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

Terry:

You write repeatedly about how God is involved in every single action, every
event, at the local level, and that nothing happens without his will, that
all natural causes and all free will decisions and all chance events are
ultimately dependent on him, and you warmly cite the Bible and the
Westminster Confession in support of all this, and you wonder why I would
infer a certain amount of personal piety on your part? :-)

The rest we've been over.

The reason we need to keep dragging the science into these debates is that
Darwinian theory is weak science. Not just weak metaphysics, but weak
science. There's almost no evidence for it. There's evidence for
microevolution, but microevolution is merely the preamble to Darwinian
theory, not the real thing. The real thing is the claim that the mutational
and selective factors that lengthen finch beaks can annihilate gills and
replace them with lungs, while conveniently and simulteously replacing fins
with feet, and conveniently and simulteously altering almost every bodily
system in just the right way to be compatible with these changes. No one
has ever established this claim. Macroevolution *presumes* that is true,
and then, having assumed the conclusion that it prefers, goes out after the
fact, trying to find out how it all happened. Darwinian evolution is a
doctrine in search of a detailed mechanism.

That's not how science is supposed to work. Science is supposed to work out
theories in the light of a careful study of the actual working of detailed
mechanisms. The Big Bang theory was worked out by people who had a great
deal of detailed knowledge of nuclear physics, Newtonian celestial
mechanics, relativity, wavelengths, the Doppler effect, etc. But Darwinian
theory cannot proceed in this normal scientific manner, because it does not
know any of the detailed mechanisms. It thus has to make a more extensive
use of *a priori* reasoning than any science has done since the Scholastic
science of the Middle Ages.

Thus, where TE says, "Darwinian evolution is one of the greatest of all
scientific achievements, ranking up there with Newton and Pasteur, as
certain as the fact of gravity, as the existence of atoms, etc.", ID throws
down the gauntlet to the Darwinians, saying, "Show us how it was done." No
Darwinian has picked up the gauntlet yet. I will believe that Darwinian
evolution is a truly scientific theory when the books and articles -- the
ones proposing detailed genetic mechanisms for specific major morphological
transitions -- start appearing. At that point Darwinian speculations will
be potentially testable, hence truly scientific.

Does this mean that TE is wrong to speculate about the theological
implications of evolutionary theory? Not at all, as long as TE people
understand why ID people hang back from such speculations. It is
*necessary* to speculate about the theological implications of Newtonian or
Einsteinian theory, because we have confirmed that nature works the way that
Newton and Einstein said it did. It is not necessary, but only *optional*,
to speculate about the theological implications of Darwinian theory, because
we have not confirmed that nature has the power to create radically new body
plans, as Darwin said it did. When that confirmation is in, ID people will
join TE speculations with much more enthusiasm.

Cameron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
To: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2009 6:09 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] TE/EC Response - ideology according to Terry

> Cameron,
>
> You mistaken me for a pious person. However, I do think that the picture
> that I paint here is consistent with what scripture teaches, that God is
> active in every event even the rising of the sun every day. If trying to
> follow scripture where leads makes me overly pious, I guess I'll wear the
> label.
>
> I don't know why you brought in the idea of God striking down the wicked
> man. As far as I'm concerned all that I say could be said of any and
> every lightening strike whether or not it has any apparent role in any
> other chain of events.
>
> I was reluctant to say what I said about ID because I figured you'd zero
> in on it as you did. Nonetheless, you yourself are an example--
> you keep insisting on some activity from God that makes a difference.
> This is where we are at an impasse. God's activity always makes a
> difference--it's part of his governing activity.
>
> Also, I fully understand what you and Denton and Behe and Dembski and
> Darwin and Dawkins mean about *really* unguided processes. I just don't
> think that such things exist. Period. I assume by *really* that what we
> mean is "ultimate", i.e. with respect to God's activity, i.e. primary
> causes. Such an idea may well be at the heart of Darwin's personal views.
> But Darwin's personal views could well be quite heterodox and even wrong.
> If that is what he means, then he's stepping outside the boundaries of
> science and confusing primary and secondary causes. Asa Gray pointed this
> out almost at the beginning of the discussion about whether or not
> Darwinian ideas are consistent with orthodox Christianity, and he pointed
> out Hodge's mistake in not recognizing this confusion on Darwin's part.
> Most theistic evolutionists since have followed this distinction.
>
> Now in their better moments Dembski and Behe will concede that a TE view
> as I articulate it is possible and is fully consistent with Christian
> orthodoxy. I have it on video from the ASA symposium at Messiah a few
> years ago. I've been tempted to make the clip and distribute when we get
> into these spats. Theologically, we're not that far apart. It would be
> nice if we could focus our attention on the theological question. We are
> in full agreement in our antagonism toward Dawkins and the new atheists.
> I continue to ask--why do we need to drag the scientific claims into the
> debate? The scientific claims, while interesting at some level, are
> largely irrelevant to the debate we all have with the atheists. Why give
> them the extra ammunition of answering the scientific objections, which
> they are largely successful in doing in my opinion, and then claiming
> victory in the theological/ philosophical debate?
>
> I don't really understand why my view is some "third mode of divine
> action". It is the divine action that concurs with every creaturely
> action. The divine action is the primary cause; the creaturely action is
> the secondary cause. The chain of secondary causes can explain things at
> a given level. Indeed, the "chain" of secondary causes is established by
> the primary cause. But the chain of secondary causes (the scientific
> explanation when it comes to physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) tells us
> nothing about God's role. You seem to want to remove primary causation
> from "normal" events (other than sustenance and continued provision of
> endowed properties and laws). Indeed, the mysterious "extra" (sic) action
> cannot be incorporated into our scientific equations--to do so would be
> to confuse primary and secondary causation.
>
> Perhaps some of your frustration comes from my unwillingness to provide a
> precise explanation of how all this works. David Wallace's question about
> my paper (thanks, David, for having a look at it) perhaps gets at this.
> Hodge's discussion of concurrence (drawing mostly on the Reformed
> scholastic theologian Francis Turretin) is interesting in that he
> distances himself from the the details, because in his view, it creates
> as many problems as it solves. In distancing himself from the doctrine of
> concurrence as articulated by the scholastics he steps back and merely
> affirms what the catechism affirms about the doctrine of providence--that
> God governs all his creatures and all their actions. Hodge is saying that
> the scholastic doctrine says more than it should say. In other words, we
> don't know how all this works. Perhaps the knowledge of the "how" is
> limited to the Godhead. We can be assured, however, according to Hodge,
> that whatever happens is under God's full control and that nothing
> happens apart from his will.
>
> I am quite content with that level of explanation. I'm probably a bit
> more sympathetic with some of the scholastics' theology than maybe Hodge
> is, so to answer David's question, I'm somewhere between #2 and #3.
>
> The "extra", the "wiggle room" that I'm willing to entertain is also a
> component of the radical individuality (a la Dooyeweerd) that I see as
> part of God's relationship with creation. Randy and I had a brief
> exchange about this a while back. Scripture declares that God calls all
> the stars each by name (Psalm 147:4). I don't think it's too far- fetched
> to say he knows each quark, each electron, each atom, each molecule by
> name. I would suggest that that individuality is largely inaccessible to
> our science and that it may well be rooted in the very nature of
> creaturehood itself.
>
> TG

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Received on Sun Jul 19 20:31:51 2009