Well, sure, somebody indeed can say that if it works well by itself that there is no need for God to exist. But the same way you could say that Bible causes people to lose faith and has potential to erase God because some of them will interpret God as cruel and self-contradicting and conclude he doesn’t exist (just as many atheists do).
But we aren’t going to trash the Bible just because it can be interpreted like that are we? Just the same we won’t trash science just because someone interprets that God is unnecessary on it’s basis.
Another example is how one could say hundreds of years ago that trying to explain weather without God’s influence will make God unnecessary and therefore we should ignore science that tries to explain the weather but here we are, accepting modern understanding of weather and while some for sure will use it to say “there’s no need for God” believers don’t have any problems with it.
One may be afraid that when we dig too deeply, there will finally be evidence for things like: God doesn’t exist (or doesn’t care about us), christianity is a hoax, world is completely deterministic, free will is just an illusion and etc.
It may be true, but hiding from it won’t make it disappear.
At the opposite side, if personal God truly exists, then from digging deeper and deeper we will see God’s presence and by extension, importance of humanity more clearly. At least if we assume God doesn’t try to hide from us. And I don’t think he does.
So I think the only solution is to accept science, because if world is not made from only mechanical processes then it can be only be proved with science’s unability to reduce it to said processes. And be alerted, I am not asking people to try to measure something scientificially, fail, and say that because it doesn’t work it was made by God. But I rather mean something like Uncertainty principle, science being able to prove that it’s not possible to predict or calculate something.
I’m not asking you to be a spokesman for ID. I’m asking you to expand on your own statements here. You wrote earlier, ‘Biological evolution does a poor job of describing the pattern of stasis followed by saltations that is evident throughout the fossil record. […] ID does a better job than Darwinism ever will.’
How does ID do a better job? What does it actually offer as an explanation, in your view?
So did Newtonian mechanics. In neither case is it an argument against (or for) the scientific accuracy or usefulness of the model.
Every evolutionary theorist thinks the Modern Synthesis is inadequate, which is why so much has been added to evolutionary theory since the Synthesis was formulated. Note that Muller very much does not propose anything other than natural explanations for evolutionary change, nor does he really suggest that physical processes other than those in standard evolutionary theory are at work. What he wants to change is the way we conceptualize those processes in our theorizing. He may be right that there are more fruitful ways to think about the process of evolution, but that question has essentially nothing to do with theism or ID.
In effect, ID introduces the possibility of God into the equation when faced with certain observations that science cannot explain. I’m glad someone is allowing science to be used in arguing for the existence of God.
Unlike Newtonian mechanics, evolution directly relates to the orgins of life on earth, including humanity, which in turn directly relates to the question of the existence of a Creator.
Re cosmology, I’ve come across atheists online who claim that the formation of stars is a “fairly simple” process that is understood by science … this is just one instance of how they use “science” to dismiss the need for a Creator. But how can anyone possibly know exactly what it takes for a star to form? My rely to their claim is,
“Well, you would know, having built many a star yourself.”
Likewise, to those who claim to know to how novel body plans and organs evolved, I say,
“Well, you would know, having produced many organisms with new body plans and organs yourself.”
Science is not pro or anti supernatural. Science cannot , and does not answer questions about things like does Yahweh, Baal or was Lovecraft unknowingly a prophet for a multidimensional cosmic creature that inspired his writings. Lack of evidence does not mean it’s evidence for something to not exist. So just because I don’t need supernatural influences to understand how a hurricane develops does not mean I need to say Yahweh is fake. Just because I don’t need supernatural force as a value in a equation of how trees grow does not mean I have proof Yahweh is fake.
Consider how the Bible says They make babies in the womb. I don’t need magic to explain how a man gets a woman pregnant. We don’t need gods to make all kinds of things to work. None of that equals atheism.
So if a person thinks just because some specific event can be explained without the use of the supernatural influence and therefore it means God is fake then that person is being influenced by two paradigms that are false.
The paradigm of atheism that says since Yahweh is not needed they are fake.
OEC / YEC / ID that says it’s fake science being employed because real science indicates the supernatural is necessary for it to work.
So they are in a position of influence that demands science or god to be fake. They are stuck between a imaginary rock and fictional hard place. With the views of something like evolutionary creationism / theistic evolution which just means a Christian ( in our case ) that accepts science and don’t demand a need for the supernatural to explain the processes and we hold to those truths without needing to compromise our belief in Yahweh or his son Jesus Christ. So while atheism or ID type beliefs may encourage a person to pick one or the other the Bible and scientific research does not. That’s why ECism is important because it’s showing a nice bridge that the others pretend does not exist to travel down. If science is going to result in someone thinking there is no god the YECism or ID has no hope of reslly helping them. But EC still can.
Really? The fact that an organism needs oxygen to survive is evidence that an increase in oxygen levels will cause new body plans and organs to evolve?
When did I “put up religion as something akin to science”?
Science is methodological naturalism … that’s quite a different animal to religion, I should think.
Well, if science was about oversimplifying complex topics to extremes and stating they are simple it would be cause for concern, thankfully, it’s not.
One can obviously explain something in few sentences, just like I can explain beginning of universe as “Just a very small thing with a lof of energy inflating into a very big thing”. But that doesn’t give this topic justice and is probably not even correct.
Science on the other hand, tries it’s best to understand the topic as well as possible with logical and reliable methods, the atheist in question probably was exaggerating to make a point but he would probably fail to explain how exactly it works, what happens inside, why it happens, just like in any fairly complex topic, there could be book or five to explain it and there would still be something to add.
Thanks to science we can more fully understand how complex this world is and so we can be more amazed with God’s creation. Some may try to convince others that science is on their side and proves their ideology but that’s not true. Science doesn’t side with no one, it simply tries to explain things.
I hung out with some folks from The Philadelphia Church of God. I still read “The Trumpet” magazine.
I became quite anti-Catholic myself.
I was brought up in a very Catholic environment, but after I left school I drifted away from Christianity. Many years later I was drawn back to Christianity via various non-Catholic forms, then eventually back to the Catholic Church.
Well bugger me dead … I’d fair-dinkum never heard of Aussie-speak referred to as “Strine”.
Told by saltationists like Gould and Eldredge, for example.
I don’t look at fossils and I don’t determine anything from them. Instead, I listen to experts like (the aforementioned Gould and Eldredge and) German paleontologist, Gunter Bechly, who is also a “saltationist” … and an advocate of ID.
(Günter Bechly is a distinguished scientist who has authored or co-authored about 150 scientific publications, has discovered and named more than 160 new species, and has 10 biological groups named in his honor.)
The number of fossils known from only one good specimen is impressively high. But, it’s not too often that a superfamily is known as a fossil from only one specimen, but Tjaernoeia is that way (there are only 4 known recent species, all rare and deeper (>40 m) water). Tjaernoeia is about as similar to anything else known (Murchisonellids seem to be closest) as tyrant-flycatchers are to wood-warblers (or alternatively, pittas to old world sparrows).
Given that there are recognizable murchisonellids in the Devonian, that is an old split.
I used to be an ID proponent until I realized that ID is not science. Why it should not be fine with you is that it masquerades as science but then turns out to be an emperor with no clothes. Our intuition is correct, that there is design, but it is lowercase ‘id’.
When God orchestrates the timing and placing of events in his providence, can we point to the details of necessary precursor events scientifically? No, we cannot. The deception of the ID community, intentional or otherwise, should not be fine with you. God does not need to fill in the gaps of fallacious thinking with miracles.
Yes, well I guess you would know how God brought the various phyla of organisms into existence, having brought many different phyla of organisms into existence yourself.
Longman once made a comparison between the providential work in the book of Ruth and creation. I’m pretty sure it was Ruth, and keep thinking I need to go back and look at it further.
