It is useful to consider the way words like energies and dynamics are used and found in the NT and Patristic writings. The Greek word for energy is “ενέργεια” (enérgeia) which means “activity, operation” and is frequently described as “being at work”. It is also used to discuss the workings or acts of the Holy Spirit in the growth who have faith in Christ.
Thus, when doctrine addresses the creative act of God and sustaining the creation, it encompasses all activity and properties, be they inorganic, organic, biological, cosmological, etc. From this we may conclude that all conform to the will of God. Within this outlook, using terms such as design is limiting and of little use theologically.
These energies and dynamics also include the intelligibility of the universe - thus ID is subsumed within the universal doctrine of Creation.
I am of the opinion that the debates/disagreements stem more from the antagonism between ID and TE/CE groups and serve no other purpose.
In your mind, how does one segregate the two notions of 1) Deism without control of anything after the creation, and 2) shepherding human throughout their lives? Deism rejects blind faith and dogma much as an ID would, absent of course inserting personal needs into the shepherding equation.
More importantly, how could He be simply a shepherd, and still bring destruction upon all of the world in order to start anew?
Deism has absolutely NOTHING to do with a lack of control. Deism is a lack of involvement in creation – a god gets things going and just sits back and watches everything unfold according to plan – which means complete control rather than a lack of control.
definition of Deism from Oxford Languages referenced by Google
belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.
The work of a Shepherd includes culling the herd radically to stop the spread of a disease even if it means starting over again with only a remnant of what he had.
The Shepherd interacts with his sheep daily and this is nothing like Deism. Indeed it is the Watchmaker God which is directly connected to Deism (both logically and historically) because the whole point is that what this Deist god created is a big machine He has designed and thus it requires no interaction because it already functions exactly according to His plans.
The whole point is that God created for a relationship – to be involved in the lives of those He created… and this is only needed because He is not their designer or controller. They make their own choices of both what they do and what they are, including both a response to God and a response of God to them. Making God designer and controler would turn this all into a big lie and joke – God just playing a role in some play already written and decided by Him alone. Indeed this is just like the creationists which have God designing the world with a lot of fake evidence telling lies so it just looks like things evolved. No, the Bible is not a lie any more than science. Life really is a product of evolution and God really did have a relationship with us – the design of living things has no place in either science or the Bible.
Have you ever tried to make a curry from scratch? it takes hours! you need to build up the taste slowly. It cannot be rushed. I guess the same applies to Creation.
The point was that evolution, as taught needs the time. If you remove the element of chance (trial and error) that time is no longer needed.
But that would be too simple an answer! You had to go all sentimental and lovey dovey over God’s relationship with the rest of His creation.
Now before you go galavanting off on your next sermon I will let you in on a little secret of Preaching.
It is not about convincing people to believe what you do. it is about giving them enough information to make a choice for themselves. Theology is not like science. It is not black and white, right and wrong. There is more often than not a variety of answers that suit the variety of understandings given to us by God. One size (theology) does not fit all. And you do not possess it.
There are different ways to approach this. The most immediately important in terms of this thread is that YECists and others are saying, “God made everything so we have to show how He designed every individual item”, but what we in our informal intelligent design club were saying was, “Due to studying science we have concluded there is a Designer, so we should look for attempts to communicate”. The former presupposes a certain very narrow view of the Christian God, the second presupposes nothing but only observes that the elegance of evolution and/or cosmology points to a Designer, Who is likely also to be the Creator (I remember arguing the notion that there could be a Designer Who is not the Creator in a sort of positive dualism where both Designer and Creator are benign).
Another that is kind of implicit in the above is that there are two kinds of design, unit and system. YECism and others only look at unit design, maintaining that every individual creature – or at least species, but that leaves out non-living things – was designed by God independently of the rest, and fail to look at the system, whereas those of us in our informal intelligent design club were looking at the systems of evolution and of cosmology and seeing design in the systems. So those fixated on unit design will fail to see the real elegance that points to God – and in fact I have never heard of even a single person considering the unit design view and changing their mind about anything, while I have known a number of former atheists and agnostics who studied the systems and concluded there must be a Designer behind it, whether evolution (the largest number) or cosmology (in second place) or physics.
For a basic definition, I like what Wordnik has:
To conceive or fashion in the mind; invent.
To formulate a plan for; devise.
(though it baffles me that they consider it an intransitive verb!)
Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. Romans 14:1
You obviously consider those who do not accept your misunderstanding of evolution and disagreements about your ignorance of providence as weaker in faith. So why are you quarreling?
Would you also say about Robert Frost’s Stopping in Woods on a Snowy Evening or Joyce Kilmer’s Trees that “none of the details is correct”?
The thing is that to say “none of the details in Genesis 1 is correct” is to not actually be talking about Genesis 1 but rather to be talking about a caricature because neither of the literary types or the three messages is about details being scientifically correct. And if you’re not talking scientifically but theologically, then all the details are correct because they all point to the message and serve to elucidate it.
I see a contradiction in terms here, unless you’re saying that the software wasn’t designed but was just random stuff thrown together!
But this is backwards, being exactly the sort of talk that we in our informal intelligent design club rejected: you’re starting with God and thus making statements about the universe rather than starting out as atheist or agnostic and seeing in evolution or cosmology such elegance that the conclusion is “There must be a Designer”.
TE and/or CE had no place in our discussions; those are options that come into play only after
concluding there is a Designer and
examining the candidates for being a deity that has endeavored to communicate with His/Her/Its creatures and thus
Deciding which candidate is most likely the Designer.
That would be the presupposition behind item #3 above, that the Designer didn’t just design the system and create it and abandon it but would only have made a design that would lead to intelligent creatures if He/She/It intended to communicate with those creatures.
There’s some funky grammar going on in that clause, and translators have to work around that to make it talk English. For example, there’s no “in” in the text; it emerges from trying to get the words “πάντα” and “συνεργεῖ”, “all” and “works together” to fit the unstated (except in some texts) subject, “God”. The first-assessment reading would be that “πάντα” means everything that happens to a believer, but the possibility that Paul means everything that happens that has any impact at all on a believer, whether directly or indirectly can’t be excluded. If Paul had meant absolutely everything that happens is worked together for good to a believer he could have put a definite article before πάντα, making it read “the all”; since he didn’t do so then at most πάντα means all things that could possibly impact a believer, and at least everything that happens directly to a believer.
“I think only an idiot can be an atheist. We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.”
Christian B. Anfinsen (1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)