Re: [asa] Letter to thinking Christians (and other theists)

> BTW, I wonder if Denyse would care to bash this comment as well: "So let me
> spell it out: DIRECTED EVOLUTION IS NON-DARWINIAN. DARWINIAN
> EVOLUTION IS NON-DIRECTED.. . . Just because the word "evolution" is used
> doesn't mean that homage is being paid to Darwin. "Directed evolution" properly
> falls under ID."
> Who made this frightful capitulation to neo-Darwinist atheistic materialism?
> Bill Dembski.
> (http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/is-directed-evolution-darwinian/)
>
> So if I believe God enters into the suffering of creation and directs all of
> it, including evolution, to the telos of redemption through the cross, am I
> a proto-atheist wearing a religious costume, as Denyse would have it, or am
> I in the ID camp, as Bill Dembski says?

This is a point on which I have a particular problem with ID. The
definition of ID seems to vary to suit the occasion. It's OK for a
big tent to include multiple viewpoints; the problem is that several
conflicting specific viewpoints are represented as characterizing the
entire tent.

The use of the term 'Darwinian' in Dembski's quote above is also a bit
problematic. Consider the following version of Intelligent Design:

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the
view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it
accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by
the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and
present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary
causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal
descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed
of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become
ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one
living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distinct
futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny
of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all
organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species
in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no
descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a
prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the
common and widely spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant
groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate
new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the
lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian
epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation
has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the
whole world. Hence, we may look with some confidence to a secure
future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and
for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will
tend to progress towards perfection.

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various
insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp
earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so
different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex
a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws,
taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction;
Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from
the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use
and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for
Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence
of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the
war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we
are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has
gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple
a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been,
and are being evolved. "

These are the last two paragraphs of the 6th edition of the Origin of
Species, so it's hard to justify calling them non-Darwinian.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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