Eddie:
One of the bizarre things about some EC writing is that the ECs fight tooth and nail against design in nature, arguing that evolution is a messy process filled with accidents and makeshift adjustments, that parts of animal and human bodies are poorly designed from an engineering point of view, that some of the suffering in organisms is so cruel that no wise or loving designer could be responsible, etc. – but then turn around and tell us how much more we should admire God for creating through this cruel, makeshift, and inefficient process rather than through intelligent design and execution!
The main thing I have objected to in your argument was your representation of “evolution” as inherently anti-Christian. I agree that evolution as frequently formulated has anti-Christian intent or implications. I also think it is quite clear that Darwin abandoned Christianity and that he saw evolution as a process without any fixed ends, so I do not think that evolution as Darwin personally understood it can be squared with traditional Christian faith. But I don’t think the very idea of “evolution” – by which I mean “descent with modification” – is in itself contrary to the Christian faith. And I don’t agree that evidence for “descent with modification” should cause anyone to doubt the truth of the Bible. The only place where there might be a tension between evolution and Christianity would be over the origin and nature of human beings. But even there, if we imagine the process of descent as a planned or directed one, I don’t think the special character of man needs to be impugned.
The difficulty, of course, is that many current EC leaders make it very difficult to imagine how the process could be either planned or directed, and actively rebuff most of the suggestions that anyone makes in that direction, mocking such suggestions either as “God of the gaps” or “tinkering” on the one hand, or as “too deterministic for a God who loves the freedom of his creatures” on the other. But that is not a problem inherent to “evolutionary creation”; it comes from certain doctrinaire commitments of current EC leaders, some of whom tend to be unflinching on their philosophy of nature, on evolutionary mechanisms, on theology, or all of these. If EC leaders took seriously the “openness of the causal frontier” between God and creation that I’ve spoken of elsewhere here, instead of fixating on “methodological naturalism” (that is, if their philosophy of nature were more Biblical than Kantian), EC would not have these problems.
thanks Eddie. Honestly, I have been addressing (or should I say trying to address) “evolution as frequently formulated.” But again, I have to say that any sort of guided evolution is a different kind of evolution than an evolution by natural processes. The word “natural” and the word “supernatural” are two different words. It seems to me that many people here would love to plant their flag on two hills and claim that evolution is both a supernatural process and a natural process. It just can’t be both.