Part A. John Walley
I am wondering if Mr. Walley failed to see a reply of mine. He had written:
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From: John Walley <1. john_walley@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Oct 20 2008 - 21:18:53 EDT
>
> Rejoinder 6D From Timaeus -- for Iain Strachan, Jon Tandy
> and Others
> [Timaeus] If someone is writing code for Word
> Perfect, and makes a mistake in one line, you don’t get
> Quattro Pro as a result. What you get is Word Perfect with
> some feature disabled, or Word Perfect that is busted and
> won’t launch at all. The thought that Word Perfect
> might, given a couple of billion years, evolve into Quattro
> Pro through a series of inadvertent errors by programmers,
> and during all the intervening stages function acceptably as
> various other sorts of computer program ..., is so preposterous that
> no one with any education in computer programming would
> accept it as a possibility.
[Walley] This flawed analogy reveals the blindspot and weakness of the "strong" ID argument. It shows a stubborn insistence on God only being involved in the end results (Word Perfect and Quattro Pro) but not in between.
Granted if I wrote intelligent program A and then subjected to random mutations of the code which would almost surely be deleterious it would not result in intelligent program B. But no one who accepts TE is suggesting this.
If however as a programmer, I wrote supernaturally intelligent program A, that had the embedded design to anticipate changes (even random ones) and use those changes to possibly alter my program A's behavior, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that I may wind up with intelligent program B, without knowing what the supernatural intelligence was that was embedded, which we can't know.
But you can't deny that as a programmer I have the ability to write a program that modifies its behavior at runtime based on external inputs. We see this every day.
This is what TE is saying and the strong ID crowd refuses to see it.
Thanks
John
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To which I replied (Rejoinder 7C, Miscellaneous Short Replies, October 21, after my reply to Burgeson and before my reply to Venema):
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To John Walley:
This criticism misses the target, and in fact confirms my argument. My complaint to Iain Strachan was not against TE but against “pure Darwinism” as I have defined it. Your response to my answer is in effect: (1) to agree with me that purely Darwinian evolution is highly implausible, since it does depend extensively on luck to “sublimate” constant deleterious mutations into something useful; (2) to argue that program A might well have been designed from the beginning to be able to transform itself into another program. But for the latter possibility to be real, not only the original functions of program A but also its adaptive abilities would have to have been intelligently designed. If this is what you mean by TE, then your version of TE accepts intelligent design of a front-loaded kind, and there is no fundamental theoretical barrier between ID and TE.
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I thought this was an adequate answer to Mr. Walley, but note his further reference to the issue in a subsequent post:
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From: John Walley <1. john_walley@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue Oct 21 2008 - 18:56:08 EDT
Gregory,
I suggest we let Timaeus speak for himself ...
... Timbo clearly equates the prospect of arriving at a Quattro Pro solely from random mutations of existing WordPerfect code with the concept of TE.
What is "conveniently absent" is any consideration of an infinitely powerful meta-design built into WordPerfect anticipating random mutations and using them to still create a Quattro Pro and "endless software forms most beautiful" as a result.
This one-dimensional, simpleton understanding of God's creative powers should be an insult ...
Thanks
John
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I agree with Mr. Walley that I should be allowed to speak for myself. I shall do so now.
Mr. Arago understood my point. Mr. Walley did not.
As I said in the personal reply to Mr. Walley which he apparently missed, I did not make any analogy relating the random transformation from Word Perfect to Quattro Pro
to TE. My analogy related to what I have been carefully and consistently calling “Darwinian evolution”, “Darwinism”, or sometimes, to make the point even more carefully, “pure Darwinism”.
I did not deny that God may have put a meta-design into life from the beginning. In fact, I have suggested that he may have. There are only two alternatives, for someone who believes God is “behind” evolution (if by being “behind” evolution one means behind it in a special way, beyond the way that God is behind nature generally simply by creating and sustaining it). Either God actively drives the process, by sporadic or continuous directed divine activity, or God front-loads the process, so that life, once begun, can augment itself without direct intervention from God. Front-loading would be the “meta-design” that Mr. Walley is talking about. It is completely compatible with ID. It has been advocated by Michael Denton, in “Nature’s Destiny”. It has been allowed as an ID option by both Behe and Dembski.
Front-loading is in fact the option that can bring together all those ID people and all those TE people who do not like the idea of direct divine intervention in the evolutionary process. It is a blending of ID and TE elements. It is, however, implacably opposed to pure Darwinism, which rejects design not just gratuitously (as some TEs think) but on principle, as anyone who has read Darwin or Dawkins knows. If you endorse the idea of a meta-design, you are rejecting a core element of Darwinian theory. You are then a theistic evolutionist, but decidedly not a theistic Darwinist. And this is just fine with me. If I have any “gospel” to sell to TEs, it is: “Keep evolution. Dump Darwin.”
As for my alleged, “one-dimensional, simpleton understanding of God's creative powers”, which is an “insult” to good theology, I trust that Mr. Walley now sees that I, and Michael Denton, and other ID people allow for a richer understanding. But I would add that Mr. Walley’s remark is unpleasantly typical of many remarks from TE people, who often write as if they have the corner on good theology, and as if everyone who disagrees with them about theology is uneducated, simple-minded, naive, fundamentalist, etc. If you want the culture wars to stop, TE people, stop writing prose like that. You must have figured out by now that for every time you call an ID or YEC supporter theologically narrow or shallow or fundamentalist, they are going to call you “liberal” or “heretical” or “accommodationist” in return. Name-calling gets nobody anywhere. I would suggest that TE-ID relations could improve greatly if both sides would drop the “more theologically c!
orrect than thee” attitude, and concentrate on the fundamental scientific questions, i.e., the ever-increasing evidence casting doubt upon Darwinian theory, and the stimulating new challenge to Darwinism posed by design theory.
Part B. George Murphy
I am told that George Murphy wants me to continue the conversation of Oct. 7th. He feels that I have not answered his comments there. I will try to do so. But first, I would add that he did not answer some of my comments, either. For example, in Rejoinder 3C (Short Responses) from October 2nd, I wrote:
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George Murphy wrote:
“... what does it mean to say that we believe in "impersonal natural explanations?" If we use the traditional model of divine action in which God cooperates with creatures as "instruments" then the instruments may indeed be impersonal but the one who works with & through them isn't. The action of a mechanic tightening a bolt with a wrench isn't "impersonal" just because the wrench is!”
[Timaeus] This is quite true, but Rev. Murphy overlooks the other half of the story, which is that wrenches don’t jump up and tighten bolts by themselves. Using his analogy, that’s exactly what classical Darwinism claims. There’s a wrench, but no mechanic. Rev. Murphy’s analogy actually presupposes a designing intelligence, whereas Darwin’s theory was constructed with the express purpose of eliminating any such intelligence from the realm of living nature. If Rev. Murphy takes his own analogy seriously, then he believes in intelligent design.
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If Mr. Murphy would care to comment on the above, I’d be grateful. But now, onto his Oct. 7 posting. He has:
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First recall my post of 3 October in response to one of your claims. To wit:
---- j burg <hossradbourne@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is to Tim, who wrote: "But it is absolutely worthless, from my
> point of view, to hear that Darwinism isn't the whole story and in the
> same breath to assert that WITHIN SCIENCE, Darwinism is absolutely
> true. There is a major blurring going on here ... ."
...................
[Murphy] This claim in an example of an all too common confusion about different levels
of causation. It is true that Abraham Lincoln was killed by a bullet, & that is
the only truth that a pathologist will state or is competent to state. But it
isn't the entire truth, & those who are concerned with the whole context of
Lincoln's death will be interested in the historian's claim that Lincoln was
killed by John Wilkes Booth.
I think the parallel with a traditional understanding of divine action via God's
cooperation with creatures is obvious. It's true that concerns about
"Darwinism" may have more to do with governance rather than with cooperation
(following the conventional 3-fold analysis of providence) but I think this is
enough to show briefly that Timaeus' claims pf worthlessness is considerably
overstated.
Shalom,
George
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The nested replies are really confusing me. It appears that Mr. Murphy is quoting a response of Burgy who had quoted me. But only part of my paragraph is included. And because Burgy does not give the date of my original post here, I cannot find the original post, and therefore cannot find the rest of my paragraph. I don’t want to try to defend what I wrote when I don’t have the entire message in which the above words was contained, because I can’t remember the context in which I was arguing, and, as I am replying to about thirty different people here who are all on quite different wavelengths, context is vital. So, unless Mr. Murphy can find my full original paragraph, which was presumably in a post from Oct. 2 or earlier, I will excuse myself from defending that fragment and will move straight to his comments.
Mr. Murphy, I have nowhere “confused different levels of causation”. In all my probing and questioning here, I have been trying to get people to sort out different levels of causation. If you look at my carefully worded post (8A) to Randy Isaac regarding “God of the gaps”, you will see an extensive discussion of causation which clearly separates the level of “design” from the level of “efficient causes”. My earlier discussion with Christine, about the architect and the construction workers, was to the same end.
Indeed, your example of the bullet and John Wilkes Booth is an attempt to get at exactly what I have been saying all along, except that your example is not very good, because John Wilkes Booth is in the direct line of efficient causation (his finger pulls the trigger) that leads to implanting the bullet in President Lincoln. Forensic science can trace back the path of the bullet, in some cases, to where Booth may have been observed by witnesses to be sitting or standing at the time. My examples are better, because the architect of the building has NO efficient-cause role in setting up the building. And God, in Denton’s scheme, has no efficient-cause role in evolving any species. Both God and the architect provide information. But in both cases, the information is every bit as real a “cause” of the event (the erection of the building, the evolution of species) as are material causes (hammers, nails, molecules attracting each other, gene duplication, etc.).
Darwinism, on the other hand, denies the upper level of causality a priori. I mean of course real Darwinism, based on Darwin (whose work I have actually read carefully, which is more than can be said of 90% of the working biologists who accept evolution). In Darwin, God creates the frame of nature, with its laws of chemistry and physics. He creates the first simple life forms. After that, God backs off, and is involved IN NO WAY in the evolutionary process, not even hiding behind “quantum” emissions of radiation. He lets the chances of variation and natural selection run their course. In the logic of Darwin, absolutely no outcome can be said to be necessary, and no outcome is guaranteed. Whether or not any given species, including man, will evolve, or whether life will remain forever at the level of primordial slime (the first simple forms) floating on the ocean surface, is left to the capricious gods of chance.
The fundamental intellectual confusion of TE is that it thinks that it can wed this chance-driven cosmology with a Biblical, divine-will-driven cosmology. The philosophical fault of TE is not that it prefers “evolution” over “miraculous intervention”. Many ID people have no problem with “evolution”, and they carry no brief for “miracles”. The philosophical fault of TE is that it tries to say that God can be sovereign and not-sovereign at the same time. God can be sovereign over the evolutionary process only by front-loading, or by intervention. If he decides to neither front-load nor intervene, then he is consenting to allow nature to spit out whatever it wills, and if nature doesn’t just happen to spit out man, well then, so much for all of God’s grand plans. And in the Darwinian view of nature, nature may well refuse to spit out man, which means no being in the image of God, no fall, no incarnation, no redemption, no salvation history, no consumma!
tion of history.
Mr. Murphy then goes on to say:
“Your original statement was not simply that God _could have_ acted miraculously in evolution but amounts to the assertion that God _had to_ so act if the concept of divine action is not to be "worthless." That particular claim is incorrect.”
As I have already said, I can’t find the full context of my original argument, but I know that I did not mean what Mr. Murphy here says that I meant. I have granted all along that God could have established design via front-loading, as opposed to inserting it manually, via miraculous intervention.
But I suspect that by “divine action” in evolution, Mr. Murphy means that evolution occurs by “divine action” in the same sense that an apple falls from a tree by a “divine action”, or that the tides are controlled by “divine action”. I suspect that he means “the ordinary course of nature, which derives its power and regularity from the divine will”. I have a response to this.
I never denied that the term “divine action” can be used, outside of the context of creation and miracles, in the sense of “God’s normal sustenance of the laws of nature”. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged this sort of action in my God-gun scenario, where I referred to it as “divine concurrence”. But “divine action” in this sense does not resolve the theoretical debate. Regarding falling objects, tides, lightning, the development of an embryo, etc., we already know, from long experience, exactly what nature is capable of. So we know that God chooses to bring babies into the world through a natural process, without special miracles; we know that God chooses to create lightning through a natural process (static electricity), without a special miracle, etc. But the case of Darwinian evolution is quite different. We know that God has chosen to lengthen finch beaks through natural processes. We know that God has chosen to grant antibiotic resistance to b!
acteria through natural processes. We do not know, and are nowhere near knowing, that God has chosen to create a bacterial flagellum, a cardiovascular system, a reptile body plan, or a free-living cell through natural processes. We have not observed these massive structural transformations, and we have not produced any clear, detailed model for how any of them could be produced by chance plus natural selection. (If we had, you can be sure that Eugenie Scott and her gang at the NCSE would be cranking out 20 propaganda books a year showing such detailed models, and gloating.)
For this reason, I might possibly have said that explaining evolution in terms of “divine action”, where neither front-end loading nor miracles were meant, was a “worthless” activity. It amounts to nothing more than saying that Darwinian processes are capable of doing what Darwinians claim they can do, and then sticking the name “divine action” on top of the unproved claim, to dignify it theologically. But an unproved claim remains an unproved claim. We don’t know that God chose to generate major phylogenetic change through Darwinian means, because we don’t even know that major phylogenetic change was in fact generated through Darwinian means. All we know is that it was generated somehow.
Mr. Murphy then moves into more explicitly theological discussion. I will respond to him, but I want to warn everyone that my theological ideas are not typical of the ideas of ID supporters. ID supporters tend to be orthodox Protestants, Anglicans, or Catholics, whereas my ideas are in key respects heretical by everyone’s standard. So it’s important for people here to know that if I claim that some theological idea is “unorthodox”, I’m not setting up my own, alternate view of Christianity as “orthodox”. I’m merely making a historical judgment. For example, John Haught’s theology is unorthodox. By that, I don’t mean that Haught’s thought about God is false [though I think that, too]; I mean that Haught would be uniformly condemned by Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. But if, in criticizing Haught, I go on to elaborate my own theological notions, I’m not claiming that my notions are orthodox, and that orthodox Christians should agree with !
me if they want to be theologically correct. I say this because I know that certain ID proponents (some of whom I think you’ve battled with in the past here on the ASA list) tend towards an ultra-orthodox Calvinism, and, while some of my statements, e.g., that the Bible represents God as absolute sovereign, may sound Calvinistic, I assure you that the agreement is confined only to particular points, and is reached as the result of independent reading of the Bible on my part, and not under any theological influence. The last authority on earth that I would acknowledge over my thoughts on religion would be Calvin, or any confession or church with the strong smell of Calvin about it.
Mr. Murphy continues:
“But sure, God _could have_ acted miraculously in the evolutionary process. Is there any reason to assert that he did? In that book that I know a bit about there are lots of texts that make claims about miracles as historical events but the origin & development of life aren't among them. In fact Genesis 1 ( which, since you're not a literalist or a fundamentalist I trust we can agree shouldn't be read as historical narrative) suggests a _mediated_ creation of life. A number of the fathers recognized this - see Messenger's _Evolution and Theology_ or for a briefer summary, Ch.8 of my _The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross_ .”
It is indeed true that I am not a literalist, but my approach to the text is still literary, i.e., based on the vocabulary, syntax, style, etc. of the Biblical writers. One does not need to consider Genesis as “history” to consider its choice of words important. The text of Genesis says “God made”, “God created”, “God formed”, etc. The Hebrew author could easily have expressed the idea of a self-developing nature had he chosen to. He could easily have written: “And God createth the seas and the earth. And God watcheth and waiteth. And Lo! On the third day, up poppeth the plants. And Lo! on the fourth day, congealeth the sun and the moon into their orbs. And Lo! on the fifth day, there emergeth from the sea fishes great and small, and the fowl of the air. And Lo! on the sixth day, emergeth the creeping things, which doth in turn yield the beasts of the field and the domestic beasts, and Lo! later on the sixth day, from some of the beasts of the fi!
eld which do loveth trees, there emergeth Man. And God, seeing that Man is the wisest of all creatures, giveth him dominion over all the earth. And God seeeth that all that hath proceeded from the seas and the earth are good. And on the seventh day he resteth.” But the Hebrew writer did not write in this way. He did not use the passive language of observed emergence. He speaks of an active, willing being, performing deeds of great power. And the language of the relation of God to nature is similar throughout the Bible; it’s the language of will, activity, command, and power.
As for what the Fathers allegedly “recognized”: with few exceptions, the Fathers hadn’t a clue how to read Hebrew narrative. Most of them couldn’t read Hebrew at all, and used either the Septuagint or the Vulgate, both of which make changes which actually alter the meaning of Genesis 1 in spots. (For example, in the Septuagint, the firmament is said to be “good”; it’s not said to be “good” in the Hebrew.) And the main literary forms the Fathers were trained in were allegory, poetry, oratory, etc. Narrative, as such, was poorly developed in classical antiquity, and the Fathers had no sophistication in reading it. They therefore did not grasp how Hebrew narrative was meant to be read. Thus, they could freely read all kinds of allegory and Christological material back into Genesis which has nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of the text. Augustine’s *Literal Interpretation of Genesis* is nowhere near literal, but is wildly allegorical, imposing!
all kinds of Philonic and other Hellenistic fantasies on the text. As a guide to the intention of the author of Genesis, it’s sheer rubbish. In *The City of God*, Augustine is somewhat better, but still nowhere near the mark. And by and large, that’s true of most of the Fathers. They almost to a man thought Hellenistically rather than Hebraically, and while I am a great lover of all things Greek (including even Hellenistic thought, which was a diminishment of pure Greek thought), I know better than to read a Hebraic text through a Greek Christian theoretical filter. I can rarely read pre-Reformation Christian interpretations of the Old Testament without wincing, they are mostly so bad.
And what does Mr. Murphy mean by this?:
“There are lots of [Biblical] texts that make claims about miracles as historical events but the origin & development of life aren't among them.”
I have no vested interest in interpreting Genesis in terms of miraculous interventions, but as one with a certain familiarity with Biblical texts and languages, I must make a methodological objection here. I see no difference in basic narrative style between the assertion that Jesus walked on water, or healed a blind man, and the assertion that God made the cattle, or the sea creatures. The Bible in both cases drily reports the events. And if there is no philological difference, then on what basis do you distinguish them? And why don’t you apply the principles you refer to below (the success of natural science and divine kenosis) to the miracle stories in the New Testament, and argue that Jesus was merely working through regular natural laws when he fed the five thousand or walked on water or cursed the fig tree? You seem to be “cherry picking” the miracles you want to interpret as interventionist, and leaving everything else to be explained naturalistically. Whe!
re are your interpretive controls? What would you do with the sun stopping, or the walls of Jericho? How about the Exodus miracles? Rather central to the whole Biblical teaching, wouldn’t you say? And Elijah’s? What about Pentecost? Do these fall on the “real intervention” side or the “naturalist” side? Were Jesus’s healings perhaps all psychosomatic? What about his Resurrection? Surely, in keeping with “the success of naturalism”, we should interpret that as Bultmann or Renan did? And wouldn’t it also be more “kenotic” for Jesus to stay dead, than to come back? I’d like to see some exegetical justification for your selectivity. I don’t want to hear from “authorities”. I don’t care what Luther or the Fathers say. I don’t care what Bonhoeffer or Pascal or Barth or Moltmann says. I care what the Biblical text says. You’re a Lutheran, so let’s have a little “sola scriptura”. Take me through several of the Biblical ev!
ents attributed to God, and tell me (1) which ones never happe!
ned; (2)
which ones happened, but were accomplished wholly through naturalistic causation; (3) which ones happened, and were accomplished through special intervention. And explain to me the principles you employed to decide in each case. I’ve got my Greek and Hebrew Bibles and reference books all ready, the better to be able to follow along.
Mr. Murphy then writes:
“God could have acted miraculously in the evolutionary process but both the pattern of divine activity suggested by God's kenotic revelation in Christ (clumsy wording, I know) & the successes of science operating within the constraints of methodological naturalism imply that our default setting for understanding divine action ought to be God working with creatures as instruments in such a way that creaturely action conceals God from our observation - that they are not only God's "instruments" but also the "masks" of God in Luther's phrase.”
Mr. Murphy, I have read your fine essay in PEC, which is very fair and very scholarly, but the case you make for employing “kenosis” in relation to creation there is weak. For one thing, the notion of kenosis is rare in the Bible, the noun being absent entirely, and the verb being found only
7 times (only 5 in the New Testament), and only once in a doctrinal context, i.e., in the Philippians
verse (where it's not connected by the writer to creation doctrine). Further on this point, the only two uses of the verb in the Septuagint have nothing to do with creation, and the passages of the Old Testament that discuss creation do not suggest kenosis, but the more traditional picture of
God's active power. One unambiguous verse in the New Testament, which pertains to the Incarnation, is a small peg on which to hang a very large parallel between the mode of Creation and the mode of Incarnation. Kenosis is a wonderful notion for interpreting the Incarnation, but there is just no philological basis for extending it to the Old Testament understanding of Creation.
Second, there's no reason to assume, as you do, that God will act in Creation exactly as he acts in Incarnation. God is multi-faceted, as human beings are multi-faceted. A great stand-up comic may behave with completely proper gravity at a funeral. Someone noted for giving millions to the poor may be the most ruthless Monopoly player, bankrupting all his opponents with glee. The Muslims were quite ruthless as conquerors but frequently exhibited great justice as rulers. There's nothing theologically inconsistent in believing that God may show himself in all his glory and power sometimes, and may show himself in humility and weakness at other times. God can choose to reveal himself however he wants, whenever he wants.
Of course, this is not to say that God couldn't have created "kenotically" rather than "magisterially". He may have. But it seems to me that the Biblical text should be the decisive factor. And when I look at the creation texts -- Genesis, certain Psalms, Job, bits of Isaiah -- I don't see much kenosis going on there. It seems odd to suppose that the Old Testament writers would have completely missed this theme. You would think there would be at least hints of it.
Mr. Murphy wrote:
“So was God's action in evolution entirely ordinary or did it involve extraordinary means? I will not dogmatically rule out miraculous divine action at a few points in the process - most likely in the origin of life itself. But I see no reason at all to assume that that was the case & several, as noted above, to remain open to the possibility that the whole process can be understood etsi deus non daretur.”
Mr. Murphy, I don’t think you should assume that all ASA members can translate Latin, and I think the casual dropping of Latin phrases is unhelpful. (For the non-Latinists out there: the Latin at the end means, literally: “as if God were not given”, but more freely: “as if God were not there”. The meaning is that the process of evolution no more needs the direct intervention of God than the movement of a falling rock needs it.)
In any case, it’s very generous of you not to “dogmatically rule out miraculous divine action at a few points in the process” of creation. I’m sure God appreciates that. Should we infer that you DO rule out miraculous divine action for most of the process of creation?
You know, it’s odd. I spend a lot of time, so to speak, among ID folk, and they don’t make nearly as many statements about what God would have done, wouldn’t have done, could have done, might have done, must have done, as TE people do. What gives TE people their confidence that they know so much about the nature, will, and activity of God? Do they have a direct pipeline to him, and does he tell them? If so, it must be nice to be so close to the Creator. We ID people must be Ishmael to TE’s Isaac, because we just aren’t in on the divine information loop. We have to do really boring things, like go out and investigate nature and find out what God in fact HAS done. And so far, we’ve found out that he sustains the universe with apparently regular natural laws, and that he causes species to reproduce their kind with astonishing regularity, with only small variations. We’ve found that, on both the morphological and genetic levels, discontinuity, not continuit!
y, is the dominant fact in the arrangement of types of living things. We have not discovered how most species came into being. We have discovered some tentative evidence, certainly not decisive, that new species and possibly one or two higher taxonomic levels have been formed exclusively by Darwinian processes, without any need for a supervening design. We have discovered no evidence that major structural changes have been brought about by purely Darwinian means, without input from some design. Further, we have no clear conception of how life could have formed without a designing intelligence. And we are hesitant to address these unsolved problems by saying how God would have or might have or probably proceeded. God just hasn’t told us.
If we can believe the Bible (as many ID people do), God has told us that he created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. He has not told us that he did it “naturalistically”; he has not told us that he did it “without miraculous intervention”. He has not told us that he did it “kenotically”. He has not told us that he deliberately concealed all marks of design in his creation so that there would still be “room for faith”. He has not told us that he used an indirect process of evolution rather than direct creation, in order not to dirty his hands with “the problem of evil”. He has not told us any of these things that TE people seem to know with near-certainty. And perhaps Christian ID people are too pedestrian, and not theologically adventurous enough, but, for better or worse, they are hesitant to go too many steps ahead of what they believe God has said. I wonder if something like this isn’t at the heart of ID/TE tensions, as much!
as any disagreement about the science behind evolution.
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