You make a good point, but you also reinforce the point that I am pointing out. Your emphasis, your bottom line is God’s Sovereignty, even if it seems to compromise God’s Goodness. Their bottom line is God’s Love even though it seems and perhaps compromise God’s Sovereignty.
The task of theology is to demonstrate how both God’s Goodness and God’s Sovereignty can be demonstrated as perfect and uncompromised in a theological, philosophical, scientific understanding of Reality. After decades of study and research I have found that neither an on monistic or dualistic world view can do this, but a world view modeled after the Trinity can.
This is why I invite you and others to stop struggling to make God’s created reality into a monism or dualism, and try a different view which is based on the Creator’s revelation of Godself to find the answer, which can resolve all this conflict.
With all due respect, @jstump and @Jon_Garvey, if you think that Aristotle can offer a corrective alternative to the scientific world view of today, I a afraid that you are gravely mistaken. There is too much that has changed since Copernicus for that to happen.
Aristotle is not the Logos. Aristotle is a human point of view, not God’s Word, Jesus Christ. We know that God’s Logos is true, even though we often do not understand it. There is not assurance that Aristotle understood God’s Book of Nature well enough to stand the test of time, even if at one time the Church believed it would. This is what got the Church in trouble with Galileo.
Too much has changed since Aristotle. Copernicus and Newton established possibility of the self existing, mechanistic clock work universe that humans could understand and rule without a personal God that scientists find so attractive. This is Modernism. Even though the Roman Church rejected this, the Protestant generally accepted a mechanistic view of the universe.
Darwin was the next change maker. Darwin did two things. He said that we do not need God to explain how life forms on earth came into being, and he rejected a deterministic, mechanistic understanding of bio reality. Modernist used the former to reinforce their view. They used to later to attack Christianity, but in truth it also attacked their view.
WW1 was the primary event that punctured the Modernistic understanding, but so did a new scientific understanding of reality, namely Einstein’s Theory and Quantum physics. Einstein’s theory with other discoveries made possible a new cosmology called the Big Bang.
The astonishing result of this is that science verified that the universe did have a Beginning and it was created ex nihilo just as Bible and theology has stated for a long time. This means that energy/matter are not eternal as Newton implied and the universe could not be self created, because it was itself created.
Quantum physics seems to deal a death blow to all those who thought that science could provide a rational understanding of how the universe works. Thus we have Postmodern thought and a Postmodern world, because all the scientific and philosophical bases for a rational understand of our world have been undermined by scientific thinking.
Jesus said, “You can’t store fresh wine in old wineskins.” You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. You can’t use Aristotle to explain new scientific realities. His time is past.
We need a need a wineskin for new scientific realities, the Second Book of God’s Revelation to humanity. I nominate the triunity model of understanding life and reality. Burtt is right, and it is because we Western humans no longer have an adequate picture of the nature of Reality that we are in deep trouble today. Half measures will not fix this.
Read a little more carefully what I said: [quote=“jstump, post:34, topic:4892”]
There are lots of things we like about Aristotle as helpful correctives to the “materialistic atheistic naturalists” you mention. But we can’t just go back to Aristotle,
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Aristotle was so wrong about so many things, going “back to Aristotle” would be dragging us into ignorance. It makes about as much sense as going “back to Galen”, and his really fantastic ideas about medicine.
He wrote so much junk. We know more than he could possibly have known. A genius in his day, he had the scientific knowledge probably equivalent to a primary school kid today. If we’re going to lionize any of the early pre-Enlightenment natural philosophers, let’s go with John Philoponus. At least he contributed significantly to the Western scientific continuum and the scientific revolution. Or is the idea that we should lionize someone who crippled the advancement of science?
Then there are the old favourites like asking if God hand-made people like David and Jeremiah in the womb (like the Bible says), or if they developed gradually in the womb, over the usual nine months, after the traditional biological event. Because you know, if Jeremiah was the product of a sperm fertilizing an ovum, that obviously doesn’t even rise to deism. Just throw out the Bible, we’re done here.
OK - I thought that either you mixed with an unusually bright bunch of fundamentalists, who have thought about essentialism and read Aristotle, or that you didn’t understand my comment. You’ve clarified which very clearly, thanks.
Your comment sounds like just the same old Fundamentalism dressed up in more pretentious language (I note you didn’t respond in any way to my comment or beaglelady’s, which would have given you the opportunity to differentiate your comment from the typical Fundamentalist arguments). Seriously, Aristotle? While we’re at it, why not also “go back to” Galen the gibbering Greek?
Eddie. I’m absolutely certain that evolution is deployed by people with metaphysical axes to grind. I’m appalled by that as well. I’m 100% on your side with this one. It’s a metaphysical position that orthogonal to the question of biological evolution. However, I don’t believe that this metaphysical position is what drives most of the scientists in the field. They’re too nerdy for be preoccupied with just that. And it’s hard to account for those religious scientists in the field.
With regard to Denton and Shapiro, I’m not happy with their scientific proposals. However, like you’ve noticed with a subset of people who support evolution, I notice that despite what I see as their scientific shortcomings, these two do have a following among those who would like to see some mechanistic, forward-directed ‘intelligence’ incorporated in cells that guides their evolution.
Take for example, the recent popularization of ‘epigenetics’: What some see as a revolution that provide a necessary, broad mechanism for evolution, I see as yet another regulatory mechanism among many. I and many of my colleagues routinely see epigenetics hyped in oncology and disease research. We consider it more of a PR campaign than a revolution. The basic science is good and interesting and we’ll certainly try to incorporate the various mechanisms into our work where it’s useful, but most of us feel it’s overhyped (like many of the ‘omics’ of the recent past). It’s another regulatory mechanism, not a magic wand. People with a a solid understanding of history in biological regulation have been aware of epigenetic mechanisms for years. Differential histone binding & coiling and their effects on gene expression was described well over a quarter century ago. The plasticity and sometime promiscuous effects of regulatory sequences/mechanisms also have a long history. Alternative splicing, plus DNA insertion & deletion mechanisms were discover even longer in the past. Yet when we read press releases and people promoting that a paradigm shift is afoot in biology, I notice that they act like it’s never been considered before. This is why I particularly like Larry Moran’s blog Sandwalk: When he dissects what many “new biology” claimants are glossing over and providing a necessary historical perspective that you might not find in the original sources.
Unask that question, but thanks for the clarification. I spoke about your comment:
Classic gradualistic Darwinism is a clear example of a theory seeking to free itself from essential forms…
There is nothing about atoms being essential forms (one atom being largely interchangeable with another) and organisms being built of clusters of atoms that precludes everything that exists in the universe being part of God’s purpose. I supposed I do not understand what you mean by essential forms and why evolution ‘breaks’ any connection to God.
We have “gradualistic” theories of planet formation from nebular clouds and evolutionary models of stars. I don’t see how “classic, gradualistic Darwinism” or any of these others are an affront to God’s sovereignty. Is gradualistic Darwinism or any physical evolutionary mechanism so inseparable from atheistic or Deistic metaphysics that Christian theological understanding must reject it? Or is the problem the suggestion that organisms have changed and turned into new species over the history of life? I’m sorry but I just don’t see such distinctions providing a useful indicator about where God is sovereign and where He is not.
LOL, who gives a flying fig about what the Dawks says? I’ve always thought that statement was dumb. Maybe germ theory and plate tectonic theory and gravitational theory did the same thing for him.
You replied to disagree with my point about Darwinian evolution and essential forms, but you say you don’t know what “essential forms” mean in philosophy, which kind of weakens your case. My initial reply to Caspar was that such things are at the very heart of the integration of science and faith, as opposed to just popular science and a vaguely evangelical religiosity.
My point was nothing to do with God’s sovereignty, but about the coherence of the very concept of God, or any other essential form, such as that of a human being, or a planet, or (in the context of Darwin) a species. If there are no such universals, then a statement like “God creates through evolution” is problematic regarding its subject, and problematic with regard to what the verb covers - especially if one regards certain universals as being privileged in specific ways such as “human beings” who share (in a universal way, as an essential form called “man”) rationality, propensity to sin, eternal life, being redeemed by Christ, etc, etc.
Post-Aristotelian metaphysics dispensed with the concept of essences, as you so ably described in the relationship of planets to atoms. Darwin’s concept (though he was not the first - it was intrinisc to the rise in evolutionary thinking, which in turn arose from the shift in metaphysics) was that there were no species, really, but a continuum of (to use the old scholastic parlance) “accidental” forms. In other words, there were only transient agglomerations of matter. His discussion of the arbitrariness of taxonomy in the first few chapters of Origin makes that clear.
At the same time, I tried to show that he couldn’t actually do without the concept of essences, by the very title he gave his book, which was “The Origin of the Speces” rather than, say, “The Process of a Chemical Continuum”.
All that arose from Jim’s useful reference to “metaphysics” and my reply in kind. That folks on this thread want to reduce that to “Ah, you’re a fundamentalist gibbering with fancy words” is a sad reflection on the ability of (at least the discussion board) of BioLogos to contribute to anything much more than culture warfare to the integration of science and faith.
I’m not an Aristotelian, but I wonder how much of his work those who so confidently rubbish him here have read any of of his work on metaphysics? I suspect Jim has, because he is actually a philosopher, and is less dismissive.