As long as you keep saying this:
and this:
(and you keep saying some variation of them with machine-like regularity), I see no point in trying to persuade you of anything. Evidently I am persona non grata to you.
For the benefit of anyone else who might be reading, every person I know who is directly involved with BioLogos (not just people who have written a blog for us or a fortiori who have commented on our blogs), and I think I know them all, would affirm the two claims I made in the first post in this series. And we all affirm that God can, has, and will perform special miraculous acts. The charge that none of us have explained how all this works to the satisfaction of a consensus of informed people throughout Christendom can only be met with the response: neither has anyone else. Divine action is a conceptual problem, and one that gets into very deep metaphysical waters very quickly. The fact that people with no advanced training in philosophy or theology get out of their depths in this discussion and decline to take a position is no more surprising than that people with no advanced training in genetics do the same with some of the finer points there.
Furthermore, Eddie requires that any satisfactory solution to the problem of divine action must be framed according to his understanding of divine sovereignty. That version has a long and venerable history, but it is not the only one, and it is certainly not read straight from Scripture. To claim Pharaoh’s hard heart as a proof text for God determining all things is exegetically equivalent to claiming that Genesis 6:6-7 and 1 Samuel 15:11 prove that God has sinned, because those verses say he repented. God’s sovereignty as determinism fits pretty well with an understanding of nature as a machine, and that is the view of nature that took hold in the wake of Calvin and continues to dominate ID thinking. But that is much more difficult (not impossible) to square with science since Darwin. My theological tradition affirms sovereignty, but accepts it as God guaranteeing the end, rather than determining every detail. God will have his way. I’ve read Zwingli’s 1530 sermon “On the Providence of God” and find it repulsive. (“One and the same deed, therefore, adultery, namely, or murder, as far as it concerns God as author, mover and instigator, is an act, not a crime, as far as it concerns man is a crime and wickedness”, e.g.). If we go that route, even this conversation we’re attempting to have is God determining every word. We can’t live that way, and I flatly reject the requirement to make our understanding of science conform to it.