RE: [asa] anti-evolutionism and deism

Thanks, David, this is very thought-provoking.
 
I've considered this recently, in trying to explain to others how does God
create today. Does he personally plant each and every dandelion in my yard
at night (it seems so, since they seem to come out of nowhere the next
morning)? If so, would someone please tell him to stop, because I have
enough! No, creation, and all sorts of other effects in nature, can be
explained in purely naturalistic terms without reference to overt divine
action. One of my favorite examples is the creation of hail -- is hail
created by God and stored in huge vats in the sky, waiting to be thrown down
upon the heads of the wicked (Job 38:22-23), or is hail formed by moisture
being caught in updrafts in the atmosphere and frozen into larger and larger
ice pellets, until gravity brings them down to the ground in the form of
hail? Obviously God can bring hail, or stop the rain, or cause it to return
again for his own purposes or in response to the prayers of faith (James
5:17-18), but He still causes those things to occur, as far as we can
generally tell, through natural processes.
 
Your comments are intriguing, because it is clear that YECists and other
theists have a point of agreement -- since about 4000 B.C., God has acted in
a way that allows his creation to produce, to "be fruitful and multiply",
*on its own* (so to speak) without reference to special creation. Yet
following on to George's comment, Christian YECists, TEists, and others must
surely recognize that God is in and through all things (Col 1:16-17; Eph
4:6), and constantly sustaining His creation, not stepping aside as the
watchmaker of deism. The only difference then really comes down to how did
the whole thing come into play before 4000 B.C.? Did God act consistently
before that time as well as after, and cause/sustain the creation through
outwardly *natural* means (being in all, and through all, the whole time),
or did God create a discontinuous, fully formed creation, and then cause it
to roll forward with naturalistic cause/effect as the physical processes
seem to reveal?
 
Obviously, that's the crux of most creation/evolution debate, do we take the
Genesis account as a literal, face value scientific record or not? But I
think approaching it from this angle helps to make a good case that the
progressive creation or TE position is highly plausible, granting to God
consistent attributes in how he has worked in creation both before and after
cerca 4000 B.C. And as pointed out, God is not acting *less* today than
during the (young or ancient) creation, but He is unchanging and continues
to act consistently.
 
Jon Tandy
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of David Buller
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 7:51 PM
To: ASA Discussion Group
Subject: [asa] anti-evolutionism and deism

I've been discussing interpretations of Genesis with my youth pastor, and he
recently gave me a copy of his YEC-perspective syllabus notes which take an
anti-evolutionary stance. In order to refute evolution from a theological
perspective, it said that in the evolutionary creationist/theistic
evolutionist view:
 
1. God creates at the level of minimal existence
2. God steps aside while creation progresses onward
 
I discussed with him how deistic this seemed to me. It presupposes that
when God isn't acting supernaturally (creating through evolution), He is "at
the level of minimal existence" and has "stepped aside." Yet this is
exactly how (with very few miraculous exceptions) God acts in the natural
world today! This view forces them to say that God is of "minimal
existence" and has "stepped aside" today. In their own YEC view, God was
actually only "active" for six days, and left it alone after that.
 
My youth pastor responded by saying, "well there are some things that God
lets happen," stating that God's ways of working have changed to the
less-miraculous. I responded by pointing out that this doesn't mean that
God is acting any less, only differently. The syllabus implied that God was
acting less today (or at least that is the unavoidable philosophical
conclusion). I pointed out the many instances where the Bible says God did
something, yet we accept a natural explanation (e.g., meteorology,
embryology).
 
Anyway, what do you all think? Do the professor's statements lead to a
deistic view of the natural world? I would enjoy your insights!

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Apr 20 07:47:23 2007