[asa] Re: Of Martian Sculptures

John Walley wrote:
> I don't know about the others but my TE position of course assumes frontloading, aka, embedded design.

And that, I think, is precisely what I'm saying about TE in my comments in the "little brain" thread...

Ultimately, TE's MUST run foul of somebody like Richard Dawkins because, ultimately, TE's are not arguing for the same sort of "naturalism" that Dawkins is.

It may well be the case that TE's skirts very dangerously with deism when they claim a kind of "radical front loading" - viz, the idea that the potentiality for complexity is inherent in the fundamental properties of matter, and that evolution is then simply (bah!) the "natural" working out of this potentiality. But at least this should be seen as close to DEISM and not to atheism - which should at least be acknowledged, I think. And to point out that this is, in fact, a kind of front loading, and that many TE's do, in fact, adopt it, is helpful.

It does, of course, require two caveats;

First, not all TE's go so far. Many are quite up-front about God pulling the strings in some quite direct way - by "guiding" the process of evolution, for instance. They would view the EVENTS of evolution as requiring direct divine intervention, but without the need for any discontinuity of natural processes.

Second, even those those who think the events of evolution can be purely "natural" - that they are somehow inevitable given the nature of the universe as God has created it - can still acknowledge the possibility of divine intervention in the course of history - in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, for instance.

But putting such "fine tuning" aside I think we can say crudely that TE does, indeed, assume some sort of front loading somewhere in the process. What then comes to the fore are the questions; "where?" and "how much?"

And it's interesting to ponder how those questions might be answered by various parties;

Dawkins must surely answer "nowhere" and "none whatsoever."

The TE (at the very minimum): "right at the start" and "enough to get us where we are without God having to jump in and tweak the system"

The ID: "somewhere" and "sufficient to get us where we are"

At which point the potential for an agreement between TE and ID becomes apparent and the strength of their differences less explicable - or so it seems to me.

Blessings,
Murray

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Received on Fri Nov 13 20:18:52 2009