I am debating Intelligent Design and working up a Biblical Theology for it. Here is a piece of my interaction in a Facebook comment and seek discussion on this. So fire away!
Intelligent Design is the application of Elohim God’s grand plan as explained by Jesus to Nicodemus in the most vital chapters in the entire Bible: Biblical Cosmology. Displayed in Genesis 1-3, John chapters 1, 3 and illustrated through all of John’s writings if read sequentially thru Revelation.
This is called Progressive Revelation made up of General Revelation, mankind’s progressive discovery of the physical Cosmos over time, and Special Revelation in which Elohim reveals his plan to Mankind recording the lives and writings through scriptures, and the life, death, ressurection of Jesus.
So what Intelligent Design transcends is Evolution’s inevitable false foundational gaps without a Divine source. This is not “the gap” theory. It is the ever changing boundary of human kind’s discovery of deeper source of all things from physics to biology to sin and death.
So it is the third way that satisfies human discovery and God’s Revelation within the grand plan of Elohim God’s creation.
The key is the use of the cosmological lesson Jesus was teaching that is the centerpiece of Revelation which theology has defined and progressive in two intertwined realms of General and Special revelations.
SkovandOfMitaze
(One 8 ounce steak used as much water as 6,000 ai searches. )
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I can’t really tell her you’re doing.
Are you trying to redefine intelligent design from a pseudoscientific interpretation of the scientific data by just stating intelligent design is not necessarily about the physical creation but a spiritual one?
If you’re debating ‘Intelligent Design’[1] (as an advocate for it) you shouldn’t be mentioning the Bible or theology at all.
The whole point of ‘Intelligent Design’ was to not be associated with religion (so that it could be taught is US schools), and definitely not be a relabelling of creationism, no way, pay no attention to the lady on the witness stand.
If you want to work up a Biblical Theology for Creationism, go right ahead.
But so far, all you’ve done is announce that you don’t know enough about the background of ‘Intelligent Design’ to avoid being sandbagged in any debate you attempt.
(You might want to look up ‘gap theory’ too, and the authorship of Revelation).
As opposed to ‘intelligent design’, without the capitals. ↩︎
Why not cut my sentence in half so that you can mock it.
Whether the reason for wanting it is theological or not it will not be proved by theology. The only way to prove the existence of ID is to show that TOE cannot achieve it. And since scientists are reluctant to admit that TOE can’t achieve anything it is unlikely to be ever proven either way.
In truth, debate is just an exchange of opinions, or arguments.
Right, theology doesn’t prove anything. A person’s theology is formed by their prior assumptions and interpretation of scripture. That is what Ray is apparently working on. Is that OK with you?
You are attempting a grand and sweeping synthesis, and such attempts in the past is have often been characterized by vague definitions and wobbly details, and becomes like trying to nail jello to the wall. My comment is to not think out loud, but take time to clarify what you mean by progressive, natural, and special revelation, how these may harmonize, and where exactly you think they may fall short. Address the questions: if God could do anything, could He create a sufficient universe? Are the processes He instituted inadequate and require intervention? If revelation is progressive, did it make use of conceptions held by the original audience? And is your understanding of nature truly informed and honest?
As @Roy pointed out, a theology of intelligent design is an oxymoron. You may be thinking more of Paley’s watchmaker.
There are two basic problems with the watchmaker theory.
1 watches are mechanical and inanimate, and subject to wear without the ability to regenerate or self repair. As such they are not a good analogy for creation.
2 Any assertions about God’s abilities or inadequacies are based on human perception and values. It is the lunatics trying to run the asylum.
Trying to put yourself in the place or mind of God is a fool’s errand. We just cannot grasp all the variables and dynamics, let alone account for independent thought and actions within creation.
One of the easiest things about ID to understand, yet also the one with a very shaky premise, is that everything that is designed intelligently must be constructed by God, because it is impossible for Man and/or Nature to design and/or enable something with such complexity. This is stated as “base law” unshakably, without exception or exemption.
Yet there are many examples we can find, without looking so hard, of non-biological examples of things built and constructed by either two. Since God created everything Natural, ID requires that processes and forces of Nature have absolutely no part to play. God created the universe in 6 days, rested on the 7th. There is no textual evidence to support the premise that God continually creates everything.
But that is simply not the case; did God create the automobile, the computer, the nifty gadget on the refrigerator door that dispenses crushed ice? The fact that I can store 1G of information in a piece of plastic and metal, the size of my thumbnail?
The argument or issue is not as “base” as people think.
Strikes me as a deliberate reversal of the ID argument. ID has never claimed that God is the only intelligence or that humanity cannot ID. What ID claims is that certain structures and/or systems could not be created by chance. Now if someone can show that TOE has human influence (Excluding breeding and genetic engineering) then I am sure we would be thrilled. Especially as humanity would appear not to exist at the times when these ID systems and structures were “created” (or came to be)
ID argues against chance. Now if there is an alternative intelligence to God that could achieve what (I et al claim) Evolution can’t then maybe we are looking for little green men instead of God. (Or the TNG Universal impregnation suggestion: “The Chase” episode)
Richard
Edit.
I do not wish to go back down the ToE is not chance argument at this point, but am half expecting it to rear its ugly head.
I think that that theological framing is fine but I don’t see why it is incompatible with the biological theory of evolution. It sounds like all you are saying is that God is progressively revealing himself through creation, a statement with which I have no disagreement. Although ID theology does suffer from god-of-the-gaps reasoning, I think that ID really needs to focus on the science part since it is currently theology trying to be a science at this point. I think that if the ID movement reformed itself to simply asking the question what would design look like in nature and how do we detect it, it could evolve (no pun intended) to become more like SETI, archaeology and other fields which involve the search for a type of intelligent design based on evidence and observation. The problem with the current ID movement is that it simply re-asserts the same arguments made 30 years ago and does not make any attempt to update its methodology or question whether its original concepts are actually sound. For example, are irreducible/specified complexity actually reliable evidence of design since most cases of said complexity in nature appear to have feasible non-design explanations. For another example, the bacterial flagellum may very well be a product of direct design (I am not saying it is), but the fact that most scientists continue to disagree and ID advocates have made no progress in 30 years, other than simply re-asserting the same tired arguments (maybe in a slightly different framing), suggests at the very least that the flagellum is an ambiguous case and better data is needed to actually find evidence of design. It is as if all astrobiologists did was debate over whether the Martian meteorite ALH84001 was evidence of life on Mars rather than developing new methodologies for investigating the life beyond Earth and the origin of life on Earth which have still contributed to science even if we haven’t answered the fundamental questions at the core of the field yet.
It is my understanding that the proteins that make up the bacterial flagellum all have independent functionality and are used in other cellular systems. So no irreducible complexity.
ID is not IC or vice versa. They are two separate arguments
The reason ID has not changed is because there is nothing to change. Either something is beyond chance or it isn’t.
As for science answering any or all ID claims…
All ToE does is supply a narrative. It suggests a means of something developing, but it has no actual proof that specific change occurred. All it does is show the existence of a mechanism and then insist that mechanism will work in all cases. “Anything can happen given enough time”?
IOW ToE does not address every specific change, specifically.