Evolutionary Creationism and Materialist Evolution

The version of Intelligent Design was not the ideology ID. It was the understanding that the universe is indeed designed by an intentional Being through rational, intelligent processes.

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Like all the infinite others from eternity according to the prevenient laws of nature. That’s the only continuous rational process choice from eternity. Where does design come in to that? God doesn’t have to work things out. He doesn’t have to think things through. And He cannot design relativity or quantum mechanics or stellar nucleosynthesis or abiogenesis or evolution. ‘Only’ instantiate them.

That is interesting. God does not think. God only acts, so humans are superior to God, because we think, plan, design.

So God does not help humans think, because God cannot think?

Then too, if God and Creation are coterminous, then I am one with God and am no way a sinner.

God does not have to think, plan, design. So who’s superior?

Why does God have to be able to think to be able to help us think?

I’m a Christian, therefore panentheist, not pantheist.

Most of the EC people I know would say that science does not have the tools to study supernatural agents.

The thing I don’t understand about ID is that all of science is based on using what we know and understand to measure, compare, predict, and draw conclusions about what we don’t clearly understand yet. There idea is that we know and understand intelligent design because we are intelligent designers ourselves and therefore can recognize intelligent design in nature. But it makes “intelligent design” this abstract thing that is divorced from our knowledge of what kind of products the designer produces. We recognize intelligent design that is a product of humans because we have experience with humans and their product. I don’t think we would recognize intelligent design that is a product of alien intelligence because we have no experience with aliens and what they produce. It is a faith claim, not a scientific claim, that we can have experience with God that allows us to recognize his work in the world. We can’t go backward from recognizing his work in the world to scientifically positing the source. That doesn’t make sense to me at all.

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A signal is a signal, an artefact is an artefact. If God used ID, we’d be obvious artefacts all the way down to our DNA. I find it so strange that a God who does not have to think, who gets it right first time, every time from forever, has to tweak.

Somebody (I can’t remember who - but Baltasar I think repeats it at least) said that all philosophy is really just anthropology. Made sense to me at the time wherever I read it.

Just so we are clear, it is my understanding that a pantheist believes that God and the universe are the same or coterminous, while the panentheist believes that God and the universe are basically the same, but God also transcends the universe, usually like the mind transcends the body.

Thus, if you believe that God and the universe are both eternal, then it is clear that they are coterminous. If so, how does God transcend the universe to become the Panentheos?

If the universe/God is eternal, then logically it does not change. If it does not change, then there is no need to think, to plan, to design. All God would need to do is act as God had been programed to do. That would make God similar to mammals who are unable to think like humans can.

Christians believe that humans are created in the Image of God, which makes us able to think and create like God and unlike other mammals. God made us in God’s Image so we could do God’s work with God and communicate with God through prayer.

Panentheism is an attractive belief system, but it does not provide enough separation between God and humanity. We need to be separate so both God and humans can be free to be themselves, however difficult that may be.

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That’s a move in the right direction Roger. With a long way to go. This panentheist believes that God grounds the being of - omms - infinite nature and its transcendence (together making creation) from eternity. So He’s infinitely more complex than that which He omms, even if He just omms it all. God is not creation is not God. That is pantheism. The panentheistic substance God is not merely coterminous with the infinity of universes from eternity. As to how He does this, He is spirit. Apart from creation, He is three Persons. So He doesn’t just omm.

The, this, our universe had a beginning. Just like all the infinity of others from eternity. Collectively they are eternal. Individually they are not, despite possibly lasting 10^100 years. God encompasses that. And no, He cannot change. Nothing can as a whole. As He cannot change He cannot think, plan, design. He doesn’t need to. It’s meaningless. Yes He acts. He is intentional. (And who programmed Him???) That all makes God utterly unlike anything else. Despite the intentionality. There is just no comparison at all.

This Christian believes humans create God in their image. Including the meaningless mantra that we’re like Him. If God creates it is for the transcendence of nature. We are His arms, we are His body, His work. It’s up to us to be as incarnational as possible for each other. Talking to Him about it can help.

There is no separation between God and humanity at all.

That is not Christian, sorry. There are Persons and persons involved in Christianity, no two ways about it. And God can intervene personally in his children’s lives. Maybe motivated reasoning is causing a very smart person to discard some legitimate evidence that shouldn’t be.

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It was said in response to

Panentheism is an attractive belief system, but it does not provide enough separation between God and humanity. We need to be separate so both God and humans can be free to be themselves, however difficult that may be.

so is hyperbolic.

The fact that there are three Persons, as I said to Roger, and an infinity of persons from eternity who all start out, apart from God’s incarnations, separated from God, in God, unaware of God in God is a different matter. A matter addressed by us invoking ourselves and all others as present in God’s absent presence. That He is in us and we are in Him, in perichoresis, inseparable. At one level. The ground level, of existence including of our personhood: everything is spiritual. Spirit. God. Nothing is outside God, that would be meaningless. Wherever we wander in our minds, we wander - separately - in God.

Sure, whatever you say, but that isn’t Christian. There is still evidence that a smart person’s motivated reasoning is ignoring, that God, as a Christian’s heavenly Father, can and does indeed intervene providentially in individuals’ lives, and it is personally and discretely knowable, and without double-talk.

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The puzzle of the One And the Many is not solved by the word “perichoresis.”

Everything is clearly not spiritual. It is physical, rational, and spiritual. It is both One and the Many. Wherever we wander, we wander as our whole selves, apart from God, but within God’s world.

Indeed! Panentheism is God the dreamer rather than God the creator. The equation of God with natural law is another kind of panentheism which becomes pantheism with an adherence to determinism with no free will apart from the operation of natural law.

That, for starters.
 

That, too. We can be and are separate from God. (That He sustains our being does not make us inseparable from him.)

 
(There is a distinction to be made between rational faith and smart but unwise motivated reasoning that rationalizes away legitimate evidence for God’s personal involvement in individual Christians’ lives.)

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Neuropsychology can tell us what parts of the brain are involved in various types of actions and decisions. But that tells us nothing one way or the other about whether those decisions are ultimately deterministic or not - either possibility could manifest itself in similar neuronal patterns. Likewise, there is nothing in how a neuron behaves that would tell us whether it was triggered by some non-material spirit, totally independent of the physical body, versus triggered by random chemical or quantum variations, versus triggered by some other possibility (or possibilities; multiple factors are quite likely).

Of course, there is also the difficulty that people claiming to prove determinism argue as if the listener has free will to decide whether to accept the argument. They also are rather unlikely to accept determinism as an excuse for your behavior if you were to whack them over the head and tell them to stop making pronouncements about philosophy without understanding it.

I happen to be rather doubtful about free will and dualism myself, but I recognize that neuropsychology doesn’t make good arguments on those issues.

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It doesn’t have to. The exception of divine intervention in the brains of Jesus’ followers, in the Transfiguration for one, Peter’s dream, Joseph’s dreams, Zecharias’, John of Patmos’ (whoever he was), prove the rule that it’s all perfectly natural.

Italics added.

That is a misuse of the word because it denotes the mysterious relationship of the three Persons within the Triune Godhead and does not apply to individuals such as we whose existence is conditional. I am in his family and I am inseparable from my heavenly Father relationally, but not in substance, as you are apparently trying to imply, and he and I are distinct individuals. (That’s a good thing. :slightly_smiling_face:)
 

It is intimacy. Jesus compares the oneness of this indwelling to the oneness of the fellowship of his church from this indwelling. “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21). Perichoresis - Wikipedia [Emphasis added.]

I guess I can see in that how maybe you can rationalize away God’s precious personal and familial intimacy and his ability to act into his children’s lives as individuals, but you are badly mistaken and wrongly discard evidence, even empirical evidence.

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Let’s try this shall we?

That’s the experience of many Christians. In the tradition of their founder as He died.

Again many Christians believe Him when He says otherwise.

Surprise me by finding someone else, a Christian someone, who thinks that reflects anything Christian.
 

Sure, Christians will affirm that Jesus is absent from us physically and that God is present with us because he is omnipresent, and we have the Holy Spirit’s presence with us, as well. So superficially you are using the terms in a way that has a semblance of sounding orthodox, but it is clear that you do not mean the same thing as Christians, since you deny that God as a Person has anything personally to do with individual Christians themselves, and he is just an absent and abstract entity.
   

Christians do believe that we are his figurative body, his hands and feet to do good works, but I hear you saying “we invoke ourselves and all others” to actually become God in a more universal and impersonal sense of New Age woo. Please correct me if I am misunderstanding your misunderstanding.

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