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June 15, 2005

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» Intelligent Design and the Hunt for Divine Easter Eggs from Virtual Fret Noise
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Comments

Curious

I am afraid I do not find your logic quite follows - "God's design while not hidden from His children is **thus** hidden from science." The argument from ID is that not ALL designs are hidden from science. In other words, you have to show that God's design MUST be hidden from science. The question is How do you know? The strength of the ID argument is really a scientific one and not a biblical one, granting that the biblical account may be unclear.

IDiot

The strength of the ID argument is that it is not testable and it predicts nothing.

Rich

Design is hidden from science because God is ordered. Science sees the order and goes: A ha! Natural law. Faith sees past the natural law to the law giver. Thus both faith and science can look at the same facts and come to different conclusions. ID makes it an argument over the facts and looks silly in the process.

StrawDog

Greetings;

You mention Philip Johnson thinking you're worse than an aethist. I'm assuming you're talking about comments in his PyroManiac blog? I think a link would be appropriate to substantiate this comment. I respect the BlinneBlog and I also respect PyroManiac, and would be interested to see what you two have to say about eachother.

Rich

Johnson was asked about the so-called big tent by Hank Hanegraaf on his Bible Answer Man radio program. February 21,2003:

Now, if you want, Hank, I can even get to the most explosive question of all: what do I do about the division between the young-earth creationist and the old-earth creationists? I’ve been building a big tent movement. I’ve wanted to unite the divided people - that’s the Christians, and divide the united people - that’s the evolutionary naturalists. So I’ve had to develop good relations between the people in the old earth way of thinking and also the young earth creationists, and I’ve had a great deal of success in doing it. I’ve been well treated on both sides.

Hank Hanagraaph: And if your asking the right questions, then this becomes a intramural debate, a collegial debate, that we can have, once we’ve established the right premise: in the beginning ....

Johnson: That’s correct. We don’t have to agree, particularly right at the start. We just have to have a civilized way of talking about it, about what we disagree on, that enables us to make some progress towards agreeing.

Then Johnson was asked of Ken Miller, a Roman Catholic evolutionist, by Hank Hanegraaf:

I can say this. You often find the greatest enemies of Christ in the church, even in high positions. There is a kind of person who may be sincere in a way, but is doubleminded - who goes into the church in order to save it from itself, by bringing it into concert with evolutionary naturalism, for example. These are dangerous people - they are more dangerous than an outside atheist like Richard Dawkins, who at least flies his own flag.

So I am not impressed that somebody says that he is a Christian of a traditional sort and believes that evolution is our creator. This is, at the very least, a person whose mind is going in two directions. Such people often do a great deal of damage within the church.

Now it is untrue that we say that evolution is our creator but I get no indication that Johnson would distinguish that from evolutionary creationists like myself.

I believe that Johnson's fundamental error is that he tends to conflate positions together (e.g. philosophical and methodological naturalism). Having been in the PCUSA once (Johnson is a member of a conservative PCUSA church) I understand the suspicion. That was one of the reasons I posted this to help allay such a suspicion.

Rich

Is science the way we find out the God is the Creator? Not according to the author of Hebrews.

Hebrews 11:1-3

1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2This is what the ancients were commended for.
3By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Anselm's motto reflects this truth: "Credo ut intelligam". I believe that I may understand. ID stands this Biblical truth on its head.

Rich

The Pyromaniac blog is not the same Phillip Johnson I was quoting. That is Philip Johnson (one l), the Reformed Baptist and promoter of all things Spurgeon. I sure hope I don't show up on his really bad theology list!

StrawDog

Thanks Rich...I understand now. And thanks for providing all that extra information, even though it didn't turn out to be the Philip Johnson I thought it was. It is all useful to me just the same.

Curious

I still do not see how you can show that God's design ***NEED NOT*** be hidden from science, when believing through faith that "God's design while not hidden from His children". Also I do not see Johnson's position is of any relevance to the discussion here.

Curious

Let see your logic here: God is ordered, therefore natural law **AND** God's design is hidden!
What I have difficulty with your logic is the second part - How did you come up with:

God is ordered, therefore God's design is hidden?

Curious

Also, why should God ALWAYS be ordered? God can will what He wants, ordered or not.

Rich
I still do not see how you can show that God's design ***NEED NOT*** be hidden from science, when believing through faith that "God's design while not hidden from His children". Also I do not see Johnson's position is of any relevance to the discussion here.

God's design is hidden from science due to the nature of science itself. Not all evidence is scientific evidence. Science is a particular way of obtaining knowledge and is not interchangeable with Natural Theology.

As the author of Hebrews noted faith is a means of obtaining knowledge. The Apostle Paul is much stronger in 1. Cor. 1:14:

14The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Thus, there is a class of knowledge that is beyond science because it is spiritually discerned. The author of Hebrews seems to suggest that the Creation itself is part of that hidden knowledge. Here I am not referring to describing how creation works which science does quite well, but that creation is creation and not some self-existent entity. Is it a necessary inference? No, but given the poor quality of the arguments presented so far by Intelligent Design I have no reason to believe that it is not a true one. Thus, what Intelligent Design is proposing cannot be done. I will address the point that it ought not be done in a later comment.

I raised Phillip Johnson because he believes that so-called theistic evolution is unbiblical. I am raising the counter-argument that I believe that so-called intelligent design is unbiblical.

Rich
Also, why should God ALWAYS be ordered? God can will what He wants, ordered or not.

I'll refer you to a comment I made on Panda's Thumb:

William of Occam provided the philosophical basis of the Reformation. For him the world was not the world of forms establish by Thomas Acquinas and the Scholastics. Occam believed these forms were in name only and thus was a nominalist. There was two kinds of God’s power. The first, potentia absoluta, where God can do anything and be utterly arbitrary. He could lie, he could make sin virtue and vice versa. Or there is potentia ordinata where God has decided to covenant with creation and operate in that manner. It is in this context we find his famous razor. The entities referenced above are Thomistic forms.

Occam held to the Bible being the only infallible source of authority, the fallibility of the pope, and the subordination of the church to the state. Occam shattered the scholastic synthesis and for that, Luther called him his “beloved master”.

So, why are the sons of Occam and Luther going back on him by re-affirming potentia absoluta, a.k.a. the god of the gaps? The naturalism inherent in Occam’s Razor is not crypto-atheism but rather the warp and woof of Protestant and thus Evangelical theology.

One other thing should be noted when the Jews demanded miracles Jesus rebuffed them. When he did do miracles it was tied to his message. In 1 Cor. 1 Paul calls the insistence of miracles as a stumbling block to the Gospel. In 1 Cor. 14 Paul rebukes the Corinthian congregation because they were disorderly and God was a God of order.

The way that Intelligent Design describes their unknown and arbitrary god is a god that does not conform to God's self-revelation in Scripture. Thus, Intelligent Design ought not be promoted by Christians who believe the Bible.

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