Quoting Cameron Wybrow <wybrowc@sympatico.ca>:
> As one of Einstein's colleagues said to
> him: "Albert, stop telling God what to do!" I think that my biggest
> problem with TEs, other than their uncritical acceptance of Darwinian
> explanations, is their tendency to tell God what he must do, if he's to be
> the kind of God that they deem worthy of worship. Fortunately, God does not
> really pay much attention to such instructions from his creatures, and so it
> may well be that he has rather uncooperatively left evidence for his
> existence in nature. The possibility is at least worth investigating. ID
> people, who are less interested in guessing what a God of a certain
> preferred kind would probably have done, and more interested in finding out
> what the actual God has in fact done, spend their time undertaking ...
Just as you want others to hold ID investigators in a more charitable light
regarding their motivations (i.e. that they are merely searching for truth --not
trying to promote religious doctrines), so you could hold TEs in a more
charitable light. TEs would strongly disagree with you characterization here
and insist that they are merely trying to look at what God *already has* done
and is still doing. They would have no truck with this notion of setting
boundaries for God. In fact, it is precisely the unbounded potential of Divine
activity that elevates attributions to God beyond the limited reach of science.
And I admit this cuts both ways. God could leave scientifically detectable
things as hints for us to see -- though at some point faith is needed to bring a
person *the rest of the way* towards a Christian (or any religious) conviction.
But it seems to me that TEs as much as anybody have been the most willing to
embrace the strongest hint of all: "Creation's broad display..." --indeed the
existence of everything / anything whether it be ordinary or extraordinary as
the display of God's power in action. And it would seem that perhaps others
have had the most problems attributing all this to God, wanting to limit God's
credit to merely the extraordinary.
--Merv
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Received on Wed Oct 14 07:16:18 2009
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