I am a former United Methodist who has returned to his Southern Baptist roots. Even though I attended an arch conservative Southern Baptist seminary, I was accepted into the ministry of the United Methodist Church. I have also preached at several Methodist meetings. I should find this article to be extremely interesting in its content. I wish to thank Eddie for giving us this opportunity. I would like to ask you a question, Eddie. Do you know any of the individuals on the Dinos in Heaven blog?
Thanks for letting me know. Have a good evening.
I find this quote in the article to which Eddie so helpfully linked us:
" … the Intelligent Design movement says nothing about the identity of the Intelligent Designer of life and/or the cosmos. In particular, ID theory do[es] not identify the Designer with the God of the Bible, as the currently available scientific evidence does not warrant that conclusion. (Of course, many ID advocates, including myself, believe the Designer to be the same Being as the Biblical God, but we do so on philosophical rather than scientific grounds.) Consequently, it would be absurd to accuse the Intelligent Design movement of “making authoritative claims about theological issues.”
I think this conclusion is LAUGHABLE.
Intelligent Design, as applied to the Cosmos, is an INTRINSICALLY theological claim (though, technically, when applied to just the life on Earth, it is conceivable that LIFE on Earth could have been created by the Prometheus people from the movie of the same name!). I know of NO pro-Design people who hold any other view than that God was the designer of the Cosmos.
The day that an Intelligent Design group adamantly insists that the Designer of Creation is NOT a God or Gods … is the day that the accusation can be dropped - - but only for that particular group.
George
[POST, AS PROMISED, HAS BEEN EDITED TO CORRECT THE EMPHASIS]
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This text seems interesting:
"Wesley on the impossibility of evolution: In addition to teaching that the first man was specially created by God, Wesley also taught that the human body could not have arisen via a natural process, because no blind process would be capable of assembling so many bodily parts, in just the right proportions and in just the right sequence, over the course of time, generating “so complicated and wonderful a machine as the human body”:
So what Wesley is saying is that BioLogos is on the right track!
Without God to guide evolution, he doubts that evolution is even possible!
I can accept that… and all supporters of the BioLogos mission should be able to accept it too, don’t we think?
Unfortunately, Wesley was also a Young Earther! 
“It turns out that Wesley believed in the fine-tuning of the universe (and in particular, the solar system) for human needs, a 6,000-year-old Earth, the separate creation of each species of living creature . . . , the special creation of the first man, Adam, from a lump of clay…”
And so I have to challenge Eddie’s motivation for posting this article here. Is Eddie really “on our side”? Does he really support the BioLogos program and logic? I don’t see how. I don’t go around collecting articles written by Sanctified Holy Men … highlighting how he contradicts the BioLogos mission …
Eddie… with all due respect … what are you doing here?
George
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I got about a 1/4 of the way through this before I quit, as it is mostly propaganda. What Wesley thought about nature was very similar to the Anglican viewpoint of his time. He agreed with Paley, no surprise there as Pauly simply took the standard beliefs and set them in a form that the masses could understand.
However, the reason Paley had problems with evolving animals is that there had not yet been found a process that let it happen. The concepts were still too raw. Charles Darwin believed Paley was correct until he found conflicting evidence. He pursued the evidence and determined a process that seemed to work. Those who looked at the evidence agreed that a process had been found and Paley was suddenly no longer the source for scientific study on this topic (and many other topics as well).
I found nothing new, surprising, or enlightening in the little I read.
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Please produce the name of a single prominent ID proponent who seriously proposes that the Designer of the natural world is someone OTHER than the God of Abraham…
… go ahead, Eddie… this should be fascinating …
George
I tend to be slightly more on your side on this than on Eddie’s, but for the sake of moving the conversation forward: If you wanted to engage with this article more, a more relevant portion than the first 25% of the article is about 55% of the way down the page on my browser (emphasis his):
Some modern-day Methodists might want to argue that if Wesley had lived in the nineteenth century instead of the eighteenth, and if he had read about Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which was much more cogently defended than Buffon’s highly speculative theory, he would have finally come round to the idea that living things did indeed evolve from a common stock, and that human beings could have evolved from an ape-like creature without the need for and divine intervention. But even if Wesley had come to accept the common descent of man and other animals, **the version of evolution that Wesley would have accepted would have been nothing like the blind, wasteful process envisaged by Darwin.**
And it goes on from there.
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Yes… @Eddie,
whatever statement you think you are defending… I certainly can’t tell.
In the meantime, the writer of the article in the link is clearly trying to argue both sides of the equation:
"In particular, ID theory do[es] not identify the Designer with the God of the Bible, as the currently available scientific evidence does not warrant that conclusion. . . . Consequently, it would be absurd to accuse the Intelligent Design movement of “making authoritative claims about theological issues.”
I repeat - - the writer’s conclusion is LAUGHABLE.
George Brooks
I’m happily waiting for you to have shown that my position is false. Didn’t you admit that the only Designer any prominent I.D. proponent has ever considered is the God of Abraham? This makes, whether de facto or a priori, ID positions a theological position. To argue this isn’t so is sophistry.
George
You really think that I can’t spot propaganda writing from the first page? I was hoping for something interesting from Wesley, but no. YEC and ID writers run rampant with propaganda yet never see it as such. Wesley was a man of vision about theology of the Spirit but a man of his century about science. His understanding about Spirit is amazing. His understanding about science was a repeat of Paley (whose writing was amazing but it was the science of his day and not ours).
I am not going to bother with writing the author of the paper. It would do no good whatsoever. It probably will do no good debating with you. You cant even remember that I did not make claims about Behe, but was commenting on something I read long ago that you claim came from Behe. Big difference.
What do I mean about propaganda? This very long paper’s reason for being is that the UMC would not let the Design Institute lobby their members at their conference. It was not written to show people that they need to listen to Wesley’s theology, but they need to listen to Discovery Institute proponents because their scientific beliefs align with Wesley’s and the UMC does not. The ID movement claims that it does not promote theological issues, yet it rejects evolution theories for theological reasons before it tries to find scientific reasons. Propoganda.
How many people associated with the ID movement are not some sort of Christian? How many Wicca or Hindu members do you have? If every one of the originators are Christian, every one of the promoters are Christian, and every member advocates the Christian God, then it is a Christian organization that thinks it can tell people that it is not promoting the Christian God. That is just dishonest.
What version of science would Wesley believed if he had lived at the time of Charles Darwin? He would have gone and talked to the man face to face. He would have listened to the reasons. He would not distorted them like ID distorts evolution theories to use as propaganda. He would not have made the name of Darwin into a cuss word like YEC and ID promoters have. He would have given honor to a good and honest man with questions.
What version of science would Wesley believe if he live today. He would read everything he could get his hands on about every topic and love it all because the God he worshiped is in every particle of those descriptions made by science. He would not try to return to the 1700’s for insight on causality because the causes are much better described today.
Wesley would have been able to tell the difference between an atheist’s “blind and wasteful” “theology” of nature and the the “good nature” that provides but is not safe. Because of his deep belief in the Spirit, maybe he could have given Darwin a reason to keep believing in God and the church. Wesley would have listened to the Spirit and determined the churches beliefs in creation were wrong. He would love the science of today just as he loved the science of his day.
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As I stated, I lean in your direction, and don’t disagree, though I’m not a Wesley scholar, and personally I’m not as sure of what he might have done. My limited purpose in commenting was to note that (buried somewhere in many pages’ worth of propaganda) the author did anticipate and respond to the line of thought that “this was the view of his time, but if he’d lived nowadays he would have accepted today’s view.” 
I took a bit of a different read on the part you quoted, but I see your point.
This has been my experience (and conclusion) as well. Eddie is a “died-in-the-wool” political proponent of Intelligent Design.
White is black; black is white …
George
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