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

"I would rather think that we all have a big problem of theodicy which no one has fully resolved. Whether someone has a "bigger" or "lesser" problem, I don't know how to judge nor do I know if it matters."

Surely a theology that deals adequately with the issue of "evil" in a single sentence has a "lesser" problem with it than a theology that devotes reams of tightly woven arguments to an accounting of it and still does not leave hearers satisfied.

My theology deals adequately with the subject in a short sentence or two: "Evil" occurs as a consequence of God's priorities: God could not achieve his goals for his creation unless he allowed it independence. All "evils" great and small stem from the independence of the creation: God allows it the freedom to do largely what it "wants."

Ultimately you can justly accuse God of responsibility for evil because he's the one who made the world. But if God made a world in which evil could not exist, given his priorities, such world would be useless to him.

God does not generate evil, but the world he made is free to do so and has done so.

John Tandy's recent post exhibits similar thinking but supplies no motive: Why didn't [God] choose to create the laws of the environment so that no decay, damage, or disinterest would ever occur? My question is, WHY SHOULD HE? Can anyone answer why God should create a world with laws like that, if it didn't please Him to do so? And who is to say that there aren't fundamental laws that even transcend this present universe, which would make such a creation impractical, so that God himself wouldn't choose to violate them?

And David Opderbeck: One can...ask...whether it would have been more consistent with God's love not to create free beings whom he knew would choose wrongly. ...There are a couple of possible responses. One is that it is better to have some free beings who choose rightly than to have no free beings at all.

My theology supplies a motive: The world's independence is essential because the fundamental God/man relationship is husband/wife, not king/subject or father/child.

Not incidentally this theology meshes well with discoveries of science, which generally indicate that the world's components behave in accord with properties built into them and not in accord with the will of some authority external to the world.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Randy Isaac<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net>
  To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 1:21 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

  I would rather think that we all have a big problem of theodicy which no one has fully resolved. Whether someone has a "bigger" or "lesser" problem, I don't know how to judge nor do I know if it matters. Are you implying that TE's have a "bigger problem" because they see divine guidance in all things and are therefore attributing disease, suffering and death directly to divine will? If so, wouldn't anyone else, ID or PC or whatever, have an equally "bigger problem" because they see divine intervention as something that occurs as needed to generate the organism that God willed into being? How would that lessen the problem of disease, suffering, and death? Does the perceived absence of such intervention absolve God of responsibility in those cases?

  Randy
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: drsyme@cablespeed.com<mailto:drsyme@cablespeed.com>
    To: David Opderbeck<mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com> ; Rich Blinne<mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com>
    Cc: 'Randy Isaac'<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net> ; asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
    Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 12:38 PM
    Subject: Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

    But many random mutations cause disease and suffering, or death. This imo is a bigger problem for TE than God's mechanism of action is.

    On Mon Feb 18 11:50 , Rich Blinne sent:

      i
      On Feb 18, 2008, at 7:36 AM, David Opderbeck wrote:

        You might also add: 3: is "neo-Darwinism" metaphysically random? It depends on how one defines the term.

        On Feb 17, 2008 9:05 PM, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net>> wrote:

          Thank you all for a lot of helpful comments.
          Let me wrap up and summarize this thread.

          1. Is the biological theory of evolution truly random? While there are elements of randomness, boundary conditions and environmental factors provide a great deal of direction. Simon Conway Morris has shown a lot of evidence of convergence though the underlying factors for it are not yet known.

          2. Does the randomness of evolution mean that it is undirected? Yes--from a natural viewpoint. This means we know of no physical mechanisms that influence genetic variation on the basis of the needs or characteristics of any subsequent organism. No--from a divine viewpoint. This means that God's purposes in guiding evolution need not involve a scientifically detectable influence on genetic variation.

          Randy

      If you want more precision and avoid Gregory's deliberate (and I would suggest slanderous) mis-definition of terms, I would let the proponents define the term neo-Darwinism. Such a definition could goes something like this:

      The synthesis of population genetics with evolution as originally proposed by Darwin of descent with modification. Population genetics study allele frequencies under the influence of the four evolutionary forces of natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow.

      Note there is no explicit reference anywhere to random. Random is implied by genetic drift and mutation both of which has been observed many, many times outside of an evolutionary context, e.g. in the current HapMap project (www.hapmap.org<http://www.hapmap.org/>). The concept of allele frequencies is also random. In classical Mendelian genetics the allele frequencies distribute randomly allowing the binomial theorem to be applied.

      Note that randomness, however defined, only comes from the genetics portion of the neo-Darwinist synthesis. I don't hear any creationist or ID proponent berating the (shudder) materialist genetic worldview. It cannot properly be called Darwinist because modern genetics post-dates Darwin. Both YEC and ID have conceded genetics at which point they have conceded the whole randomness question. It is also interesting to see what else Michael Behe has conceded:

      1. Common Descent
      2. Natural Selection
      3. Random Mutation

      What he hasn't conceded is that the random mutation has enough reach either on the basis of not being able to produce irreducibly complex "machines" or having an insufficient rate with so-called double mutations (e.g. drug resistance in the Plasmodium parasite). Behe's analysis is fraught with problems that has been raised here, in PSCF, and elsewhere I will leave it to the reader as a Googling exercise to explore this further.

      At this point the question might be raised give all this randomness is this somehow inconsistent with design and by implication Christianity since Christianity rests on a Creator God? Consider the example of Ruby Red Grapefruit. In 1927, Hermann J. Muller found that ionizing radiation causes (shudder) random mutations. Since then chemical mutagens have been found.

      Botanists have taken advantage of the randomness to produce better crops by increasing the mutation rate through radiation. See here:

      http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html>

        Pierre Lagoda pulled a small container from his pocket and spilled the contents onto his desk. Four tiny dice rolled to a stop.

        “That’s what nature does,” Dr. Lagoda said. The random results of the dice, he explained, illustrate how spontaneous mutations create the genetic diversity that drives evolution and selective breeding.

        He rolled the dice again. This time, he was mimicking what he and his colleagues have been doing quietly around the globe for more than a half-century — using radiation to scramble the genetic material in crops, a process that has produced valuable mutants like red grapefruit, disease-resistant cocoa and premium barley for Scotch whiskey.

        “I’m doing the same thing,” he said, still toying with the dice. “I’m not doing anything different from what nature does. I’m not using anything that was not in the genetic material itself.”

      Thus, we have neo-Darwinist evolution in action controlled by an intelligent designer. This should not be surprising since Darwin used this exact same analogy in Origin when defining natural selection. If a human breeder is compatible with all this "randomness", then certainly the Lord of Heaven and Earth is.

      Rich Blinne (Member ASA)

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Feb 19 10:53:16 2008