Re: [asa] Saving Darwin: What theological changes are required?

>>> "karl.w.giberson@enc.edu" <gibersok@gmail.com> 6/10/2008 8:17 AM >>>
writes:

In rereading the posts, I sense that some participants are dualists.
To speak of something "immaterial" that God installed in a physical
creature is to be a dualist. If we allow dualism, we can do all kinds
of interesting things theologically. Unfortunately dualism is not
considered a viable option any more so we are stuck with having to
take seriously that "sin" is coded in our genes and has an actual
physical aspect.

Ted comments:

I used to agree with Karl's final sentence here, but I no longer do. I
might or might not be a dualist myself--it depends on how dualism is
defined, and it also depends on what my own answers really would be to some
hard questions that I don't often think about: in other words, I don't know
what my own view is, partly b/c I haven't thought about it hard enough yet
and partly b/c it's also just very hard to sort this out. No one, flat no
one, has "solved" the mind-body problem in a way that brings wide assent
from philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people (who experience top-down
causation daily and associate it quite properly with their identity as
rational persons, whatever the experts might say). This problem is also, as
I've often said, the most fundamental one underlying the whole origins
issue: how do we go from matter & motion to means, minds, and morals?

Why do I no longer agree with Karl that dualism is no longer a viable
option? Actually, it's one of those cases in which extended contact with
Christian scholars in other fields has convinced me that dualism may well
have some viability today. It's esp the philosophers, including my
colleague Robin Collins, who have convinced me that I was too quick to
follow the crowd by tossing dualism on the trash heap. In my own thinking,
I had already concluded that, if God genuinely is a spirit and not embodied,
then there is at least one unembodied mind (to borrow a term that Bill
Dembski has used). And I'm not enthusiastic about Hobbes' view that God has
a body, any more than I like Sally McFague's quite different yet similar
affirmation. Hobbes was an atheist, for all practical purposes, and McFague
is pretty darn close to pantheism, far too close for my comfort.

One of the things that has happened since the 1970s, and one of the best
things in academe, is the renaissance of Christian philosophy/philosophers.
It's all but given atheists like Quentin Smith heart attacks--they want to
read the riot act to any fellow philosophers who won't just accept a
materialist view of the mind, whether or not they are dualists--and they are
genuinely concerned about how many smart young philosophers are Christians.
My understanding is that a number of those folks are dualists of one sort or
another, and I am in no position to tell them they're nuts, or even that
dualism is not a viable option. Heck, Descartes wasn't even the kind of
dualist that he's usually portrayed to be... but that's another story, for
another time.

Ted

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Jun 10 09:21:09 2008