Evolution and God's Sovereignty (and the BioLogos view)

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@Eddie

I’m talking about the case where the TE leader has an opinion and suppresses it.

I don’t have a problem with that either. No one is obligated to answer all my questions, just because I wonder something. People are allowed to have personal boundaries and decide not to put everything they think and believe out there to be dissected and evaluated and judged (which seems to be exactly what you want to do.) for whatever personal reasons they have, and it doesn’t really matter if you or I think they are good reasons or not. There is no social contract that says if you write something you have to explain yourself to every critic who demands more from you.

@Eddie

And when I bring up the good secondary sources and the primary texts, the discussion ends; the TE biologists, physicists, etc. quickly exit the discussion.

Well, most people don’t really enjoy those kind of peeing contests on online forums, especially when the topic is outside their field of expertise, so I can’t say I blame them. It takes a special kind of person who prefers to spend their precious free time here and not on Netflix. I find it amusing, but I admit to being weird.

@Eddie

People shouldn’t talk in public about subjects they don’t understand. It’s that simple.

Hmm. It seems to me that the whole point of dialoguing with other scholars is to help you clarify, refine, and at times change your thinking. The point is not to keep quiet until you can pontificate on what you understand perfectly so as to bless the world with your wonderful understanding. There are enough people in academia who hold this misunderstanding to make the average conference painful, but just because it’s “normal” doesn’t make it good.

@Eddie

It isn’t enough to have a good argument. One’s argument must be perceived in the right way by one’s opponents, to have any effect on them.

I agree. Maybe it’s different for your generation, but in my generation and those younger than me, you get points for being perceived as kind and open-minded and gracious and intellectually humble. So BioLogos wins points for that. I’m betting they’re aiming for a younger demographic than most of the people who fuss about their communication belong to.

@Eddie

Do you think that the Bishops at the Council of Nicaea were “guessing” when they formulated the doctrine of the Trinity?

I’ll treat this as a serious question, and not just a distracting rhetorical move. I think the bishops at Nicaea were using their sanctified imaginations and the spiritual gift of discernment to solidify a conceptualization of the meaning they constructed from special revelation and the tradition of the apostles. I don’t think the doctrine of the Trinity is “fact” in the usual sense of the word. It’s not an observation, it’s not a logical deduction. It’s a theological truth claim that we accept by faith was revealed in a spiritual way to the Church.

So again, what passage do you suggest we exegete to arrive at a spiritual imagining of how God works in the process of natural selection? That’s where your argument breaks down as far as I see it. Doctrines are established through a process of spiritual discernment in conversation with special revelation and the body of Christ. I retract the word “guessing” but I don’t know a good English word for a process that involves faith and enlightened imagination to arrive at knowledge. You don’t study DNA and come up with doctrine.

@Eddie

You might as well say that Rousseau was “guessing” when he opposed Hobbes with serious argument, or that Aristotle was “guessing” when he opposed Plato with serious argument. You might as well say that Newton and Leibniz were only “guessing” in their arguments against each other, or that Newton and Goethe’s arguments regarding light were just “guesses.”

See, it’s this kind of thing that make people not want to engage with you sometimes. We get it you read lots of books and can name drop all the smart people throughout history. What is the point of this paragraph? I personally think it is more amusing than intimidating, but some people are insecure.

@Eddie

And if he does hold that view, then he has to explain whether such sovereignty is compatible with the indeterminate evolutionary outcomes which are the logical implication of Darwinian theory. If Collins has nothing to say about that question, then he is ducking one of the most important theoretical issues in evolution-theology discourse. That is why I am right to ask TE/EC leaders to answer the questions I specified; they should not be allowed to continue to duck the important theoretical issues.

No, he doesn’t have to explain anything. You want him to. That’s different. And it seems to me that we’ve already covered the ground in other threads that what you think can be thought and reasoned to is not what everyone on earth agrees can be reasoned to. How are you supposed to come up with a textual/traditional position on natural selection when natural selection is a foreign concept to the text and the tradition? And the text and tradition have led people to come up with some truly mind-bending conjectures about sovereignty. We had to invent words like infralapsarianism. Don’t pretend “sovereignty” is a settled topic that we all hold hands and sing cum-ba-ya over.