Your response resonates with me. My mother lost her hearing at 16 due to meningitis, which later led my father into ministry among the Deaf—relationships that eventually shaped my own adoption and life. I don’t take that to mean the deafness itself was intended by God. Decades later, cochlear implant surgery significantly restored her hearing without undoing any of those goods. For me, that reinforces the distinction you’re drawing: God can redeem contingent, even tragic, outcomes without having meticulously caused them, and human intervention aimed at healing need not be construed as resisting God’s will.
5 Likes
My sentiments exactly!
2 Likes
I fail to see your logic.
Being able to heal is a gift from God, whether it is by natural or supernatural means. Like the Atonement it is an answer to a problem that had to exist rather than a design element. Whether the healing is due to birth defect, illness, accident or whatever, healing is part of this life. We have some natural abilities and the knowledge to supplement those abilities.
People seem to underestimate the providence of God by making it only directly from Him rather than part of the creation He made.
Richard
To detect design, or determine whether it is good or bad design, we need to know what the goals of the design are. For that matter, determining whether mutations are detrimental or not often depends on the situation. If God’s goal is to create a dynamic, adapting, diverse suite of organisms, using some basic physical patterns and mechanisms, then evolution does that rather well.
Obviously, not everyone is predestined to be Reformed; there exists a range of views on the degree of prior specifying and determination that God uses. But both our science and theology need to be driven by the data rather than by what we might want to be true. God is the way He is; ultimately our ideas about Him are either right or wrong in any particular detail, just as natural laws are not subject to our preferences. In many cases, the data are relatively sparse, and we’re left with question marks.
In John 9:3, Jesus declares that the man born blind was blind not because of some sin but in order to to display the works of God. Similarly, Joseph perceived God working for good through the evil actions of his brothers. Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, and Job struggle with these questions. Paul sought freedom from whatever his “thorn in the flesh” was. Yet we are not given a detailed account of how this works out in systematic theology. We are assured that God is in control, that He is working a plan for good, and that He knows our sorrows and sufferings. But we are not told why not have things turn out some other way.
Human sin does contribute to problems, even prenatally - substance abuse, stress, and pollutants can negatively impact development. But must humans be so wicked and stupid? Especially, couldn’t I be less wicked and stupid? Being less stupid tends to go with being more aware of the problems in the world, though.
Both the biblical accounts and other historical data, including personal experience, indicate that physical miracles are rather rare events. Even in the process of salvation, God works primarily through the process of having people telling other people or reading rather than miraculous communication. Similarly, we are tasked with working to try to help to address problems, whether medical, social, etc. Why couldn’t there be fewer of them? Why can’t the problems be less exhausting? Why can’t we have consistently good supervisors rather than self-centered rulers? We aren’t told.
Although Jesus did plenty of healing, He also had points of trying to avoid the crowds to focus on more important issues. God’s priorities are evidently often different from ours. If we accept that His grasp of the situation is better than ours, we can trust that things are working for good even though we don’t see it. In C. S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, the main character is told that he had in fact come by the shortest route, but it would look odd on a map.
5 Likes
I feel for you. For that privileged, liberal, yearning. A subset of Frankl’s search for meaning, which covers all less privileged, less apologetic yearnings. For which it’s harder for the liberal privileged to feel sympathy.
What is meant by “swamped” and “overwhelmed”? They seem to suggest that guided mutations would make no difference, which is ludicrous – any mutation that persists makes a difference.
If forget what all he counted; I know that warm-bloodedness and walking upright were two. The were all major items, not details.
That was invoked by Reformed theologians in the matter of lightning rods.
I think Vinnie would (rightly) point out that this is inherently deistic in assuming that God is separate from His universe.
Though it’s hard to talk about the universe these days without being somewhat deistic; it’s inherent in our worldview.
Oh, how true! I actually heard, “I don’t understand that so I don’t worry about it” from someone just yesterday.
1 Like
I get a little confused over all this Deism business as if God must only be revealed by revelation nd cannot be seen in Nature. Paull seemed to think God was reflected in HIs creation but that does not stop Him being active as well. The Theistic view being promoted by many here implies God does not have to “interfere” or “tinker” as if by doing so it somehow diminishes Him. It is all very well to think that there is no need for direct action if there is a system in place but as soon as you introduce individuality and independent thought no system can possibly second guess it all.
Richard
That has nothing to do with Deism. Deism treats Creation like a machine God set in motion and maybe sometimes bothers to interact with.
1 Like
“Swamped” meant that there are so many mutations occurring that if the number of guided mutations is low enough to be undetectable, it’s also too low to have an effect.
If every possible mutation happens about twenty times per generation - which is the case for humans - then a few specific guided mutations wouldn’t make any difference - they’re just duplicating something that would happen anyway, and are going to be outnumbered and probably outcompeted by other unguided mutations, especially if the unguided mutations give a survival benefit that is in opposition to the guided ones.
But would they persist? Mutations that are guiding evolution towards a particular goal aren’t necessarily advantageous to survival, so wouldn’t necessarily persist.
Even if they were advantageous, there is so much competition for survival in many species, including some of those in the human lineage, that survival of the organisms containing the guided mutations would also have to be influenced.
There’s no point in guiding mutations in, say, 1000 of the offspring of a particular species if none of them survive to adulthood. because the survival rate of that species is 1 in a million. Guiding the mutations isn’t enough.
The point is that because of the large number of mutations that occur naturally and the low survival rate of many organisms, you can’t have guidance that is both statistically undetectable and successful.
Then he wasn’t counting mutations - since both of those would involve many, many mutations - but innovations.
1 Like
O wow.
Now you have really done it.
Mutation guiding?
What part of ToE is that from?
Richard
It’s not from ToE. I was talking about the consequences of your claims of guided mutations.
1 Like
I am not quickly finding any authentication of significant theological objection to lightning rods. Asimov made the claim but he didn’t check accuracy on such matters. I locate a reference to one Amish group objecting, and to popular spouting off that threw in bits of biblical language, but nothing more on a quick search.
If all things are guided, then mutations are guided. Richard seems to be advocating occasional miracle-style nudges to the system. Strategic intervention like that might direct evolution along a particular path, without leaving obvious traces. Whether such an approach is more theologically likely than alternatives obviously is a question that the scientific data cannot address. A similar result would be achieved by designing the entire system to arrive at the goal without requiring nudges. The lack of nudges might be a deistic approach, or it could reflect constant active guidance of all things, or some other pattern. Accurate description of the data, and careful assessment of what interpretations are compatible is important, but it is possible to find various interpretations of anything.
Specificity of prediction may be used in deciding between possibilities. A classic example is the precession of Mercury. As measurements of orbits improved after Newton’s law of gravitation was developed, it became clear that Jupiter and Saturn showed influence of something else, leading to the discovery of Uranus and Neptune. Mercury’s orbit also doesn’t quite match, leading to ideas about a planet further in. Einstein’s corrected gravitational formulas exactly predicted the adjustment, wheras other planets could give all sorts of values to tweak Newton.
3 Likes
- Including, I assume, embryonic Intersex development, and these creatures https://www.youtube.com/@OutofPlaceZoologist/videos, and that’s just “living creatures”.
- If one proposes “all things”, it’s time to look at what the James Webb Space Telescope shows us.
Certainly there are a lot of things that can raise the question “why guide and design things that way?”. But we must seek the best understanding of how God works rather than relying on whether we like all of it. If, on theological grounds, we set our position on God’s degree of control of events, then we interpret things in light of that. Determinist and indeterminist spins can be put on anything.
Sexuality has the problems that there are so many strongly-held agendas and so much complexity that it is challenging to pare away the spin to facts, and even harder not to impose one’s own spin on perceived mere facts.
2 Likes
I don’t remember checking up on Skye’s research into this myself, but I first encountered the idea listening to one of his “Skyepod” episodes (linked below). It sounded plausible enough and I usually trust Skye to know what he’s talking about. Hopefully you can give the below link a listen, but it’s possible that it’s behind a registration wall (I’m a Holy Post Plus subscriber). Let me know if you can’t access this.
Quodlibeta: Lightning Rods and the Church investigates the question a little and doesn’t find good evidence for significant religiously-inspired opposition. There was scientific opposition to lightning rods, and popular claims and superstitions of all sorts, but the “warfare” model-type caricatures seem definitely untrue as a general picture.
2 Likes
Thanks - it’s good to know that this is disputed. Of course, I don’t recall that Skye ever said it was any kind of formal rejection by any governing church body - I think he was speaking of general cultural attitude. And the Quodlibeta author struck me as a bit arrogant (or perhaps of a defensive bent) when (he?) casually lets slip his view that scientists then (and now) tend to be arrogant. Which would also be a common theme among those looking for reasons to reject science generally. So I’m not sure how unbiased his own conclusion would be here, but it doesn’t stop his point from being a possibly needed corrective. If James Hannam was the “clerk” author involved - I’ve actually read his book “God’s Philosophers” and found it very enlightening.
There’s a quote from John Adams about encountering somebody who was rather voluble on the subject but used a mishmash of biblical phrases and popular level science and philosophy rather than a coherent religious position. I can’t find good documentation of actual significant religious denunciation of lightning rods, and the claim generally smells of a warfare myth. Of course, individual preachers may say anything, especially in places like the US with a lot of independent churches.
1 Like
Maybe this can’t be a good comparison, but I wonder if somebody 200 years from now made the claim that there was significant objections to vaccinations back in the early 2000s; would they find significant record to back up that fact at that time? Mainstream scientific literature might not mention it that much. Mainstream published church literature might show scant evidence of any such thing in terms of it making any waves in denominational doctrine. Of course if they searched popular news print from our era, there would be significant commentary about it there, but is that what they would search? Maybe they could also say then that “there is scant evidence of any significant religious objection to vaccines from the early 2000s.” I know - it seems impossible that there wouldn’t be evidence everywhere to be found. Just look back at all the old NYT papers they would no doubt have record of, and find volumes. But a couple hundred years before now, such printing - especially if about embarrassing stuff might not have been as reliably recorded, perhaps?
1 Like