Evolutionary Creationists should distance themselves more clearly from deism

@Jon_Garvey, I really have no idea what you mean by that.

JOB and other books discuss God bringing the rain … the snow… the hail…

And we know that God also brings miracles.

So… it’s either a Mixture of natural law and miracles… or it is all miracles … or it is all natural law.
It’s pretty simple.

And if you look at the BioLogos mission statements … they provide for miracles definitely … and they also allow for a combination of natural laws and miracles.

So, what exactly is your objection?

George Brooks

None of these people are officially associated with BioLogos. What does their identity matter?

Instead, you would get to talk to most of the people on the BioLogos Voices program, and all the key leaders. All of these people will be there pseudonym free and available for comment.

You are a scholar of religion and science. You can justifying attending for academic reasons, and use your professional allowance. You can even make a presentation. The abstract submission process is open.

Given how much you care about these issues, it seems like a “no-brainer.” You should go @Eddie.

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Just a friendly invitation =).

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A useful discussion of God, eternity, and knowledge can be found in, “Eclectic Orthodoxy”, (https://afkimel.wordpress.com/) and the classic view of Christianity. The following quote may stimulate some discussion. I agree with @BradKramer regarding the limitations of human language, but we all understand that is the way we as reasoning human beings are able to discuss these theological matters.

Christians have traditionally confessed the omniscience of God. It’s part of the job description for divinity. The problem arises when we speak of God’s knowledge of future events. How can God cognize what hasn’t happened yet? Does he peer into a crystal ball? The theory of atemporal eternity provides a nifty solution: God does not foreknow future events; he apprehends them in his timeless present.”

and
Now the interesting thing is that if God enjoys a temporal mode of existence, as … other philosophers claim, then God may well be in the same predicament as the rest of us. What’s going to happen tomorrow is as future to him as it is to us. Yes, the sempiternal Deity knows a lot and is therefore in a great position to make super-accurate predictions, but unless he causally determines human decisions and actions, he cannot predict with 100% accuracy what … is going to do… Nor need this ignorance be seen as compromising the divine omniscience. Just as God cannot do the logically impossible, so he cannot infallibly know the logically impossible. Swinburne proposes a revision of divine omniscience—“not as knowledge at each period of time, of all true propositions, but as knowledge of all propositions that it is logically possible that he entertain then and that, if entertained by God then, are true, and that it is logically possible for God to know then without the possibility of error” (The Christian God, p. 133). Omniscience only guarantees the knowing of that which can be known. The future is not something that can be known, and at the point it can be known, it won’t be future anymore. When will then be now? Soon.”

and
“But can a God who lives outside of time apprehend time in this way? Is he capable of distinguishing past and future and therefore of identifying the relevant “present moment,” thus enabling him to judge whether a tensed statement is true or false? Temporal eternalists think not. In order to make the proper determination, God would need to be active in time at the relevant moment, but the atemporal God transcends all such moments.”

For those interested in these discussions, various references are provided and people can access papers written on the subject. The point I am endeavoring to make on this blog, is to question such phrases as, “God directed the asteroid …”, or “God can choose a photon to make a mutation that …” All such phrases presume a temporality to God’s creative act, and would believe that God is caught in that moment. This is at least a semi-deist belief, as is: “God works through evolution".

Theologically, ALL statements on the Creation from nothing involve all events that we as temporal creatures come to realize within the creation. It is not so much that we are limited by language, but rather we ourselves are within creation and must, by this fact, limit our language claims when these seek to place God within our time frames. If we choose to discuss God and His creation, our language must by necessity take into account our limited understand of God’s creative power. Conflating our understanding of particular objects in the creation with how God does? is to indulge in theological error.

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The general idea that God can and has enacted His will on rain or sperm is not a problem. But the specific claim that raindrops fall to the place where they fall because they are guided individually by God, and the specific claim that human ova are fertilized because God directs a particular sperm to them, is simply not in the realm of reality. Raindrops fall where they fall due to atmospheric conditions and gravity. Human ova are fertilized by the sperm which is most opportunistic and vigorous.

Brad explained it well here. That’s even before we get to the subject of the completely unsubstantiated view of divine sovereignty which some people here are fanatical about.

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It might be scientism, but it’s nonsensical so it can be ignored.

Good science says they’re not measurable or predictable, yet.

Sorry but you don’t get to shift the burden of evidence. You made the claims, and I asked what conceivable theological justification could there be for them. In the absence of any theological justification, insisting the claims are correct, is certainly absurd.

I agree. So what? Meanwhile, any comment on the observations of Adelard and William of Bath? Surely someone with fifty years of theological study would be familiar with this tradition.

Brad has rightly pointed out that Eddie is asking Biologos to affirm bad science and bad theology. He also made this very astute observation.

There’s a raft of theological issues which evangelicals are happy to stuff in the “too hard, must be mystery” basket, but on this particular issue some people refuse to accept anything but a specific kind of theological precision. In particular, Biologos is being told that in order for conservative evangelicals to accept evolution, Biologos must demonstrate that evolution is compatible with a particular conservative view of divine sovereignty (among other things).

But there is no reason for Biologos to do this. Apparently it hasn’t even occurred to some people that such a compatibility may not even exist. Perhaps these particular conservatives are theologically in error. Perhaps the scientific facts are demonstrating that their views on sovereignty are just plain wrong. Until they accept that possibility, and start taking the scientific facts seriously, then there’s no reason to discuss the issue with them at all. The scientific facts are already established, so they need to take stock of the effect this has on their theology, and that’s their job. It’s not the job of other people to come along and try to rescue a theology which may well be broken.

In any case, conservative evangelicals of this particular bent are a minority within a minority within a minority. They’re a tiny scrap of Christianity. Most of the Christian world is looking at the US with complete bemusement, wondering how Christians there have still failed to grasp and harmonize the basic scientific fact of evolution, which the overwhelming majority of the Christian world has already accepted and moved on from.

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I think having him endorse Old Earth and Evolution with Common Descent some time well after the founding of BioLogos would be just fine.

I have yet to find him doing so any time after 2007.

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So you have to be asserting that (to use the example that’s already been tossed out) John the Baptist was unintended by God, then? I don’t understand your position–it seems like you’re just disagreeing reflexively. How is this: [quote=“Jonathan_Burke, post:68, topic:18370”]
The general idea that God can and has enacted His will on rain or sperm is not a problem.
[/quote]

fundamentally any different than the claim that raindrops fall where God wills them and human ova are fertilized by the sperm that God sees fit to fulfill his purposes? Was the sperm that would become John the Baptist simply lucky? [quote=“Jonathan_Burke, post:68, topic:18370”]
Raindrops fall where they fall due to atmospheric conditions and gravity. Human ova are fertilized by the sperm which is most opportunistic and vigorous.
[/quote]

And Shakespeare is just ink on a page! I do not see how this is at odds with an orthodox view of God’s sovereignty. Please demonstrate to me how it’s incompatible. I’m not trying to shift the burden of proof to you, I genuinely want to know your objections out of curiosity. In the meantime, I guess I need to tell 1900 years of church tradition that its view of sovereignty is completely unsubstantiated.

No.

Because the conception of John the Baptist was a miracle. That’s the whole point here. The issue is whether everything always happens because God specifically exercises supernatural power to intervene directly in order to make it happen (as in occasionalism), or whether the universe operates according to natural laws which God instituted in the beginning, and that God’s personal intervention is only occasional. The difference is between saying God could steer every individual raindrop to its final position on the ground but does not do so (my view), and saying God does steer every individual raindrop to its final position on the ground (an extreme view of divine sovereignty). I illustrated this with my quotations from Adelard and William of Bath.

To put it another way, do you believe in gravity or “Intelligent Falling”? Do you think raindrops end up where they do because of atmospheric conditions and gravity, or because God manually steers them there?

That depends on what you mean by “an orthodox view of God’s sovereignty”. I don’t see how it’s incompatible with an orthodox view of God’s sovereignty either, unless “orthodox view of God’s sovereignty” refers specifically to the particularly silly versions of double predestination and other views which insist absolutely every event in the universe is predetermined by God and there is no such thing as randomness or independent volition.

The actual clash between “an orthodox view of God’s sovereignty” and evolution which is specifically argued over on this forum, is the issue of “randomness” in evolution. There are people here who consider it utterly impossible that randomness could exist in the universe, because it contradicts their view of God’s sovereignty, so they reject evolution as a result.

No you don’t. There are several strands of church tradition concerning sovereignty. Naturally North American evangelicals typically tend to recognize the Augustinian/Calvinist/Reformed strands, and pretty much ignore everything which anyone else actually wrote. I personally believe the version invented by Augustine in the fifth century and expanded on many centuries later by Calvin is fantasy, but to represent this as 1,900 years of church tradition falls very short of the facts.

There are plenty of centuries old church traditions which modern Bible scholars and theologians now acknowledge are not true to original Christianity but are the inventions of later centuries (immortal soul, infant baptism, penal substitution, conscious torment in hell, etc), though none of them are 1,900 years old. The idea that Christians could have managed to get things wrong for a very long time should not be very surprising to anyone. It’s the foundation on which the Reformation was built; Luther claiming the Catholic Church was wrong about all kinds of stuff and people should follow his new ideas, Calvin claiming the Catholic Church was wrong about all kinds of stuff and people should follow his new ideas, etc.

The question “How is God involved in the evolutionary process in a way that goes beyond Deistic aloofness?” could be better addressed as two questions: (1) How might the God of Christianity be involved in the evolutionary process? And (2) How does the Christian conception of God differ from deistic assertions? As to your answer, and with much respect, @Swamidass , I think it is an excellent start in the right direction in addressing both of these questions.

I think the best way to engage the first question is by doing some initial diligence to the second. I could not possibly do full service to the various nuances and renditions of deistic theology, but I think it accurate to assert deism as somewhat a product of the Enlightenment (again, speaking in generalizations). A deist may assert (a) of God in general, that he/she/it could be understood just as accurately from “nature” – that is, observations of the natural world – as from any form of revelation – e.g. all religious texts, of which the Bible would be considered the foremost for a Westernized deist. Put otherwise, special revelation is fine but not necessary; something else can suffice on its own or be added. Likewise, a deist may assert (b) a high confidence in the capabilities of human cognition to map, categorize, and piece together a complete and harmonious world-picture. The truth and reality of most if not all things can be comprehended, known, and put together. Like a puzzle, the task is to find all the pieces and to place them in the right location. A deist may also © downplay the role of God in history and the present world, quarantining any and all such instances as “supernatural” (as if God were not active in the natural).

Contrariwise, Christian theology going back to the Fathers (and further, into Jewish theology) (a) has seen God’s special revelation as a necessary starting, middle, and end-point, with all other observations (i.e., theological conclusions of general revelation in the observations of nature) being contingent on their congruence with said word of God. (Isa. 40:8; 50:10; Ps. 119, esp. v.105; 2 Tim. 3:16; Rev. 22:18-19) Thus, whenever one attempts to connect an observation of life to the workings of God it must first be filtered through the lens of God’s self-revelation (recall Job). As a Lutheran theologian, I learned this as the distinction between the Deus revelatus (God as he has revealed himself to us) and the Deus absconditus (God as he absconds/avoids/does not reveal himself to us) but more on that in a moment. Part of assertion (a) is predicated on the Christian acceptance that, (b) in an extended paraphrase from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism commenting on the third article of the Apostles’ Creed, “we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit calls people through the Gospel (i.e. special revelation of God’s mercy in Christ), enlightens them by his gifts (i.e. faith), and sanctifies and preserves them in the true faith. As the Father likewise calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church on earth, and preserves it in union with Jesus Christ in the true faith.” Briefly: the estimation of human cognitive capabilities (and really any capabilities) when it comes to God is one of a complete depravity. A completely accurate and harmonious world-picture is not possible (and could be considered an attempt at justification by works). But any knowledge we may have of God (and any positive relationship) must be given from God’s side to us (i.e. grace alone). (a) and (b) being the case, Christians assert that © there is much which has happened in the courses of human history, all of which is governed by God (Job 38ff.). Most of the what’s and why’s and how’s of God’s role in history are not given to us in the Biblical revelation. Rather, the subject of Scripture, it’s primary kerygma (and the primary task of all good and decent theology) is fallen humanity and the God seeking to justify it. Again, Luther puts it bluntly (but well): “Let no one, therefore, ponder the Divine Majesty, what God has done or how mighty He is… The proper subject of theology is man guilty of sin and condemned, and God the Justifier and Savior of man the sinner. Whatever is asked or discussed in theology outside this subject, is error and poison.” (LW 12:311; see also Rom. 3:21-25a, 1 Cor 11:23; 2 Thes. 2:15; and 3:6)

I summarize the Christian position with a final thought from Gerhard Forde’s On Being a Theologian of the Cross, pages 79-80: Quoting Luther, Forde begins “The Apostle says in 1 Cor. 1[:21], ‘For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.’ Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross. Thus God destroys the wisdom of the wise, as Isa. [45:15] says, ‘Truly thou are a God who hidest thyself.’” Forde continues: “The cross cannot be considered therefore as one option among several in our attempts to see God. The cross shuts down alternatives. It destroys the wisdom of the wise. It blinds the sight of the theologian of glory. What is revealed is precisely that we don’t know God. Our problem is not that we lay claim to such little knowledge of God but that we know so much.”

Having defined the Christian stance as polemic to the deist, we can then move back to the first question: How might the God of Christianity be involved in the evolutionary process? Before I make any move for my answer thereof, however, I want to hear any thoughts or questions to what I’ve written above. This will give me further time to think through my answer to question (1) and will help me clarify, as a greenhorn to the forum, how my language and manner of writing are received. And so I ask, what are your questions and thoughts to this so far?

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I see what you’re saying–and I guess the answer for me, since you (helpfully!) brought up occasionalism vs. conservationism, is that I fall under concurrentism which I think is most faithful to scripture, and is most helpful when trying to harmonize evolution and Christianity (which I certainly think can be harmonized, if I hadn’t made that clear). We can agree to disagree on that (if in fact we do disagree).

I don’t have a problem with randomness with respect to our knowledge, but I do think it’s problematic to say things are utterly random to God (Proverbs 16:33, among others is pretty clear on this).

I was being facetious more than anything on the 1,900 years of church tradition line; I chafed at your uncharitable phrasing more than anything. I readily acknowledge that the church can be wrong on things.

Anyway, I just wanted clarity on your position and I got it, so thanks. Apologies if I seemed combative at any point.

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Yes this is where chaos theory sort of helps out. It’s clear that there are events which are apparently random but which are actually following specific laws. They are orderly, but at a scale beyond our capacity to perceive. Chaotic systems are deterministic, but appear random because they are not reliably predictable, or are only predicable over very short spans of time. Weather events look random until we understand the underlying laws which cause the meteorological phenomena, but the system is so complex we cannot predict events very far in advance, and our capacity to predict accurately diminishes exponentially the further ahead we attempt to predict. But God obviously doesn’t have this problem.

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Why should I pay? This is something that you should be eager to do, since you have posted about trying to get peoples’ opinions over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But if you are impoverished, why not start a gofundme page and post the link here. btw, how far are you from the conference? Where do you live?

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@Eddie,

You don’t think it is your job? Whose job do you think it is? Who is the one who can barely post on anything else?

It is certainly not my job to do so. So if you aren’t interested enough to participate … I don’t really need to take your constant pleadings on this point very seriously.

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Do you mean that people in general shouldn’t be demanding that others make highly specific position statements?

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Hello Just,

As I said in the other thread–welcome!

The concept you have enunciated is how to obtain the knowledge of the gospel. I agree that it is only through God’s supernatural intervention that any of us can have that knowledge, as the Scriptures and theologians you cite so clearly express.

There is another kind of knowledge in play when we talk about science, however. It is the kind of knowledge that any human can obtain through the exercise of rationality that God, though common grace, has provided to all of us. This is the knowledge of nature that Paul seems to refer to in Romans 1:20. It is not sufficient for salvation, but it is enough to be accountable to God and to live in the universe He created. This is the domain of knowledge in which sciences like physics and biology operate.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to write several paragraphs on the distinction between these two kinds of knowledge. The distinction does seem useful to me, however, so I wonder if it seems useful to you also when it comes to thinking about questions like the relationship between faith and the science of biology?

Warm Advent wishes,
Chris

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