I was a strong supporter for many years, both financially and in participating in online discussions. Not so much anymore. I may share some of the experiences that led to my eventual distancing from ID but I want to be careful because I don’t want to live in the past. I haven’t been active in this debate over ID for a couple years now and I still have people I consider friends.
Teaser List:
The “Big Tent”
ID and Front-Loading
ID and Common Descent
ID and Common Design
Divine Design
It is the last of these that is most relevant to the current thread. I believe that God is always active in the world. It does not exist without His sustaining it. I think that ID sets up a false dichotomy between what nature can do acting alone and what requires the intervention of a designing mind. It all requires a designing mind. And I have obvious reservations about God needing to “intervene” in His Creation.
Not that I think God set it up and let it run without Him. But rather that it cannot run without Him period. So ID sort of flirts too closely with Deism for my tastes. God is not absent. Ever.
I think a lot of difficulty derives from a failure to understand the very process of life. Too many people have this picture in their head from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” which makes life something completely magical which can be added to non-living things making them move by themselves. But clearly this is nonsense in the face of all we have discovered about how living things do what they do. It is not magic. There are reasons why they can do what they do.
So, instead I think the process of life is something that requires the intermediate step of automation. This is what all our science points to being the case. And this is why I believe we are living in a universe filled with all these mathematical space-time laws of nature. To be sure I believe God designed these. But the reason is not so that God can step back and just watch, but because it is a necessary component in the process of life which is all about freedom of will and God’s desire to have a relationship with others who are not just extensions of Himself.
Obviously I cannot agree with the compromise Mung has made as he has stepped back from ID. “That the world does not exist without His sustaining it.” He says this is not panentheism, but (sorry) I think this is lip-service rhetoric with no real meaning. This description fits the nature of a dream which not only fits the definition of panentheism perfectly, but is also the most trivial sort of omnipotence. Instead, I firmly assert that a true act of creation is the creation of something which does exist on its own without God needing to sustain it. And rather than elevating God, this idea of making God’s creation dependent on Him diminishes Him.
So… how about facing the following question head on: Can God create something which exists on its own and does not require Him to sustain it? If you say no then how is God omnipotent except in the trivial way of a dreamer? But if you say yes God can, then you need to investigate as I have the question of why God would do such a thing. And clearly I have provided an answer: because God seeks a relationship those who are not just extensions of Himself, and this requires life which in turn requires the automation of natural law. It explains why God created the universe.
Whether you have stumbled upon something significant or not, I doubt that you have provided an answer.
I agree, and it is something I am struggling with.
If we need God defacto then life is meaningless beyond that. It makes us only one step back from the automaton if the only answer is to willingly become one.
So the path to submission has to have limits. We have to retain some autonomy to remain human.
And this is how I have found the Christian life to be. I gave my life to God but He has given it me back. 99.9% of the time my life is my own, warts and all but I remain at His disposal iff needed. It is the fundamental difference between slavery and service. Paul seemed to want it to be more the other way.
But, it is still my choice and not something that is mandatory to survive or live. It has to be. And all these claims about slavery to sin are not part of that relationship that God wants or made. It would mean that we literally can’t live without God, which defeats the principles of freedom that we claim. And it would make any commitment to God shallow and self-motivated instead of a clear choice of direction and intent.
Though I prefer the term miraculous. And my view isn’t concerned with whether something is “alive” or not.
You seem to be of the view that God is not active in the world. Or if God is active in the world it is only by means of occasional intervention. Yes, I reject both those views.
A friend from my university days, a biology major, claimed that only seven interventions by God were needed to get from a single cell to humans – maybe not humans exactly like we are, but bipedal, upright, warm-blooded creatures with opposable thumbs and bilateral symmetry. The powerful point in terms of evolution is just how well it works all by itself given the millions of mutations it took to get from a single cell to us such that it would only take seven interventions.
All these years later it still irks me that the young-earth Creationist camp hijacked that term! In our informal club at university “intelligent design” wasn’t necessarily about God, it just meant that the universe looked like there must be a Designer. Some in that club became Christians, but the path between “There is a Designer” to the God of the Bible is actually a long one, and the God of the scriptures is not necessarily the end of the path anyway.
That fits how we treated it in our informal club, though it was generally agreed that if the designer was not a Designer then he/it/she was a step removed from the actual origin, that the ultimate designer has to be greater than and exterior to the universe.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
That depends what point the design is. The biology majors in our informal intelligent design club concluded there must be a designer because evolution is such an elegant system for producing astounding diversity – including growing, learning, and finding answers to challenges.
It’s worth noting in this connection that the biology majors who’d gone from atheist or agnostic to deism or theism were a small minority of such students – how small I couldn’t say since I had no way of knowing how many atheist or agnostic students there were among all the biology majors at the university. Not that the question even occurred to me; if it had I might have been able to get such a figure given the surveys done by the science departments (assuming they would have given a student such access).
You appear to think that if God should cease to exist (blasphemous suggestion), that the cosmos would remain. It has nothing to do with his omnipotence or trivial dreamer language, but ontology. How can he who possesses aseity create something that also possesses it and is not conditionally existent, its existence not contingent.
You’re confusing two prepositions, which is important since a great deal, possibly most, theology rests on prepositions. The two involved here are “in” and “under”: panentheism says God is in everything, but Mung – I think – when he says God is sustaining everything means that God is beneath everything holding it up, i.e. maintaining its existence.
And that’s really just a derivation from God’s answer to Moses, “I AM that Am”, i.e. God is the only non-contingent being.
“Automation” doesn’t fit with the scriptures, given that the apostle wrote that Christ holds all things together: holding things together requires effort to sustain those things, which means active personal involvement.
Something an old theologian wrote once – I can’t recall who though I think it was a monk – may be helpful here. He said that God is under all things to uphold them, above all things to rule them, and beside all things to have fellowship with them, but He is only in those who put their trust in Him. These can be regarded as modes of presence since the prepositions are used metaphorically. Since God is in these relationships simultaneously, asserting that He sustains all things in existence does not preclude having relationships with any particular created entities as distinct from Himself.
Indeed this can be compared with the Trinity: the Son is continually begotten of the Father, yet He is not merely an extension of the Father, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father, yet He is also not merely an extension of the Father.
I totally understand. The workings of things is totally astounding to me all the time. But I think it is so much so that it exceeds what you can expect of things which are designed. We are quickly learning with new technologies that there is a better way of doing things than design. When you let something find its own answers it can often do even better than design.
Nope. Not either.
At church someone was talking about the minor miracle of finding his wallet yesterday. Do I think God is that involved in our lives? Yes, I do.
God created to have real intimate relationships. But it is not a relationship at all if everything you do is just an expression of God. For a real relationship, you have to have a life and existence of your own.
It is good to reject both Deism and pan(en)theism. I think those are both wrong. But I think you need to ask yourself what the latter of these even means, in detail. What is the difference in practical terms between a panentheist god and the theist God. How would you know whether the God you are describing is one and not the other.
Furthermore, I see a big problem with making it all God with no natural law at all. The automation of natural law is not only demonstrable but something we can manipulate as we choose. Is it God who is mechanical and easily manipulated? I don’t think so! It is the process of life itself which requires this mechanical nature of the world which living organisms can manipulate for their own ends. But do you really think it is an understanding of God which science is giving us? In the end, I think this idea is destructive of both science and theology. We need science to study natural law because that is real and for theology it plays into the hands of the atheists who like to cast religion into the role of primitive science.
Actually, no – magic is the manipulation of forces external to a person in order to bend those forces to the person’s will, usually by some sort of ritual. Living things rely on the forces within them to do what they do.
I’ve been deliberately avoiding that word . . .
but it’s correct regardless: the great declaration of God’s name as "I AM that Am"tells us that everything else is dependent on Him for existence – we are contingent, He is not.
Whilst this appears to be a great compromise…its a biblical false claim that completely ignores the numerous times in the bible narrative where consequences have been anything but evolutionary…there are heaps of them that cannot be explain using this kind of logic.
Water into wine - obviously this happened fast…not possible to be any kind of scientific process (you can leave water in a jar for as long as you like, no amount of millions of years will turn it into wine!)
Christs death and resurrection - again, not evolutionary
Nebuchadnezzars madness - this appears to have happened almost immediately that Nebuchadnezzar glorified himself whilst overlooking his kingdom from the palace after having been warned about this by Daniel in his explanation of Nebuchanezzars dream about the tree being cut down.
The events of the exodus where the plagues befell the Egyptians (particularly the last one where all the first born in all of Egypt including animals died in a single night)
Saul (later the apostle paul) being blinded by the visit from Christ on the road and his healing a few days later where his sight was restored…again, nothing evolutionary here
…i could go on citing heaps of other examples, you claim is utter rubbish and just plain wrong. Miracles having nothing to do with either science or evolution and the Bible is full of them (starting with Creation)
Machines that can learn do so because they were designed to do so. I think you’re confusing design with planning: planning is what takes away agency; design, on the other hand, is what bestows agency. That design can exceed expectations, i.e. provide results that were not initially planned, should not be surprising since we ourselves exhibit that phenomenon: with senses and physical abilities fit for surviving in a savanna environment we have sent some of ourselves to the moon and along the way to that come to live in nearly every set of conditions on the planet. Thus when a design team discovers that a robot (or set of robots) can do things never thought of during the design phase it shouldn’t be unexpected.
Not a single one of those has any bearing on evolution, and that you think they do shows you have no clue what evolution is about. That you call what he wrote a “compromise” just affirm that.
You should listen to John Walton at Wheaton about Genesis – a scholar who knows what he’s talking about.
