Re: [asa] Dowd, Miracles, and ID-TE/ASA-List Relations

Wayne:

I appreciate the sincerity and kindly personal tone of your post. Somehow, though, I think we are talking at cross purposes. I find myself not so much disagreeing with what you say below, but wondering how to connect it up with my earlier posts. I think you are addressing, in large part, questions of personal faith that are quite different from the theoretical questions that I am addressing.

Let me ask you a question about this:

"As a Christian, I have to accept that the bible has proclaimed miracles that I cannot explain with my craft."

My response is: Why should you be able to explain a miraculous occurrence by science? And why should you feel troubled if you can't? I don't see the problem here. If God parted the waters of the Red Sea in the way that the story depicts, why should we expect that we should be able to understand how that could happen? Luther didn't try to find out the natural causes behind such miracles. Nor did Calvin. Nor did any of the great medieval saints, or any of the ancient martyrs. Last I heard, neither did American theologians like Jonathan Edwards or J. Gresham Machen. It is very odd to suggest (a) that scientific explanations should be findable for Biblical miracles; and (b) that there would be any spiritual value in knowing such explanations even if they were available. The stories were not written as a challenge to our scientific ingenuity. They were written to express the mighty works of God in the life of Israel. To approach the miraculous events as technical problems to be solved is to approach them in a modern secular spirit that was alien to the spirit of the Biblical writers and the original readers alike. So I am not expecting you or anyone to explain any miracle scientifically, and I am not blaming you or anyone for failing to do so.

The point of my original post to Ted was not that TEs should do a better job of explaining miracles; it was that many TEs seem to have serious doubts about the very *occurrence* of the majority of the miracles. And lying behind that hesitation to accept the events, in my view, is the determination that "naturalism" must reign, not only now, but at all moments in the past. Once that attitude is universal among "enlightened" Christians, the exceptions insisted upon by Ted and/or George, e.g., the virgin birth and the physical resurrection, cannot long be maintained. (They can of course be maintained throughout the lifetimes of Ted and George; but in the long run of Western culture, they cannot and will not be maintained, unless the presumption of naturalism regarding past events is dropped.)

On another point: I never denied that belief in Scripture requires trust. But that has nothing to do with intelligent design. Intelligent design is not about Scripture. It's about discerning God's fingerprints in the book of nature. Many people here seem to think that it is a mark of great piety to deny that we can discern God's fingerprints in the book of nature. But this distaste for seeing God's wisdom in nature is historically a modern one. Traditional Christians were quite comfortable with the idea.

You wrote:

"This may also hit on why it is that ID can be questioned theologically (which you raise in a different post). It is basically another attempt at proving God. If God could be proved, there would be no need for salvation by Grace through Faith. Just present the straight facts, and anyone who refused to believe in Jesus would be well deserving of damnation. Not even a reprobate. Deserving! Simple as that. But even St Augustine in his time recognized that salvation is not coming through intellectual efforts or any other way for that matter. St Paul saw that too. That was not the age of Enlightenment and science and reasons. The founding fathers of the Church saw that God even has to give us the faith which he extends by His Grace; long before any of the current issues with science arose."

I am not sure how much ID material you have read, Wayne, but I have read thousands of pages of it, so let me give you the short version of ID on the issue you raised. ID does not attempt to prove that the "designer" it detects in nature is the Triune God of Christianity. The identification of the designer with the Christian God is for every ID proponent a matter of faith, not of science. Period. If anyone has told you anything different about ID on this point, they are either ignorant of the ID position or lying out of malice toward ID.

Thus, the knowledge of God's existence available through ID, which is very meagre, is not salvific knowledge. It does not compete with the Gospel. It does not render the Gospel unnecessary.

The position of ID on this is not different from the position of Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived, and certainly the most philosophically competent. And I will stand corrected if someone will provide textual counter-evidence, but I am told that Calvin himself accepted a limited natural theology of the sort implied by ID, and Calvin can hardly be accused of saying that human reason can substitute for faith in Christ.

I have said all this before, to other ID critics here and elsewhere, but they are apparently hard of hearing, because they neither refute my point nor agree with it, but keep arguing against it as if I have never made it. There seems to be a pathological stubbornness against the reception of alternate viewpoints, and even against the reception of correct information, among several of the "orthodox TEs" on this list. I'm hoping that you don't share in this pathology, and that you will grasp my point instantly, and will either accept my correction of your mis-impression concerning ID (which is offered in good will), or, if you think I am wrong, will disprove it, by providing passages from the ID theorists or from classical Christian theologians or from the Bible, to show me where I am wrong.

Cameron.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: dawson wayne
  To: Cameron Wybrow
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 9:54 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Dowd, Miracles, and ID-TE/ASA-List Relations

  Cameron:

  Perhaps lately, I don't post so much. However, I have commented from time to time in the past on this list. As an ASA member, I will speak for myself.

  Yes, you raise a significant issue. One that serious scientific types like myself wrestle with constantly. Being a theoretical physicist in the biosciences and currently working on theoretical problems in that field, I basically have to struggle with this question starting every morning when I pray and going on throughout the day. It is not like I have not been questioned by colleagues (the majority of who purport themselves to be religion free) and it is not like I have not had something that they could focus on.

  As a Christian, I have to accept that the bible has proclaimed miracles that I cannot explain with my craft. There may be theological grounds for rejecting the claims or pointing out that the purpose of a Biblical text (such as Jonah) was not intended to be read literally. Certainly, some of the arguments are persuasive though some might chose to call that "compromising". I am not a theologian, and must defer to them at some point. There may be instances where there are plausible scientific explanations.

  In a big way, it would seem that ever since St Augustine (and St Paul) first propounded a theology salvation of grace through faith, we all should find ourselves having to cross an enormous gap that cannot be supported by anything other than that act of God reaching down to us while we were lost in the depths of sin. So if you really examine your faith, you will have to admit that you didn't arrive on some rock solid intellectually irrefutable grounds. You have accepted Jesus on shaky ground; personal experience, some miracle that you perceive as God's act of grace or mercy, some event as it were that made you repent and believe.

  As we grow in our Christian faith, we only come to see even more how God had to go out of his way to reach us and how little we reached for him. I think we often forget why we wear that cross. It is not to remind ourselves about about how we would never do "that", rather it is to remind ourselves just how capable we are to _do_ just "that". "That" being whatever bad things you see in the world. This is what scientists who proclaim themselves religion free seem oblivious to. It would be very nice if we could blame all the evil in the world on people who were well on the road to perdition with a long resume to prove it. Born evil and prodigiously endowed with nothing but evil thoughts. Too often, it starts with well meaning people who intended to do good. How does that happen? Have you ever asked yourself that? Think about how it has happened with yourself, possibly even as a Christian. If you have lived much of any time at all as a Christian, you come to see that that relationship with Christ is _all_ you have between the narrow path and perdition.

  Therefore, I wager that it is very easy to sit in an armchair in a comfortable room and say how one should address these matters when bullets are whizzing past his head. It is another thing to know what one will really do when bullets are really heading his way.

  Now, to get to your question. It is not wrong to assume things that don't have experimental proof of existence. It does, however, put one in a tenuous situation. I can say I believe in miracles, but I can hardly say I can prove them. Am I supposed to lie and say "it's a scientific fact that miracles happen"? What evidence can I present? If you have some measurement of miracles, lay it down on the table for everyone to see; including the atheists and doubters. Are you so sure you would not disappoint them and send them away finding Christians dishonest. Sure, we can argue a case for the Resurrection, we can argue a case for the Exodus, but the last step is certainly an act of faith. We trust that God interacts with the world and may have intervened in the past, and may even occasionally intervene now. We trust it based on accounts in scripture. But in the final analysis, we base our belief in scripture on trust (faith as it were). There is no getting around that.

  I would like to sound like some preacher and claim that "the Bible is True". But it isn't like I have not had to examine myself and my craft and recognize that when I do theoretical physics, I am doing something different than when I believe in Jesus. It is to some extent, a form of metaphysics. There are some things such as in theoretical particle physics where people will believe things such as strings and unobserved particles that may or may not be true. But metaphysics has even less connection to experimental verification than theoretical particle physics, though in some specific examples, some could argue not much difference. That is a different story. Particles physics does have an out in that such particles are _theoretically_ testable for; even if in fact, they are utterly untestable. On the other hand, metaphysics is largely untestable, because we really don't understand it and it would be presumptuous to try.

  This may also hit on why it is that ID can be questioned theologically (which you raise in a different post). It is basically another attempt at proving God. If God could be proved, there would be no need for salvation by Grace through Faith. Just present the straight facts, and anyone who refused to believe in Jesus would be well deserving of damnation. Not even a reprobate. Deserving! Simple as that. But even St Augustine in his time recognized that salvation is not coming through intellectual efforts or any other way for that matter. St Paul saw that too. That was not the age of Enlightenment and science and reasons. The founding fathers of the Church saw that God even has to give us the faith which he extends by His Grace; long before any of the current issues with science arose.

  To sum up, it is not necessarily that I don't believe the miracles of the bible. The issue is that I cannot beat people over the head with them; claiming them as proven facts. I can sometimes offer plausible scientific examples on what might have happened, I can sometimes conjecture, but finally, I don't know what happened and have little way to find out. It doesn't mean they didn't happen, just that I don't have any way to evaluate. If I could measure one irrefutable miracle, that would open the door for others, but that does not appear to be how God runs things; and it would not be consistent with the long tradition we know of grace through faith.
  God give sight to those who know they cannot see, and makes those who claim they can see blind.

  It is true that modern science has made us distinguish between what is faith and what is fact, but if anything that should make us hold on the Jesus even more, because we can only realize just how much more we are sinners saved by Grace.

  by Grace we proceed,
  Wayne (ASA member)

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Received on Mon Apr 27 01:47:49 2009