Awhile ago I mentioned I was writing a piece on divine action for the TEDS online magazine, Sapientia. It has now posted. At the bottom of the page you can see a list of all the contributors. Next up is Michael Behe!
The original assignment was to respond (in 1700 words) to the question, “Does Evolutionary Creation allow for detectable divine intervention?” This article is me doing the analytic philosopher thing, trying to figure out what might be meant by the relevant terms and sketching a response.
I’ve now been given a follow-up question to respond to (in 1250 words) on how my “different discourses” view differs from NOMA (which I think is pretty easy to answer) and whether my view of EC is different from Behe’s (it definitely is). His piece posts tomorrow, but the relevant bits of his definitions and conclusion are these:
Evolutionary Creationism (I capitalize the phrase because its meaning is different than the sum of the individual words.): the idea that God created all the matter, energy, and laws of the universe ex nihilo in a single event, in the beginning, in the knowledge that they would develop over time into the world He intended by the outplaying of natural laws
divine intervention : the occurrence due to ex nihilo creation by God of some physical event in the world that would not otherwise have resulted from the outplaying of natural laws following their ex nihilo creation after the beginning of the bulk of nature
Working from those definitions, then, my answer to the symposium question has to be a clear no, because the very definition of the term “Evolutionary Creationism” (EC) precludes divine intervention. I hasten to add that’s not a criticism, because it seems to me that the phrase was intentionally coined to describe a situation in which divine intervention not only can’t be detected, but indeed has not occurred; rather, the outplaying of natural laws is thought to be a sufficient explanation.
Maybe we could crowdsource my response?