I gather that a court in the US has ruled that teaching ‘Intelligent is a breach of the seperation of Church and State and hence against the Constitution of the USA. The case was brought by parents at a Pennsylvania school who were dismayed that intelligent design was being taught alongside evolution in biology classes, as the local school board believed this would make the curriculum more balanced.
Unfortunately, this is a case where this balance would be false. No doubt the theory of evolution will be subject to further modifications, but scientifically speaking it’s the only show in town.
I’m sure I don’t fully appreciate the constitutional aspects of this case.
But as for the science, the judge has hit the nail squarely on its head.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Kim 12.21.05 at 3:17 am
A good day for the church as well as the state, because “the judge has hit the nail squarely on the head” not only for science but for theology too.
At best, the god of ID is either the god of deism or a god-of the gaps. At worst, the god of ID is an idol, because when the deity is deployed in scientific accounts of creation, he is, reduced, ipso facto, to an obect of creation, i.e. the Creature is reduced to the status of a creature, albeit a mighty and resourceful demiurge. In other words, God ceases to be God. God is not an explanation for the world, a theoretically traceable cause (even a “first cause”), God is the mystery of the world whose ways are unsearchable.
Another way of putting this fundamental category mistake is to say that God’s providence can only be known by faith, not by demonstration.
Which is not - it is crucial to note - to accept the enlightenment notion that science is about “facts, while faith is about “values”, an epistemology which, though purportedly “making room” for faith (Kant), actually banishes it from the arena of public knowledge into the the chamber of private opinions or personal feelings. It is simply to affirm that faith is a different way of knowing from science, with an altogether different object to know - “God” rather than “nature” - and a different way of knowing and expressing it - prayer, worship, and faith-talk - rather than empirical investigation and the discourse of the laboratory.
Which is the ultimate irony of ID. At bottom ID is a laudable protest against the margnalisation of religion by secular humanism - but it is a misconceived protest all the same, conceding the rules of engagement before the battle even begins - and then shooting itself in the foot! Or to switch the meatphor, even if ID’s operation were successful, its patient would be lost on the table.
dh 12.21.05 at 3:36 pm
“…its patient would be lost on the table.” or saved from the futility of not recognizing a creater greater than ourselves.
Doesn’t the God of ID of those who believe in young earth show a God that is so powerful that He can do the mircaculous beyond the human understanding by creating the universe in such a short time frame. Many non-Christian people have told me after speaking with them “while I don’t hold to young earth, I do value your strong Faith because it takes a lot of Faith to believe that the universe is created in such a short time.”
Kim 12.21.05 at 7:07 pm
dh,
You should read some our great theologians, from Augustine through Calvin to Barth. Each of them would tell you that to talk about creation taking place “in such a short time” is to make a fundamental category mistake which, again, confuses the Creator with the creature and amounts to idolatry.
God is the Creator, not a beefy celestial labourer working at speed. And God’s “power” in creation should not be thought of as an act of sheer will, but rather as the prodigal, unconstrained love of the eternal Trinity spilling over from the divine being (but by grace, not necessity) to issue, ultimately, in creatures made in God’s image, in love and for love. Best, then, to think of God’s creative power, not (as it were) as a mega-thermonuclear kind of power, but as the power of love that lets everything be. Finally - on time - God does not create in time, God creates time itself. God speaks (Genesis 1, John 1) - and behold! - creation in itself, and creation as the theater of the history of salvation
That creation is an act of grace, that ceation is ex nihilo, “out of nothing” - “in the beginning” has nothing to do with the start of a chain of causality; that creation is an object of faith, not sight (that’s “nature”, not creation) - “We believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth”; and that, ultimately, creation is the creation of the whole Trinty - these three things are what is distinctive about a Christian understanding of creation. And about these three things ID can tell us absolutely zilch.
By the way, humanly speaking, the finest acts of creation do indeed “take time”; it is destruction that takes place quickly.
dh 12.21.05 at 10:45 pm
I agree with the conclusion but my view doesn’t downplay your conclusion but adctually makes it stronger. I feel that a quick creation shows God having more power than one who created it in a long time. Also, you speak in human terms and God is so much more powerful than that that He can do something that in the natural cannot be explained but to a point (as I have stated before with Dr. D. Russell Humphries). God speaks and behold “evening and morning” were each and everyday of creation. He didn’t have to labour to creat the universe in a short time for God is more powerful than that. My God is so powerful that with a snap of His fingers or with a word spoken the creation was made and He wasn’t constrained to have it be for millions of years like scientists put God in a box do. Trinity is not the creation from the creation. The Trinity was there BEFORE the universe was even created. God has never had a beginning for He is eternal. The trinity of God (triune) has always been and will always be.
I don’t buy that it is idolatry. I don’t see how that can be if God is powerful enough to create the universe in a short time period. It was by love and all that you stated in those paragraphs that God created the universe in a short time. ““in the beginning†has nothing to do with the start of a chain of causality” that is why I don’t believe in evolution or long earth creation. God spoke and it came into existence. This isn’t a thermo nuclear affect but a love for us that He would show us His power and Grace for us to be created to have a relationship to Him.
“15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.”
Part of understanding God is His power and supremacy over all creation to go along with the most important thing the love and a relationship to Him by our Faith in Him alone. Basically, God being all powerful doesn’t downgrade Him being Abba Father (Daddy God) and Him being Abba Father (Daddy God) downgrade Him being all powerful. He is equally both at all times and at the same time. I think I also mentioned this in previous post with the Lion of Judah and the Lamb of God. At all times He is both. That is what the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Understanding the concept of Him being both. How wonderful is that that our Father loves us but that if He wanted (and if you see how close he was in the flood) of wiping out all of creation but because of people having Faith (Noah, Abraham’s days when he left Ur, etc.) You can see how God’s nature is both. Even Paul talks about people who downplay God’s power when he references “having a form of Godliness but denying His power” and how we should be careful of people or ideas that have this. (Not referring to you but giving insight).
Steve 12.22.05 at 5:13 pm
dh,
Would your faith in God be shaken in any way were it revealed to you that he actually HAD chosen to create the universe over eons through processes such as the Big Bang and evolution?
I don’t understand why a God who would choose to use those processes would be any less powerful than one who created it in six days. As the almighty God, it is really his choice how he creates everything is it not?
Personally, I think that conversations such as this one, while intellectually amusing, are a bit like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I don’t suspect that one’s interpretation of the first part of Genesis is all that important in the grand scheme of things.
dh 12.22.05 at 8:53 pm
Actually I know the answer to “angels dancing on a pin”. It is all of them because 1/3 of all of the angels were cast out of heaven implying a fixed number of angels in the first place in light of the pin being a fixed amount of space.
I don’t believe it will ever be revealed so the hypothetical is not reality. In fact if you read Dr. D. Russell Humphries regarding Creation you can see how an old earth and a young earth can co-exist with the old earth being an appearance of something that actually took a short period of time. (I really enjoy the concept of creation in a “white hole”).
My question why is it considered a stretch to believe in a young earth when God can do anything He desires? Why assume evolutionists or old earth scientist are right? In my opinion old earth and evolution assume deism that I can’t adhere to. It also implies randomness in the creation when I believe God does nothing random everything has a purpose. To me what is the point of making creation long when God created it in a shorter timeframe?
Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim 12.26.05 at 12:36 am
No doubt the theory of evolution will be subject to further modifications, but scientifically speaking it’s the only show in town.
Let’s grant for a moment that evolution is, scientifically speaking, the only game in town. The correct response, I think, is “So what?”. What reason is there to think that the deliverances of science are in all cases the ultimate truth? What reason is there, in fact, to think that science is capable of giving us any sort of ultimate truth? If you are committed to naturalism as a complete view of the universe (as I would think a Christian minister would not be), then you have little choice but to think something like this. But if you are committed to the idea that there are entities that transcend the purely natural, that in fact the most significant person in the universe–the causal origin and ground of it all–namely God (as I would think a Christian minister would be), what reason could you have to think that he (or He) isn’t involved causally involved in the world he created? The most you could say if you are a theist is that God *chooses* to let life develop according to natural laws and without his direct intervention. Perhaps you’re right, but then it’s fair to ask: what evidence do you have for that notion? In what way does it recommend itself?
Science is quite limited in what it can say about ultimate things. It cannot even secure its own first principles without begging the question. If I may be so bold, I would like to recommend Dallas Willard’s paper “Naturalism’s Incapacity to Capture the Good Will”. In particular, I recommend secion II, where he treats the limits of what science can say. I realize you are probably not the metaphysical naturalist he is arguing against, but you might interested in what he says about what science (taken as “science”, or taken as the conjunction of all the disciplines we might regard as scientific) can and cannot say.
Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim 12.26.05 at 12:37 am
At best, the god of ID is either the god of deism or a god-of the gaps.
I guess I don’t buy this contention. If ID doesn’t purport to be giving a complete account of God’s nature (and it doesn’t), then now is the designer it talks about constrained to the dimensions of deism? The “mighty and resourceful demiurge” you speak of could fit the profile of the designer, but so could the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim deities as well.
As for “the God of the gaps”, this sort of objection is vastly overrated. Long before Darwin’s birth, the English Puritans had these wise words to say about God’s activity in the world:
II. Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He orders them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.
III. God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure.
The Westminster divines had to say the least a robust view of God’s majesty, holiness, and transcendence, and yet they had no problem maintaining that he acted in the world through second causes, such as the regularities of nature.
At worst, the god of ID is an idol, because when the deity is deployed in scientific accounts of creation, he is, reduced, ipso facto, to an obect of creation, i.e. the Creature is reduced to the status of a creature, albeit a mighty and resourceful demiurge. In other words, God ceases to be God.
This is an extraordinary assertion (or perhaps set of assertions). Are you saying that, if I claim that God, an infinite, non-corporeal, eternal, omnipotent, self-existent person, decided to create time and matter, and with them the laws that govern them, so that all things fall out according to his providence, I have thereby made him an idol?
Why should a person think something like this true? Why do you think it true?
God is not an explanation for the world, a theoretically traceable cause (even a “first cause”), God is the mystery of the world whose ways are unsearchable.
You complain (rightly, no doubt) about Kant for banishing God to the chamber of private opinions and personal feelings, and yet with the above-quoted sentence it seems to me that you have banished God to the solitary confinement of utter incomprehensibility. Is there some problem with the idea that some of our concepts apply to God?
You should read some our great theologians, from Augustine through Calvin to Barth. Each of them would tell you that to talk about creation taking place “in such a short time” is to make a fundamental category mistake which, again, confuses the Creator with the creature and amounts to idolatry.
Where do Augustine or Calvin say that “to talk about creation taking place ‘in such a short time’ is to make a fundamental category mistake which, again, confuses the Creator with the creature and amounts to idolatry”? Doubtless when read through a Barthian filter they could be taken to say something like this.
dh 12.26.05 at 5:29 pm
Thanks Melchior for your wonderful responses. They were a breath of fresh air.
Melchior Sternfels 12.28.05 at 5:38 am
Thanks dh. In case you are interested, I dived into a different discussion of ID at the ChicagoBoyz blog. Bear in mind that my object there was not a defense of ID, but a critique of bad arguments (pseudo-arguments, really) against it.