Joshua, I asked you earlier who is guilty of confusing “design” with “creation”. I’m not sure that you directly answered this question.
I certainly have never stated, nor even implied, that “design is a good replacement for create”. In fact, I explicitly differentiated them, indicating that “creation” included much more than mere “design”.
Nor can I think of any ID proponent who has reduced God’s “creation” to nothing beyond “design”.
As I pointed out, the authors who most frequently confuse “design” with “create” are American TE/ECs, many of whom frequently equate “design” with “miraculous creation” when they criticize ID writers.
I grant that that some ID writers, especially in the early days of ID (much less often in recent years), increased the possibility of confusion by speaking of “design” as an alternate theory of origins to “evolution”. That suggested to some that by “design” they meant “creation”. But that confusion was found mainly in things such as blog posts written in the promotional style of advertising by Discovery staff columnists, and rarely in the major ID books by Behe, Meyer, etc., where a more careful theoretical exposition is found.
In any case, even if some ID writers have from time to time been less than clear, you have said that you want to use this site to move forward, and I’m suggesting that one way of moving forward is to be more precise and consistent in our language than either the TE/EC critics of ID or some of the ID-promoters on blog sites.
That’s why I’ve said that we should distinguish between the conception of a thing, and the execution of a thing. A thing is never “created” until the execution is complete. Conception alone is not enough. “Design” refers to the conception of a thing alone. If I say, “I designed that airplane,” I don’t mean that I also built it. If I say, “God created the world”, I mean much more than that he conceived of it in his mind.
I agree; design refers to ideation, conception, projection, etc. And “crafting” includes ontogeny – the craftsman realizes a design, as opposed to merely thinking one up.
I have nothing against conceiving of God’s creation through the analogy of the “craftsman”. It does not deny that God also designs. And if you find craftsman-language more common in the Bible than design-language, and that makes you more comfortable, I have no objection to using craftsman-language.
However, I would point out that even craftsman-language has been criticized by critics of ID and creationism. They say that to speak of God as a craftsman is to picture him as an agent within creation, manipulating matter, as an efficient cause among other efficient causes, and then they say that this is not what God is; they say that he is the final cause, not an efficient cause, and that it reduces God in dignity to bring him down to the level of efficient cause. The Thomist critics of ID, such as Feser, have said things like this, and over at BioLogos, they say similar things in less Thomistic language. They don’t like images that suggest that God mucks about with matter. They vastly prefer the image of God creating “laws of nature” which then by themselves create galaxies, stars, planets, oxygen, water, the first life, multicellular life, and so on up to man, without God ever having to “craft” anything. Such crafting they mock as “tinkering” unworthy of a transcendent God. So the very image you claim to be more “Biblical” than design is – an image which Jon and I don’t object to – is not an image the BioLogos folks like.
When Ted Davis recently confessed that he leaned toward a model where God subtly intervenes at the quantum level to select mutations that would lead evolution in a desired direction, he was really suggesting a subtle kind of “crafting” of the evolutionary process – and was rebuffed (politely) by Jim Stump and Brad Kramer for doing so. That rebuff was of course in good BioLogos tradition, as Venema and Falk had in the past expressed a lack of interest in such direct crafting activity by God.
I know that you are trying to find your own way and not bound by what BioLogos says or does, and I appreciate that, but there is in fact, all through American TE/EC, in the ASA as well as on BioLogos, a leaning toward a “fully gifted creation” in which God does not have to “craft” anything because nature, from the Big Bang on, has all the powers it needs to create everything. The BioLogos folks and others such as Matheson have constantly mocked the literal use of verses about God knitting us in our mother’s womb; they don’t like the “hands-on” imagery of knitting – which is of course a craft.
So while I have no objection to speaking of God as “crafting”, you are going to meet resistance within the scientific community, even within the Christian evangelical scientific community, if you endorse this image. You will get the same pushback from many TE/ECs as do the ID people when they speak of God as “designing” anything. Many TE/ECs are determined to purge creation language of even the slightest hint of anthropomorphism.
Their language of creation is in fact not derived primarily from the Bible, but from the thought of the Enlightenment – the though of Leibniz, Kant, and so on. They conceive of God’s creation as the action of impersonal processes of nature, and much Biblical language they regard as merely poetic, and seriously inaccurate if taken as even a partly correct characterization of what God does.
Jon and I have been interested in recovering the Biblical and traditional language of creation, as opposed to further pushing the reduction or elimination of that language. So you’ll get a sympathetic ear from us regarding imagery such as “crafting”, but I doubt you will get a sympathetic ear from many evangelical scientists. To many of them, it will sound too much like “intervention”, “tinkering”, “reducing God to a mere secondary cause among others” etc.