Quite so. I believe such a mindset is called Scientism these days. It seems to me that there’s quite a few Christians on this site who share that mindset. They appear to be allergic to the possibility that evidence of God (such as intelligent design or irreducible complexity) can be found in nature.
Yes. God is the author of nature as much as of miracles.
That is a false equivalency and you are spreading falsehoods if and since God did in fact use evolution to create the massive, amazing and beautiful diversity of living things. (I’m reminded of nudibranchs, mentioned recently by @Paraleptopecten.)
Huh. Neither did nuclear fission or fusion. 
And YECs have to believe in hyper-evolution since the imagined global Noah’s flood to get the variety of species we see today, so you’re pretty much stepping on your own tongue.
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Actually, it’s the mindset of accepting the twofold realities of God’s special revelation via the Bible which does not address science (nor does science discount miracles1) and the reality of the truth of God’s creation and how it works.
(You aren’t perchance the guy that asked me years ago online for chapter and verse where the Bible says truth comes from reality, are you? For all intents and purposes you sure could be!)
1 It just cannot address them.
Is it correct to descibe the theory of evolution as an “understanding” of biological origins?
Surely to understand how something occured means to know how it occured - no one will ever know how life-forms on earth changed the way they did.
We can’t even be sure about what happened, let alone gain an “understanding” of how it happened.
Is it correct to describe gravity as an understanding of why things fall or the moon orbits the earth or the earth, the sun?
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As a presupposition, I am not hostile to the idea of ID in principle, but given that the evidence from Paley to the efforts of the Discovery Institute have not been compelling, and nothing new has been forthcoming, eventually you shrug and move on.
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No, they’re allergic to stupidity masquerading as science and how that smears God’s name and drives people from Christ. ID in general boils down to trying to pound square pegs into round holes while being inconsistent about different realms of science.
Well, either that or in God magically inserting chromosomes too big to even fit in reproductive cells in order to get all the genetic information necessary to turn out all the many millions of species out of merely thousands on the Ark, including a new miracle with each new set of offspring in order to get the right genes into each set of newborns to start all the species we observe – and then another miracle for each offspring to trim the chromosomes down again to have only what’s useful to each species . . . except that the observed genetic material shows poor matching to almost any species given all the non-coding DNA including viral sequences, broken sequences, and more.
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That depends on how you mean it. If you mean how life began, no – evolution has nothing to say on the matter, it only deals with life and the new life that comes from it.
Nope. In stellar physics, and in glaciology, as well as in bulk chemistry, it’s quite common to understand how something occurred, i.e. the principles by which the sytems operate, without knowing exactly what events took place.
I see no reason to think that doesn’t apply to evolution as well.
At the Farmers’ Market here in the summer there’s a big wooden “game” where a ball goes in the top and makes its way downward bouncing off pegs to arrive at one of the slots on the bottom. If that game was given a cover so the ball’s path wasn’t visible, we wouldn’t be able to know what happened, i.e. we wouldn’t be able to see the path it took – and yet we definitely understand how the ball got to the bottom.
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I used to read stuff by Morris and his crew in hopes of finding something that actually resembled science; I have long since given up bothering any longer because it became quite plain that they have no intention of actually doing science, only in dreaming up science fiction scenarios to explain their misunderstanding of scripture.
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The denial of physical reality certainly does not lead to respect for God, contrary to the petitioner’s heart in the first desire mentioned in The Lord’s Prayer.
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Yes. Abiogenesis (Abiogenesis - Wikipedia) is the field that studies how life could have began. While there are many open questions on that, nothing need change a theist’s belief that God created it.
I take your point, but it seems to me that we know a lot more about the path the ball took, than if it was completely hidden. As in, for example, the evolution of birds from a branch of theropod dinosaurs. Perhaps the game in your analogy should have various bits of covering, hiding many (but not all) parts of the tree. And be very large 
.
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Strange. It seems that you know the way in which God had to perform miracles, which you think didn’t occur, but you can’t give a mechanism for the origin of such a simple structure as the lens of an eye. Which, you believe raised by natural causes.
Consider an art competition. Contestant A takes a large block of marble and meticulously carves it, bit by bit, until it produces a magnificent statue. Contestant B waves a wand, says the magic words, and a magnificent statue appears. Which has done more impressive work? Of course, anyone can take a hammer and chisel and break pieces off a chunk of marble, while not anyone can wave a wand, say words, and get a magic result. But my hammering and chiseling is not going to give a magnificent statue, whereas anyone with the same magic could make the same result.
What is most impressive is subject to individual judgement, but it is impressive that God could plan and implement a way to create the diversity of organisms that He wanted by using a set of relatively simple natural laws.
Scientism is the denial that the miraculous can happen. The god of the gaps error is claiming that God is only working in the miraculous, not in events that happen by physical law. It accepts the scientistic premise that “natural” means that God isn’t involved, rather than the biblical position that “natural” events are of God as well. Thus, it is actually the “there have to be gaps in evolution” position that is falling into a scientistic-type error, not those who say “God could have done this miraculously or not, as He chose.”
But affirming that the miraculous does happen doesn’t mean that we should believe all claims that something is miraculous. For that matter, the Bible warns against miraculous signs used to false ends - miraculous does not prove that it is of God. Everyday experience and the testimony of history, including that recorded in the Bible, tells us that most things happen following natural law patterns. John refers to the miracles recorded as “signs”. They are specifically pointing to God. Yet the ID movement often acknowledges that the claimed examples of design can’t be shown to go with a particular designer - is it intelligent aliens, or Zeus, or God, …?
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I don’t know why you repeatedly make these statements which you know are completely untrue. You know that ID folks accept Gods guidance in nature by natural laws. And you know that I accept the Westminster confession.
There is nothing untrue in the statement about what the god of the gaps error is.
ID folks frequently make god of the gaps errors when they are focused on attacking evolution. When they think about the theology, they often do acknowledge that God is at work through natural laws, but often they go right back to bad god of the gap arguments. For example, Dembski has an essay in an “apologetics Bible” that uses god of the gap errors to argue against evolution and admits that god of the gaps is incorrect. Of course, ID being a self-identified big tent, there is quite a range of views within ID; some individuals are highly prone to god of the gap claims and others aren’t.
For example, Philip Johnson proclaimed that we are either made by God or by mindless molecular processes. That’s a god of the gap error; being made by molecular processes is not an alternative to being made by God but rather an alternative way for God to make things.
Jonathan Wells’ assertion that Christianity is not about Christ but rather about opposing evolution is likewise a god of the gap error. I do not know whether his being in the Unification Church cult (Moonies) contributes to his favoring a god of the gap error; it certainly lies behind his denying that one has to put your faith in Jesus to be a Christian.
Claims that “methodological naturalism” leads to philosophical naturalism are god of the gap errors. “Methodological naturalism” is thinking that natural laws are likely to apply in a particular situation, but if you recognize that God is at work in natural laws and in miracles, then you are not going to endorse philosophical naturalism. Likewise, claims that evolution is excluding God or that TE is a compromise with philosophical naturalism are god of the gap errors. Of course, TE is a big tent as well, and there are some who invoke evolution as limiting God’s role or His options, in addition to the atheists who are strangely successful at using evolution as a bad excuse for atheism. But anyone with a decent grasp of the concept that God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means (to return to the Westminster standards) should not be misled by these errors.
The ID movement’s basic demand for a “God hypothesis”, like the “scientific” atheists’ demand for a “God hypothesis”, is basically the god of the gaps error - insisting that God has to be seen by gaps within science, rather than affirming that God is at work through natural law.
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- Nice term, where’d you get it? Moved me to search on line for it’s history, if any. Closest I could come to it is “God of the gaps fallacy”.
- I encountered its possibility, as a recent new-comer to to the concept of “Intelligent Design”. A polymath I once knew asserted that the universe is rational, and it occurred to me, eventually, if that’s true–and I believe it is–should I be surprised, assuming that God is rational, if atheist’s can’t see Him in the world around them. The answer, I decided, is No.
- “Moreover, the “God of the gaps” perspective has been criticized for its association with logical fallacies, specifically the argument from ignorance fallacy. This fallacy asserts that just because something is not currently explained by science, it must be attributed to a supernatural cause. This type of reasoning is seen as inherently flawed and does not provide a robust foundation for religious faith. In this context, some theologians and scientists have proposed that a more satisfactory approach is to view evidence of God’s actions within the natural processes themselves, rather than relying on the gaps in scientific understanding to validate religious beliefs.”
- Very recently, I came across N.T. Wright’s book: "“Broken Sighposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World”, and he;s the one who helped me see: He revealed Himself on the cross and in the resurrection.
This brought to mind something Dr. Michael Heiser said in an interview, with reference to seeing amazing things and concluding God was at work:
“Most of the time God’s present you’re never gonna see it. There’s this thing called ‘the unseen hand’, there’s this thing called ‘providence’. God isn’t just engaged, He doesn’t just sorta care when something big happens. God’s interest is unrelenting, moment by moment.”
John Lennox of Oxford talks about this a lot. His most common illustration is asking which is responsible for the existence of the Model T automobile, the assembly line or Henry Ford? I got a chuckle out of an interview where he related posing that to a grade school child and getting the response, “Both!” That child was smarter than the statement “…you can’t give a mechanism for the origin of such a simple structure as the lens of an eye. Which, you believe raised by natural causes.”
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Given that “in Him all things hold together” I’ve never understood how it could be viewed any other way! It’s like claiming that fairies make flowers bloom: even if that were true, it would just tell us that fairies are God’s mechanism for making flowers bloom, not that there is no God. It’s the same error as thinking that because we know that an atom is made of electrons, neutrons, and protons then there is no God; the truth is that electrons, neutrons, and protons are just God’s “bricks” for making atoms.
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