Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

Terry:

Thank you for this careful response.

1. Regarding the specifically theological remarks you make, I would say
that many of them would be acceptable not only to Calvinists but to a wide
range of Christians. I grant that the Christian God is omnipotent,
omniscient, omnipresent, in all things, behind all things, etc. I grant
that ultimately it is God who powers gravity and electrostatic phenomena and
so on. I grant the complete dependency of the universe on God. If we were
merely speaking about theology in a very general mode, and not about the
more precise relationship between God and nature or the workings of
secondary causes, I would probably have very little disagreement with what
you say.

2. But there is still the question how to conceive "nature" within this
framework, and it is here that I find what you and David are saying
ambiguous and unsatisfactory. You refer to "secondary causes", but some of
the statements you make imply that you don't mean by "secondary causes" what
I mean by it (and what, in my view, most philosophers and theologians in the
history of the West have meant by it). I understand nature to have a
dependent existence, as you say; but I also understand it to have a *real*
existence. As George Murphy said, that is an implication of the doctrine of
creation. The world is real. (And in speaking about this, I always like to
commend to people the famous and influential articles of Michael Foster on
Christian Creation doctrine and the rise of modern natural science,
available in a book which I edited.) And while nature is not "autonomous"
in an absolute sense (as if it could exist without God), that does not mean
that it does not have its own powers and self-regulating, self-regenerating
abilities.

Here you seem to disagree with many TEs. Ken Miller, for example, has
spoken of God's respect for nature's creative role (analogous to the
behaviour of a parent who stands back and allows a mature child to "do it
himself"); Van Til (even back when we was a more orthodox believer, I'm
told) spoke of a "fully gifted creation", i.e., a creation which was
"deputized", as it were, to do things for itself; George Murphy has
suggested that "the capacities of creatures" may be quite extensive, perhaps
extensive enough to account entirely for macroevolution without miraculous
intervention or tweaking; and many other TEs, I believe, have spoken of
nature as if it has properties, powers, etc. that belong to it, so that God
does not need to "tinker" with it for natural phenomena, including
macroevolution, to occur.

The ultimate source of nature's powers is of course God, and perhaps we
should think of God as always providing the "ground vibration" that hums
beneath all natural activity, and thus to think of natural activity as in
one sense really a mode of divine activity; yet for all that, the world is a
reality distinct from God in important ways. That has been the general
sense of the Christian tradition, at least those parts of the tradition I
know a bit about -- Augustine, Aquinas, and some parts of Anglican and
Catholic and Protestant thinking. I cannot speak for the Reformed
tradition. I would be surprised, however, based on my reading of Calvin
himself (which is not extensive but more than just a few pages), if Calvin
did not grant that the world had an existence in some way distinct from
God's, and natural powers of its own (however much those depended on God for
their operation). I would be interested in getting some references from you
or anyone here to extensive passages from Calvin regarding "the nature of
nature", secondary causation, the distinction between the world and God,
etc., so that I could read more of his thinking on the matter.

What puzzles me is that you and most other TEs seem to take umbrage when
anyone suggests that anything other than "secondary causes" might be
necessary to explain the evolution of integrated complex systems, and many
TEs mock both YEC and ID for any such suggestion, yet, when I *try* to speak
the language of secondary causes in order to meet TEs on their own
battleground, a certain subset of TEs (yourself and David and probably some
others here and elsewhere), suddenly starts becoming very vague about
whether "nature" (as opposed to God) really causes anything. How can one
answer the question whether secondary causes are sufficient to explain
macroevolution if one does not have at first a clear conception of what is
meant by secondary causes?

I understand what Hobbes means by secondary causes. I understand what
Darwin means by secondary causes. I understand (I think) what Descartes
means by secondary causes. I understand (I think) what Aquinas means by
secondary causes. But I don't really know what you and David mean by
secondary causes. You seem to use what I would call the traditional or
normal sense of the term when your goal is to attack ID for "God of the
gaps" or "miracle-mongering", but then to switch tactics and use the term in
an unrecognizable sense when dealing with some of my remarks. Your notion
of nature -- how it works, to what degree it is autonomous, whether the
causal nexus is normally unbreakable (excepting miracles such as the Red Sea
or the Resurrection), etc. -- seems to be very elusive indeed. And I find
to hard to agree or disagree with a position that I cannot pin down.

I spoke earlier about philosophy. A philosopher would spend much more time
clarifying terms such as "nature", "cause", "efficient cause", "secondary
vs. primary causation", "necessity", etc., *before* discussing the fine
details of God's role in planetary motion or macroevolution. I am trying to
induce you and David to offer this preliminary, definitional sort of
preamble, to explain to me how you think nature works, *before* you then
stitch that together with divine action. But you seem unwilling or unable
to offer such a preamble. I do not know whether this is all tied up with
your particular Calvinist theology, or whether you just think that the
notion of nature and causality you are using is so obvious that I should be
able to get it without elaboration.

3. I suspect that I am working within a conception of nature that you would
find too "Deistic". And perhaps I am. However, I do not see how
traditional Christianity (again, I cannot speak for Calvinism) can avoid at
least a "semi-Deistic" account of nature. If God created nature to be a
reality, and if he gave it "natural laws" discernible by the human intellect
(which you and all other TEs proudly proclaim to be the great inheritance
that Christianity bequeathed to modern science), then in some sense it is
right to speak of the autonomy of nature. In some sense it is right to say
that secondary causes are a sufficient explanation for what happens, i.e.,
can offer (in principle, anyway) what Donald MacKay in a mid-50s essay
called an "exhaustive" explanation for what happens. I believe it is
historically clear that the *motive* of Darwin and of his evolutionary
predecessors and contemporaries was to show that secondary causes were
entirely sufficient or exhaustive in this sense. That is, I believe that
Darwin and his supporters held a more or less "Deistic" view of nature, and
I further agree with George Hunter that Darwin did not invent this notion of
nature out of whole cloth, but inherited it from a number of philosophers,
theologians and clergymen of the previous 150-200 years, who preached and
taught that God (outside of a few miracles, largely confined to Biblical
times) worked entirely through "secondary causes". I further believe that
all of the caustic (or at least condescending) remarks about "God of the
gaps" which have issued from the pens of Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, Francis
Collins, etc., go straight back to this
God-only-operates-through-secondary-causes tradition in philosophy and
Christian theology. (Though Miller blows hot and cold on this notion,
accepting it or rejecting it as serves his polemical purposes, or as his
mind wanders through the field of theology for which he has little natural
aptitude.)

Another way of putting it is this: the main lines of argument that *most*
TEs (and for that matter most atheist Darwinists) have used against ID and
YEC people are based, consciously or unconsciously, upon a Deistic or
quasi-Deistic idea of nature as a closed realm of secondary causation
(excepting the Biblical miracles and, for non-cessationists, a few other
miracles). But the criticism of my analysis that you and David Campbell are
offering seems to involve a denial of this Deistic or quasi-Deistic idea of
nature. So what I am asking for is for you to be clear. If you disagree
with Scott and Miller and Collins when they speak of secondary causation and
naturalistic causation and God of the gaps and miracle-mongering and so on,
if you think they are making *the wrong kind of argument* against ID (I'm
more concerned about the ID than the YEC side of things), then I wish you
would, in addition to criticizing *my* conception of nature, criticize
*theirs* as well. On the other hand, if you and David essentially agree
with Darwin and Dawkins and Scott and Miller and Collins and Ayala in
conceiving of nature as a closed realm of secondary causation, then you
should have no objection whatever to my comments when I speak of guidance or
non-guidance in terms of "what would have happened naturally if God had not
intervened" and so on.

4. I wish to comment on only one specific passage in your note, which
illustrates the general difficulty I am having. You wrote:

> His involvement makes a difference at all levels: sustaining the being of
> the creature, sustaining laws and properties, and locally contributing to
> the outcome.

"Sustaining the being of the creature" -- I check;

"Sustaining laws and properties" -- I check;

"and locally contributing to the outcome" -- HOW?

The third point is the nub of the whole matter, and pertains to the causes
of evolutionary change. My point is that if God "sustains the being" of a
cloud, and of all the electric charges in it, and of the electric charge of
the ground, and if God "sustains the laws and properties" of charge, etc.,
the lightning bolt will jump to the ground *of its own accord*. God does
not have to do anything "local" to make this happen. (By which I do not
mean that he is not present during the event, or that he does not will this
particular lightning strike, but only that, though present, he does not have
to do anything *special* or *extra* beyond what he does in the case of
*every other lightning bolt*.)

Do you agree or disagree?

If you disagree, why?

And if you agree, then would you agree that God does not contribute
"locally" to the evolutionary process, i.e., he does not do anything
different -- does not perform any special or extra creative action -- in the
evolution of man than he did in the evolution of spiders? That is, he did
not have to do special action X in order to get spiders, but special action
Y in order to get man. All he had to do was *to steadily will the
continuance of the laws of inheritance, natural selection, etc.* which were
quite capable of taking care of all the local details themselves. Would you
agree with this? Or do you see God as "sticking in" some extra little
creative action, peculiar to each case? Perhaps hidden under quantum
indeterminacy? An extra action without which the spiders couldn't have
appeared, and man couldn't have appeared?

Another way of putting this is: do you really believe that events in the
world (outside of events which obviously have revelatory purpose, e.g., the
Resurrection, walking on the sea, manna in the wilderness, etc.) generally
are brought about exclusively through laws of nature which God ordained at
Creation and steadily maintains? Or are you holding out for some "wiggle
room" for God, so that even in what we would call ordinary or natural
activities, things do not occur strictly in terms of natural laws?
Obviously we cannot argue about Darwinian mechanisms until you are
absolutely clear about this.

5. Regarding Denton: Yes, quite obviously he accepts the anthropic
principle! That is not at all incompatible with front-loading. In fact,
"front-loading" is the *means* by which, according to him, the evolutionary
goal of man is reached. You seem to have missed the part where he speaks of
his view that the massive "unused" portions of DNA house the "evolutionary
program" which unfolds over time. If that is not "front-loading", I don't
know what is. Further, it is not just the DNA which is "front-loaded",
because the DNA and the protein folds and all else necessary for evolution
are generated from the mathematical structure of physical/chemical reality.
So the "front-loading" was ultimately done at the time of the Big Bang.

On another point, it is true that he does not insist that *exactly* homo
sapiens had to be the end of the evolutionary process, but he *does* say
that something *very much like* homo sapiens had to be the end. There are
many very strong reasons for this, among them that even the most highly
intelligent octopuses or ants would not be able to utilize fire, and the
ability to utilize fire is essential for the development of technology,
without which an intelligent species cannot acquire the scientific
understanding of the workings of nature or of its own origins. Denton
discusses the importance of fire, and the necessary connection of its
employment to a certain primate body shape, at some length.

And whether you like the term "necessity" or not, he insists that the
*general direction* of evolution was tightly constrained. Pick another word
if you like, but he is clearly talking about something quasi-deterministic,
the opposite of chance (and he opposes "chance" explicitly and repeatedly).
He understands the evolutionary process to be much less indeterminate than
the process envisioned by Gould, or even by Darwin. The alleged chance,
spontaneity, contingency and freedom of the evolutionary process are
understood by him as largely illusory. Contingent events there are, but the
overall plan is too well enforced to be thwarted or even seriously diverted
from its course by them. Denton's naturalistic creation story is unified by
law in a much tighter way than Darwin or even the most fanatical of
"molecules to man" advocates (Sagan, etc.) ever envisioned. In fact,
Denton's "law" runs from the top to the bottom of nature, penetrating every
aspect of the world and imposing upon it a quasi-Platonic mathematical form.
His scheme ruthlessly and unapologetically subordinates stochasticism to a
deeper necessity. Denton understands the application of "law" to biology in
a far deeper way than Darwin ever did.

As for your final sentence, it is not Denton's responsibility, within the
task he sets himself, to comment on the Biblical record or harmonize his
views with those of special revelation. I don't say that they *can't* be so
harmonized; nor do I say with any assurance that they *can* be; I have an
open mind on the question. I provisionally conjecture that they could be
harmonized with a sufficiently flexible reading of the Bible. And a
flexible reading of the Bible, if I may speak with a degree of
understatement, does not seem to be a problem for many TEs. But I am
holding off on any discussion of harmonization until I see Denton's third
book, which is supposedly due to come out this year. I am eager to find out
whether he comes full circle, to revisit the possibility of Christian belief
in the light of his teleological and anthropogenic understanding of nature.

Nonetheless, I cannot resist the comment that Denton's almost complete
determinism should seem much more theologically appealing to a Calvinist (as
I understand Calvinism) than Darwin's "laissez-faire", chancy conception of
evolution. Calvin called Lucretius a "dog", and I can imagine him doing the
same (and am almost certain that he *would* do the same) for Darwin; but I
think he would be rather impressed by the thoroughgoing sense of
divinely-planned inevitability that runs throughout Denton's account, and
would see Denton as a ripe prospect for evangelization.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
To: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

> Cameron,
>
> With David's response (and then your counter response) and the renewed
> discussion of front-loading, the discussion has come back around again. I
> have been mulling over a response now for over a week. I am confident
> that you won't be satisfied because my notion is deeply rooted in my
> theology. I do think, contra Gregory, that it reflects a very deep
> integration of faith and science. I am also confident that if you grasp
> my view here and accept it that you will agree with assessment about
> biological evolution.
>
> Also, I find your distinctions unhelpful. Concurrence is the needed word
> that is distinct from cooperation and guidance but you don't like that
> word. Also, as you define things, indeed, I mean guidance and
> cooperation. There is no creaturely ability that is able to function
> without God's involvement. His involvement makes a difference at all
> levels: sustaining the being of the creature, sustaining laws and
> properties, and locally contributing to the outcome. God's role, because
> of his faithfulness, is such that the outcome is describable by the
> approximations that we call scientific law.
>
> It is good to see that David and I are giving you the same answers for
> the most part. We have arrived at our perspective "independently", i.e.
> our views are not derivative from each other in any way. However, we do
> faithfully, I think, represent the Calvinistic and Reformed perspective
> embodied in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechism which speak
> quite plainly of these matters.
>
> George is correct in asserting that the sovereignty of God is the major
> undergirding idea here. I'm not sure his discussion of mediate vs.
> immediate action is particularly relevant. I even think that he
> overstates the case in characterization of Hodge and I'm not sure we
> claim Zwingli especially when it comes to ideas concerning the
> sacraments. Hodge's comments reflect the idea that special grace
> (conversion, sanctification, etc.) always involves the direct action of
> the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that there are not means: scripture,
> preaching, sacrament, etc. but that if regeneration occurs, it's because
> the Holy Spirit has acted in an immediate way.
>
> Okay. All of this is prefatory to my real answer.
>
> The fundamental starting point is with the doctrine of God (theology
> proper). Several attributes of God are particularly relevant for this
> discussion. God is omnipresent. God is immense. God is omnipotent. God is
> simple. God is self-existent (aseity). I don't know how many of these
> need explaining, but the basic idea is that God is everywhere and his
> full being is everywhere and he is not limited by space. It's not as if
> part of God is here and part of God is there. Even "after" God created
> the world he is everywhere. That means the full being and power of God is
> present "in, with, and under" every creaturely entity, every quark,
> electron, molecule, cell, organism, mountain, planet, galaxy, etc.
>
> Now we must be quick to say that this does not mean that everything is
> God. The Creature is not God. We are not pantheists. Not even
> panentheists. The Creature exists separately from God. But not
> independently from God. Only God is self-existent. But the creature is
> dependent. Radically dependent. If God would stop his work in maintaining
> the creature, the creature would cease to exist. (Talk about "making a
> difference.") Nontheless, everywhere the creature and all the parts of
> the creature is (most creatures are not simple but are made of parts),
> God is there in all of his fullness.
>
> Of course, this is all incomprehensible. That's why the theologians call
> these the incommunicable attributes of God. We don't share them. We can
> barely grasp their meaning. Even talking about them should make us
> nervous. But since God appears to us and tells us that he is these
> things, then we proceed. And we base our thinking about the creation on
> this revelation.
>
> One thing that it does mean is that all our language about artisan and
> artifact, artist and creative work, guiding a boat like the a pilot
> guides the boat, concurring the way a politician concurs, etc. falls
> woefully short. The carpenter and saw analogy brought up before captures
> some of what is meant by concurrence or cooperation, but with God, the
> saw owes its on-going existence to the carpenter, is fully filled up by
> the being of the carpenter, every quark, atom, molecule that makes up the
> saw is filled with and empowered by the carpenter. There is NOTHING in
> our experience as "creators" and "governors" that is like this. The
> artifact and creative work exist apart from the artisan and artist. The
> artisan and artist are dependent on the objective properties of the tools
> of their craft.
>
> I trust you can see where I am going with this. You spoke about "angels
> pushing planets". While I'm not so sure that that's the most felicitous
> expression, I'm not as dismissive of the notion as you suggested "others"
> in our group are. God in his omnipotent, omnipresence enables his
> creation at all levels (sub-atomic, atomic, molecular, macrosopic,
> systems). The creature would not work apart from this enabling power, the
> creature would not have its properties or its interactions with with
> other creatures apart from this enabling power, and in the process he
> guides and governs what the creature does so that the outcome of the
> creature's action is exactly what God wants. His guidance and governance
> is such, in his sovereign will, that each creature acts according to the
> properties God gives it: necessary, contingent, or free.
>
> So molecular motions and chemical reactions are empowered by God (who is
> "in, with, and under" the atoms and molecules involved). That fact that
> we can predict their outcome as a result of scientific discovery does not
> mean that they are unguided, ungoverned, unenabled, independent, or
> autonomous. It also does not mean that God isn't doing anything that
> makes a difference.
>
> The extension to evolutionary processes is obvious.
>
> So Dawkins (and Cameron for that matter) may say that God isn't doing
> anything, but if what I say above here is true, then they couldn't be
> more wrong. The task of the scientists is "think God's thoughts after
> him", i.e. to find out in terms of secondary causes how God created and
> governs the world. The scientist makes no claims about how God interacts
> with the world. Asa Gray's criticized Hodge's "What Is Darwinism?" (and
> Darwin himself) for not knowing better. As I've stated before I'm not
> even sure how you would tell the difference between an "irregular"
> God-governed action that leads to some evolutionary innovation and one
> that is part of the "regular" God- governed action.
>
> And again, because God's guidance, cooperation, and concurrence is
> present in all that happens, the fact that something is describable by
> secondary causes in no way means that God is not involved. What this
> means is that the science of the theist and the science of the atheist
> may look very similar as long as they only talk about secondary causes.
> This also means that we can be indifferent as Christians to the science.
> Let the chips fall where they may. It doesn't matter. God is still the
> ultimate originator, sustainer, and governor.
>
> I also want to make it clear that I'm not making any claims on the
> details of God's interactions in these processes. Because of the
> incomprehensibility of God's omnipresence and immensity, I am fully
> willing to accept that all this may not be accessible to the human mind.
> That we say "God governs all his creatures and all their actions" is
> sufficient.
>
> On a side note: I have been looking again at Denton's book. I'm finding
> that "front-loaded" is not exactly the term I would use to describe his
> ideas. It seems more in tune with notions of the anthropic principle. He
> sees himself as being in line with Paul Davies and Stuart Kauffman. Thus,
> the world is created with laws, constants, components, etc. that produce
> carbon, liquid water, things necessary for life, that principles of
> self-organization result in the emergence of life and it's steady
> evolution. I think it would be a mistake to put his view in the category
> of "necessity". None of this is really that incompatible with the
> Darwinian story as long as the contingencies of Darwinism are understood
> to be constrained by the geometry, physics, chemistry, etc., i.e. not
> everything is possible, but only those things that fall within the
> parameters of the way things are (or the way things were created). Thus,
> Denton doesn't seem to insist that it be "us" that resulted but something
> like "us" (mammalian, bipedal, large-brained, etc.). Front-loading in
> Denton's sense doesn't really get us anywhere in my opinion. Certainly,
> guidance would be needed in Denton's program to get to the specifics of
> the divine plan as recorded in scripture or the unique creation that we
> have today.
>
> TG
>
>
> On Jul 9, 2009, at 5:09 PM, Cameron Wybrow wrote:
>>
>>
>> Terry:
>>
>> I never said that #4 was not possible. But as I said to others who
>> proposed it, it's really a subset of #3, since it accepts guidance, even
>> if the guidance is indetectable.
>>
>> I find your final paragraph incomprehensible. Not the English prose,
>> which is fine, but the notion expressed in it. It seems very close to
>> what David Campbell is saying.
>>
>> If God's "guidance" in chemical reactions means only that God "powers"
>> the basic laws of charge, etc., and then the particles, under the
>> guidance of these laws, merely act "naturally", and attract or repel
>> each other, etc., then I have no problem with your view, but I think
>> that "guidance" is a misleading term for it, too far from the everyday
>> use of the word and hence liable to confuse people.
>>
>> If God's "guidance" means what would normally be meant by "guidance" in
>> everyday life, i.e., God literally guides or steers *a particular
>> electron* to join up with *a particular atom* to form *a particular
>> compound*, i.e., God is in effect *constructing that particular compound
>> at that particular point in time and space*, then I think such
>> "guidance" is entirely redundant, since the natural laws God has
>> established can accomplish every detail of the action without any
>> "guidance". As I said to George, "co-operation" of that sort seems as
>> ludicrous as to say that even though I am pushing the gas pedal on my
>> car and it is going 60 mph, someone must *also* run alongside my car at
>> 60 mph and push the car along, or the car will stop moving. Either the
>> internal combustion engine is enough to exhaustively explain the motion
>> of the car, or it isn't. Either the laws of charge and so on are enough
>> to exhaustively explain the capture of hydrogen electron by a chlorine
>> atom, or they aren't. If the laws are sufficient, then God doesn't
>> "guide" anything; he merely powers the laws. If the laws are
>> insufficient, then God would indeed be needed to "guide" each particular
>> chemical reaction, everywhere in the universe. But others here have
>> ridiculed that conception as "angels pushing the planets". And when ID
>> suggests anything like that, it is scornfully called "God of the Gaps".
>>
>> Terry, the terminology of "guidance" that you and David Campbell are
>> using is *just not clear*. I am trying to get you to see that is it not
>> clear. And I am trying to get you to see that this lack of clarity harms
>> TE generally, and limits its "drawing power" in the wider world.
>> Whatever may be the faults and defects of ID theory, its writers are
>> more in tune with common language than TE writers are, and, as Aristotle
>> and Wittgenstein in different ways make clear, it is necessary to
>> respect the virtues of common language -- when it is used coherently,
>> that is -- in order to think out even the difficult and abstract
>> problems in philosophy. The same applies to theology. Metaphors and
>> analogies are necessary in theological discourse, but when they must be
>> used, the "anchor word" of the metaphor or analogy ("guidance",
>> ''chance", "force", "will", etc.) must be employed in the way that it is
>> employed in everyday speech; otherwise the metaphors and analogies will
>> confuse more than they help. The way that you and David Campbell are
>> using "guidance" confuses more than it helps. I suggest that you find
>> another word for the concept you are trying to express.
>>
>> Cameron.

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Received on Sat Jul 18 23:02:53 2009