1/24/07

I watched a VHS tape last night with a debate between Phillip Johnson, University of California, Berkeley,  and an evolutionist William B. Provine, Cornell University.  It was in interesting in some ways. The church has left those who are convinced of evolution with nowhere to go except to atheism.  The evolutionist was rather rabid about the atheistic implications of evolution. I wonder if it is true that evolutionary mechanisms can do it all.

1/27/07

The advocates of a young earth and a six day creation actually have one advantage in that they have a scenario laid out of what happened, and also they have an explanation of fossils, which display a great variety of now extinct animals, explaining all on the basis of the Noahic flood. 

On the other hand, it just occurred to me last night, when reading a particular book, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller, that the intelligent design advocates, as far as I know from going to a conference in Seattle and watching a few of their videos, actually don’t have a scenario that they lay out. In fact as I remember, they avoid the subject of the age of the earth.  They are pointing to the complexity of organisms to say that evolution through chance mutations and natural selection is not plausible, but that is really all they are saying.

I wonder what their view is, or if they have one, of the question of where the species come from that come and go in the fossil record.  You have the extinct wooly mammoth, for instance – does this mean that God intervenes through the history of the planet to create species, not just at the beginning? 

2/5/07

John Middam replies:  “The Intelligent Design movement is deliberately a big-tent community. It aims at only one thing–showing intelligent design behind creation. In that way their research can be used by young earth types who might not otherwise want to talk to them. It can also include people who believe God set up the initial conditions so precisely that the earth and all of its creatures (possibly even man) would evolve according to the “laws of nature.” Therefore, I would not expect a coherent picture from an ID conference. However, the various individuals involved do have their own ideas. Some of them would suggest intermittent bursts of creative activity, perhaps roughly corresponding to the days of Genesis 1. I think it likely that God created various kinds of creatures at different epochs during earth’s history and that these broad kinds continued to develop, or evolve, into the multitude of different species that do and have existed. So I see no problem with wooly mammoths being the ancestors of modern elephants.”

In the debate between Phillip Johnson and an evolutionist William B. Provine, Johnson said that he and Provine agreed that if the creationist view was wrong, then there was no more place for God, life was meaningless, etc.  Similarly, Kenneth R. Miller says that by insisting on this, creationists “are the unlikely and unwitting allies of vigorous atheists like Dawkins, Provine, and Lewontin who would agree enthusiastically that a complete success for materialist science condemns any search for God to ultimate failure.” (p. 215)

Thus by agreeing to this assumption they have left the evolutionists with nowhere to go.  It makes sense that if these two guys, Johnson and Provine, agree on something and they are both obviously wrong (in different ways) then maybe the fundamental error lies in that assumption.

Johnson quote from the debate:

Will Provine and I agree that the modern neo Darwinian theory of evolution is fundamentally inconsistent with any meaningful theism, with any meaningful God who acts as a creator of the world. Now of course this isn’t necessarily true of the concept of evolution broadly construed … but the modern neo-Darwinian theory, that is to say the orthodox view among today’s scientists, insists that evolution is an unplanned, undirected process. It combines elements of chance and necessity, or natural law – that is to say, a combination of random genetic changes or mutations which are accumulated through natural selection.  These are impersonal, material forces reflecting no preexisting intelligence and no guidance, so that human beings as the outcome of this process are essentially an unplanned accident of nature.

It’s evolution in that sense that we are talking about. … The implication of evolutionary biology in that sense is perhaps not exactly that God does not exist. It would be more accurate to say that if God does exist, existing is about the only thing that God has ever done.  God is permanently unemployed, has never found useful employment in the entire history of life, because impersonal material forces were capable of doing the whole job, and did do it.

So if one attempts to hold a view of God as creator, it is a very attenuated view and one which tends to fade away into unreality.

I would agree with Will Provine on this, I would tend to stress … a theistic picture of the world is fundamentally inconsistent with the manner of thinking that evolutionary biologists have employed to reach their conclusions.  That is to say, contemporary evolutionary biology, like much else in science, is based on the premise that nature is all there is — it is based on a premise of metaphysical naturalism. One assumes that at the beginning there was nothing but matter in mindless motion. It follows from this starting point assumption that impersonal, unintelligent, purposeless forces must have been capable of doing all the work of creation, because there wasn’t anything else.