This displays the problem - it is neither of these, but a human construct that biologists have by and large embraced - all discussions should than follow the classical falsification or Kuhn paradigm approaches common to the natural sciences. I cannot fathom how any force can be mindless or mindful, but on this site, such rhetoric is common.
The Orthodox view of creation has been expounded since the first few centuries of Christianity and I was under the impression this was common to all major denominations. Debates have occurred around the transcendence of God and the Catholic Thomist outlook appears to draw some criticism regarding placing God in a chain of causality. Eastern Orthodoxy maintains that God is beyond infinity, and cannot be accessed through human means. This places revelation central to speaking about God. There is ample literature on this, and I am certain no Patristic writings would support such nonsense as “evolution is God ordained”. I recommend @Jon_Garvey and his blog, as he has a series dealing with Basil.
I suppose one may be puzzled on why it was termed Neo-Darwinian after this grafting, and simply Darwin’s theory of variation and natural selection before.
In any event, I cannot find the gross errors implied in Fuller’s paper that I cited - perhaps you may like to point any errors, be they historical, biological, or matters of fact. If you do perhaps we may both send them of to Fuller for comment.
Why do you definitively claim “it is neither of these”, placing yourself as arbiter of what is and is not true? And am I reading your words correctly when it seems you are claiming that ToE is only a human construct?
Theists look at natural phenomena and can believe it is the “hand of God” – mindful. Atheists may look at the same thing and see an amazing coincidence independent of anything supernatural – mindless.
How do you come to this? Just to play along, if as you say, evolution is God’s tool and is a mindful force, would this be anything other than (a) a theological statement that actively involves God, and/or (b) an argument for an intelligence that designs and steers this force.
Whatever position you adopt, it places God outside Orthodoxy and into an arena that is a human construct. It seems that ID, for example, falls short by the very reasoning you seem to adopt.
Perhaps you can scientifically (and theologically) define a mindful and purposeful force - than we can discuss which of us is an arbiter!
I don’t really understand your semantics here. How does proposing God’s role in Evolution put God outside of Orthodoxy any more than proposing his role in any part of the entire Universe?
If God uses a force that is mindful and purposeful, than that force is God, which contradicts God’s transcendence. God sustaining the Universe (imminence) is understood as God’s energies, which are subject to, along with the creation, by the power of God’s Word.
The Catholic teaching tried to avoid God as a cause by referring to activities willed by God, but there is debate, probably made difficult by translations between Greek and Latin.
If you are one of those who takes this controversy seriously, what if we only make God’s connection to evolution as no stronger than his connection to making the rain?
Surely, there could be no controversy about that, right?
My comment is non-controversial as far as Orthodox Christianity goes, it has been part of our beliefs for many centuries, and Catholic teachings (I think Benedictines) are often similar. So I find remarks on this site odd to say the least. God’s transcendence has been part of Protestant/evangelical teachings as far as I remember. Orthodoxy regards it as hyper-transcendental, or beyond infinity. Christ is the Word through which all was created. This is about as non-controversial as it gets.
Your wording leaves much to be desired --just what is God’s connection? Sometimes your remarks amount to providence, and yet they veer of to other matters that I cannot comprehend.
Are you able to respond to my request re the papers you brought up? I understand you have a background in maths so I would value your input. An additional difficulty has to do with the data base he refers to (similar proteins for species used to favour a UCA). From my search so far, I find that 99% of all species on earth are extinct - if this is correct, I would be staggered if the modelling in the paper(s) relied on a 1% sample size. Perhaps you may provide some input on the mathematical approach you seem to advocate…
And I cannot comprehend your lack of comprehension.
Do you doubt God’s involvement in the making of rain - - despite the many biblical references to God’s keen interest in rain?
Can you find one religious or philosophical paper which suggests that I.D. or Christian acknowledgment of Evolution threatens the theology of Transcendence ?
This is the most bizarre objection I have yet seen on the BioLogos pages. At first I had to surmise that you were being sardonic … But now I see you are quite serious that somehow Evolutionary Theory, even when it is God’s idea, throws a grenade into the human perception of God’s nature.
You are going to have to back that up with some kind of supporting article that anyone takes that idea seriously … and that it’s not just something you cooked up yourself.
It is clear that we cannot have a meaningful conversation. For the last time, ToE is the paradigm of biology - if you find this objectionable, than so be it. ToE is not a theological construct, no matter how much it rains and how you think that is caused.
It could be helpful here to be more specific and bring in the BioLogos Questions section. The problematic ideology here (as GJDS writes "attached to ToE, not to be confused with ‘theory of everything’) is evolutionism. Yet just as problematic is the ideology of creationism.
“BioLogos emphatically rejects Evolutionism, the atheistic worldview that so often accompanies the acceptance of biological evolution in public discussion. Evolutionism is a kind of scientism, which holds that all of reality can in principle be explained by science.”
(There is no explanation why they capitalize Evolutionism, but not scientism.)
Fuller’s work is difficult for natural scientists especially because they are largely unfamiliar with the field of epistemology and Fuller is a social epistemologist who rejects scientism and atheistic promotion of evolutionism & Darwinism. He’s also come out recently as a Unitarian Universalist, just like BioLogos’ currently most vocal ‘proponent’ in gbrooks9, which makes him very difficult to pin down (partly due to his nominalism, & partly because he simply covers so much ground in his writings). He’s anti-Jesuit after his Jesuit education and upbringing, but highly pro-science and religion discourse. He’s a secular humanist as much as a Unitarian, but he bats for the ‘religious’ side when the topic becomes highly polemical ‘science vs. religion.’ So the simplistic dismissal by Chris Falter should be taken with a grain of salt.
Notice above in the thread where Steve Schaffner confuses Darwinist ideology with evolutionary science? It’s a similar level ‘slip-up’ to Fuller’s sometimes loose talk of DNA. He understands the implications of Darwinism and evolutionism on society better than any of his critics here, that’s for sure. And that’s a very powerful mind, as un-orthodox as it can sometimes be. Please be careful with Fuller, e.g. might want to check out his “I am not a molecule.” I am not a molecule | New Scientist
Could be, although that’s not what he says is puzzling about it.
Not really the sort of thing I’m interested in – I spend too much of my professional time looking for errors in papers to want to do it in my spare time.
Maybe @BradKramer could introduce a little “sanity check” in this discussion.
You say that presenting God as involved in the process of Evolution damages the transcendent status of God.
But you seem to insist that the same reasoning applied to the process of Making Rain somehow does not damage the transcendent status of God.
And when I ask for a clarification for how the two scenarios are different in regard to transcendence, you seem to argue that the body of natural law that regulates Evolution, as a biological paradigm, is radically different from the body of natural law that regulates the water cycle.
And/or you misinterpret what I wrote previously by implying that I said that Evolutionary processes are a Theological Construct. I certainly never said any such thing.
Could you be doing this intentionally ? I’m not the only one who wonders why your discussions become so “thick” with theological jargon as soon as we start talking about Evolution.
compared to any other natural process the Old Testament tells us that God works with.
Now perhaps this is just a temporary confusion. But it is a confusion that you and I have personally visited on more than one occasion - - prematurely ending the discussion before you can explain how anyone can construe the ToE as so very different from any other natural process which God chooses to use.
@BradKramer, do you have any thoughts on this repeated struggle to interpret @GJDS’s wordings ?
From my experience, scientists don’t really care what it is called. For the vast, vast majority of scientists it is simply the theory of evolution. In the 1940’s and 50’s it was also called the Modern Synthesis, describing the combination of Darwin’s earlier theory with modern understandings of genetics.
If you are interested in the history of how the theory of evolution was developed then I would suggest a really cool and well written essay by Ernst Mayr called “80 Years of Watching the Evolutionary Scenery”.
Mayr wrote that essay when he turned 100 years old, and he recounts his own experiences during the era when modern genetics came to the forefront. He describes the different camps within biology, and how it all shook out when genetics was melded together with Darwin’s theory. Just a snippet from the essay:
“By the end of the 1940s the work of the evolutionists was considered to be largely completed, as indicated by the robustness of the Evolutionary Synthesis. But in the ensuing decades, all sorts of things happened that might have had a major impact on the Darwinian paradigm. First came Avery’s demonstration that nucleic acids and not proteins are the genetic material. Then in 1953, the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick increased the analytical capacity of the geneticists by at least an order of magnitude. Unexpectedly, however, none of these molecular findings necessitated a revision of the Darwinian paradigm—nor did the even more drastic genomic revolution that has permitted the analysis of genes down to the last base pair.”
This reminds me of a quote from Darwin, which you might find interesting. As science started finding natural processes that explained the world around us there was some backlash among some philosophers and theologians, and it wasn’t limited to just evolution. Some even objected to Newton’s idea that gravity was a mechanistic in nature.
“It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers … I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.””
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
That quote is an interesting time capsule from a time when the theory of evolution was first put forward. Thought you might find it interesting.
I think you are using terminology different than others on this site. I don’t want to say there is no difference in reality between your views and others’, but I want to urge you to consider that terminology barriers may be causing a good bit of the frustration.
GJDS’s views make sense to me compared with the hard to pin down, sometimes near relativistic “open philosophy” approach of liberal Protestantism. GJDS’s reflect a more orthodox relationship between science and faith than most others here, that should be easy to admit. And that could be part of the problem too, don’t you think, Chris; the obvious moves towards unorthodoxy by ideologue evolutionists that GJDS indicated?
Please don’t forget that one of the BioLogos mods recently referred to the “theological constraints” of other Christians without acknowledging home denomination “theological constraints”. So yes, let us remember that terminology is used differently sometimes by BioLogos people than is used by mainstream Christians too.
