin has no distinctively Christian elements, e.g., though McMullin is a Christian. ~ George

  @ I suspect that Plantinga would reject what you might want to call, "Christian" arguments:
  1st, I did not say "Christian" but "distinctively Christian" arguments. The difference is non-trivial. There are plenty of theistic arguments that can be made by Jews, Muslims & others as well as by Christians, but that's not what I'm talking about.

  2d, I surmise from your placing of quotes around Christian that you think the arguments I refer to really aren't. That is of course a judgment that should be made only after you've read some of the arguments in question. You might look at George Ellis & Nancey Murphy's On the Moral Nature of the Universe or Eberhard Juengel's God as the Mystery of the World, or the collection edited by John Polkinghorne, The Work of Love, as well as the article of mine to which I referred (or my book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross.)

  3d, Plantinga may indeed reject the arguments to which I refer. I made a point of saying that he & other anti-ID folks might indeed do so, & that my objection to their procedures was that they didn't even try to deal with them.

  4th, in the material you quote below from Plantinga he does not respond to any of what I have called "distinctively Christian" arguments.

  Shalom
  George
  http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

  One root of this way of thinking about science is a consequence of the modern foundationalism stemming from Descartes and perhaps even more importantly, Locke. Modern classical foundationalism has come in for a lot of criticism lately, and I do not propose to add my voice to the howling mob.36 And since the classical foundationalism upon which methodological naturalism is based has run aground, I shall instead consider some more local, less grand and cosmic reasons for accepting methodological naturalism." ~ Alvin Plantinga Philosophical Analysis Origins & Design 18:1 Methodological Naturalism? http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/arn/odesign/od181/methnat181.htm

  There is that little question of, "what is the 'rational' thing to do?," however:

  "Now in view of these examples and many others like them (together with broader Augustinian considerations), the natural thing to think is that (in principle, at any rate) the Christian scholarly community should do science, or parts of science, in its own way and from its own perspective. What the Christian community really needs is a science that takes into account what we know as Christians. Indeed, this seems the rational thing in any event; surely the rational thing is to use all that you know in trying to understand a given phenomenon."

  ~ Janice

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Received on Fri Jan 5 13:01:13 2007