Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

Anyone who is interested may keep the following comment as my standard reply to any of Gregory's criticisms like those below. I will not reply to them again.

Great amounts of time can be wasted by demanding that a correspondent spell out all of his/her definitions & uses of terms &c in detail even though those things are common currency in the community of discourse & in the specific conversation which is going on. We all know that the root of the word "philosophy" is philia + sophia, love of wisdom, but it's a long time since it's been common usage to call a chemist or a geologist a "philosopher" or even a "natural philosopher" - & that in spite of the fact that many people in such fields have Ph.D.s, a vestige of an older usage. "Philosophy" today, what's done by people in a philosophy department, is a narrower discipline. The very fact that we make a distinction between "science" and "philosophy of science" (an imnportant activity even though it may be of secondary importance in some cases) shows that. Similarly, in a discussion of "neo-Darwinism" the most pertinent science is biology, even though we all know that when you get to questions about the genetics that's involved, we also have to talk about chemistry and physics, & that when we start to talk about human evolution we'll be concerned with anthropology &c.

The asa listserv is a forum for quick email correspondence, not for writing dissertations. I think most people know what we mean by "science," "philosophy," "biological evolution" &c. If Gregory wants to go into detail about the need to include the social sciences in science-theology dialogue, & in discussions of evolution in particular, then I suggest - again - that he do that in an article to submit to PSCF or some other journal in the religion-science field. If all he wants to do is engage in logomachies then he will increasingly be ignored here.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Gregory Arago
  To: gmurphy@raex.com ; dopderbeck@gmail.com ; randyisaac@comcast.net
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 7:01 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

  Since when did 'love-of-wisdom' (philosophy) become unimportant to 'science and religion' dialogue?

  Second paragraph below rewritten in short: "is (natural-physical) history random"?

  G.A.

  p.s. I have noted 'neo-Darwinism's' ambiguity too; no thanks for the nod.
  p.p.s. 'biological evolution' and 'theological understanding' as the 'real issue'; but to the exclusion of all others, including physics, anthropology, sociology, etc.? If so, then yes, this seems to be a deep problem for the TE/EC position to me...

  George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
    I come in rather late on this thread to comment on 3 points. 1st, especially in view of the ambiguity of the term that Randy & David note, the question of whether or not Randy's (or anyone else's) view is "neo-Darwinian" is of very little importance. The critical questions have to do with our theological understandings of divine action, scientific (not philosophical) understandings of biological evolution, and the correlation between them.

    2d, I question whether anyone can show scientifically (& not just assert) that the process that has gotten us to our present state as Homo sapiens from the time that our ancestral line diverged from that of apes has actually been "random" in any technical sense - e.g., that critical mutations have statistically quite unremarkable. The lack of detailed genomes of our ancestral species for the past few Myr would make that difficult, to say the least.

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

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Received on Mon Feb 18 10:32:14 2008