Re: [asa] Rejoinder 8B from Timaeus - to John Walley and George Murphy

> 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.

Tim,

Yes I did miss this response the first time but I agree that it should be is obvious that TE is frontloaded with Intelligent Design. In fact I have even heard Bill Dembski say that if you consider evolution as front loaded then he would be happy to accept that. I agree frontloading should be our common ground between ID and TE.

I think our difference is in the definitions of both ID and Darwinism. From reading your posts you seem to imply that Darwinism excludes this type of front loading and implies atheism. I know this is a popular use of the term but I don't think that is universally accepted on this list. I think many like me see Darwinism as only a mechanism (sans ideology) of RM + NS which is of no threat to the Christian faith.

In addition, you seem to believe that it is not sufficient for ID to have been embedded only at the beginning but it has to be manifested along the way as well, such as in the fiat creation of Adam for God to get credit for His creation. This is what I termed "strong ID" and where I get off the ID bandwagon. As I have mentioned before I don't think this can be known so I don't see any point in making a doctrine out of it. It is safest and most defensible and I think scientifically superior to just say that we believe God worked through evolution (front loaded ID) and leave it at that.

Now this does not mean that God does not intervene in creation after the frontloading like the Deist view. Far from it, I believe in supernatural intervention and pray for it all the time. God may have intervened to create Adam and all the species but it doesn't look like it. It doesn't matter though because whether He did or didn't it doesn't mean he still doesn't intervene today, the defense of which appears to be at the heart of the needless attacks of the Deist view of TE.

My apologies for the strong language but it is frustrating to continually have to belabor the obvious among people who ought to know better but seem to refuse to surrender pet biases for apparently political reasons. If you could accept the above offered definition of Darwinism, then I think that would diffuse this. Your position seems to me to be that we should expect to see interventions (in addition to just frontloading) in creation since that is the opposite of "pure Darwinism" and we know that to be wrong. I don't think that in necessary or justified and suggest this may be a case of overcorrection.

Thanks

John

--- On Mon, 11/10/08, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:

> From: Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu>
> Subject: [asa] Rejoinder 8B from Timaeus - to John Walley and George Murphy
> To: asa@lists.calvin.edu
> Date: Monday, November 10, 2008, 1:49 PM
> Part A. John Walley
>
> I am wondering if Mr. Walley failed to see a reply of mine.
> He had written:
>
> ************************************
>
> 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
>
> *******************************
>
> To which I replied (Rejoinder 7C, Miscellaneous Short
> Replies, October 21, after my reply to Burgeson and before
> my reply to Venema):
>
> ********************************
> 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.
>
> ********************************
>
> I thought this was an adequate answer to Mr. Walley, but
> note his further reference to the issue in a subsequent
> post:
>
> ********************************
>
> 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
>
> *******************************
>
> 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:
>
> ********************************
> 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.
> **********************************
> If Mr. Murphy would care to comment on the above, I’d be
> grateful. But now, onto his Oct. 7 posting. He has:
>
> *****************************************
> 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
>
> ***************************************
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
> "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the
> message.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Nov 10 18:11:07 2008