Below is another installment of my comments from two weeks ago on a thread at Uncommon Descent, which I've been re-posting here.
As the conversation wound down, I patiently endured the silly suggestion that my expressions of frustration amounted to my "reverting to a culture war mode" (huh??), then asked a question that summarizes one of my main objections to the ID movement: the arguments, all too often, add up to a debasing of "natural" processes in God's world. "Random" or "naturalistic" mechanisms are too frequently assumed – or even asserted – to be separate from God's real work, such that explanations that provide "purely" or "merely" natural accounts of biological phenomena are thought to "exclude God." Exposing and attacking this blatant error is one of the main goals of my blog.
Well, unfortunately, I don't think I made my question very clear, and Thomas Cudworth clearly didn't understand what I was getting at. We'll come back to it sometime, but here it is for QoD readers, most of whom should be able to see where I'm going.
Thomas @89:
I’ll be glad to leave the discussions of culture-war casualties behind. If you read my response to StephenB again, you might find that you have been too harsh in your judgment of my words. (In fact, I think your comment that I “reverted to culture war mode” is patently unfair.) But either way, I’m still committed to our discussion, and I will let your comments stand as they are, if that means we’re done with that particular diversion.
I’ll add that while I think you’ve been unfair in your characterization of my comments, I don’t think you meant to be rude or disrespectful, and I’m still glad to be a part of the conversation. I’ll also add that we should all work on being patient with each other: we have substantive disagreements on emotionally-charged questions of real import. We should expect each other to behave civilly, but we oughtn’t be surprised to see some sharp disagreement. I’m okay with that (or I wouldn’t be here), and I think you need to be okay with that.
I propose that we wrap it up, for now anyway, perhaps by looking over the previous installments to see if there are any questions we’d still like to ask each other. I’ll start, if that’s okay.
Do you see design in the processes of human embryonic development? (I do.) If so, do you think that a Christian developmental biologist who embraces naturalistic explanations of these processes should be expected to affirm that s/he believes that Psalm 139 speaks the truth?
This is not a trick question; I’m very curious about how the whole natural vs. God thing works out for ID thinkers when considering biological phenomena other than evolution.
4 comments:
I wonder if you'll get further in your inquiry along these lines than I did.
By the way, I just realized that you weren't in my blogroll. I've rectified that unforgivable oversight...
Steve asks: "I’m very curious about how the whole natural vs. God thing works out for ID thinkers when considering biological phenomena other than evolution.
For me, it works out the way I see God interacting with all of creation. I suspect that we (all of creation) are in a great dance with God. We can think of Him as Fred Astaire, and ourselves as Ginger Rogers. Most of the time, Ginger dances on the ground with her own two feet. But every so often, Fred lifts her up off the ground and gives her a twirl. I suspect that's what happens with us (creation) and God. Most of the time, the events in Nature can be understood as Nature dancing on her own two feet (just acting according to natural laws or quantum mechanics). Once in a while something happens -- either in the human realm or the natural realm that is best understood as God lifting us up and giving us a twirl.
Does this make sense?
The other metaphor that might apply is to see God as a farmer planting seeds. The first seed would have been what we refer to as the Big Bang. It could be that the next was the Origin of Life. It could be that the only other seed was the one planted in a Jewish woman in Nazareth, 2000 years ago.
Steve:
Not sure if you still read comments on older entries, but I thought I'd answer this:
Do you see design in the processes of human embryonic development? (I do.)... I’m very curious about how the whole natural vs. God thing works out for ID thinkers when considering biological phenomena other than evolution.
The problem, as I see it, is that words like "natural" and "random" are protean, and change meaning from person to person and discipline to discipline. I've seen a number of writings about what "scientists mean" when they talk about things being "random" or "natural", but in my opinion, these are all mistaken. In reality, there is no universal "scientific" definition of "natural", or of "random". They can mean different things depending on the context in which they are used, just as they can in ordinary, non-scientific conversation.
With that out of the way, I'll pinpoint what I think the difference is between "natural" explanations for things like embryological development and evolution.
When we say that an embryo develops "naturally" or by a "natural mechanism", we mean that the immediate cause of the embryo's development is an automatic (that is to say, not possessing a mind) process. However, that doesn't in any way imply that the process in question was unintended, or even that that particular embryo was unintended.
To give an analogy, when I finish writing this post, and press the "Publish" button, my computer will send the string of ASCII that I wrote as a series of binary packets, which will be pieced together by your web server. The web software on your server will store the string of ASCII in a database, and when you read it, that text will be sent from the server to your computer.
So, the immediate cause of my post, which you are now reading, is a "natural process" in the same sense as embryological development is: it is automated and mindless. And yet this doesn't mean the post was not designed. The process was intended (by software and network engineers) and so was the individual post itself (by me).
In the case of evolution, it gets trickier. Here, "natural" and "random" are used in the context of "natural selection" and "random variation". Darwin, who coined these terms, was trying to provide a way of accounting for the appearance of intendedness in such a way that genuine intentionality would be rendered superfluous. And, outside a few theistic evolutionists, it appears to me that this is the almost universally accepted understanding of Darwin's theory.
So, to put it all in a nutshell: When we say that an embryo "develops naturally" there's no problem, because in normal usage, this implies nothing about whether that embryo's development was intended or not. However, when we say that something "evolved naturally" the standard meaning of that phrase is that the intendedness of the thing in question is an illusion.
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