[asa] a theological exercise - peripherals

A few comments on secondary issues that came up in responses to the "exercise" -

1) The analogy between embryological development and biological evolution is a good one. The fact that very few Christians object to the idea that science can give a detailed account of the former "though God were not given" even though they believe that God is the creator of each person strongly suggests that it should be possible to do the same type of thing with evolution. Certainl;y some will insist that at some point God gives the embryo a soul, just as some think that at some point in human evolution God gave hominids a soul. But since souls are scientifically unobservable, TEs can accept an unobservable insertion of unobservable souls.

2) It's true that some of the articlesin Zygon aren't Christian. But please note howat publication describes itself - "Journal of Religion and Science." It simply is open to a broader range of religion-science contributions than is, e.g., PSCF. OTOH it is certainly not anti-Christian - in witness of which I can cite 3 unabashedly Christian articles of mine that have been published there.

3) The verb dmm is translated in its sense "to be still" in Josh.10:12-13 in NIV, NRSV & NEB. While of course no translation should be considered absolutely definitive, the fact that 3 respected modern translations from rather different sources all render it in the same traditional way certainly should carry a good deal of weight, especially for those who don't consider themselves experts in biblical Hebrew.

4) Nancey Murphy was quoted as saying, "The problem for TE ... is that it is an unstable category. If evolution is unguided, the position collapses into immanentism; if guided, it collapses into PC [progressive creationism]." The term "collapses" is a loaded one here & I think the statement with regard to TE & PC is misleading. PC means acts of divine creation separated by temporal intervals. In the limiting case in which the action is continuous PC becomes TE, so if anything, PC "collapses into TE." The issue of "guidance" isn't the critical one here - in classical terms, its a matter of divine cooperation, not governance. But even if the statement is accepted, so what? If TE & PC agree in some limit, why does that mean that TE is "unstable."

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

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Received on Thu Jun 5 07:47:18 2008