Is PS Against Using Scientific Arguments as Evidence for God's Existence?

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@Eddie

the BioLogos folks and other TEs have often tried to harmonize Christianity with evolution by making a huge appeal to alleged statements about “randomness” in the Bible, but if evolutionary theory changes (and scientific theories do change) so that “randomness” becomes a much less important cause of evolutionary change, and structural necessities related to chemistry and physics become much more important (as some of the Altenberg scientists believe), then the Christian apologetic of BioLogos will become outdated, and evangelicals will have to scramble for Biblical passages that speak of necessities or laws or the like.

I think you are misrepresenting the position of many ECs and CAEs. The point isn’t that everything is random, but that (apparent) randomness poses no threat to Christianity as even the Bible says that God governs the outcome of probabilistic events. If the amount of randomness or probabilistic uncertainty in natural phenomena were to decrease, this would also not threaten the viability of Christian belief. After all, even with the randomness we know about, there is also a lot of order and regularity. In other words, randomness is not a good test case for Christianity.

@Eddie

What the ID folks have shown (and not just them, but others in philosophy and other fields) is that the popular rhetoric that “science has demonstrated that there is no design” is hollow, and that in fact science has shown no such thing. Even if ID folks never succeed in providing a convincing demonstration of design, they (along with certain philosophers, e.g., Plantinga, Feser) have succeeded in achieving at least a draw. The claim that science has made belief in design or belief in God impossible is no longer taken seriously among educated people, except for a few ultra-science-geeks and their journalistic cheerleaders.

I agree with you that it is important for Christians to build a robust defense against the claim that “science has demonstrated the irrationality of religious belief”, but is ID really the most influential or even best-suited candidate for this? When I was a teenager, as I realized that no serious scientists held to YEC, I first turned towards ID. But I also quickly realized that the majority of biologists, even Christian ones, were also skeptical of the claims of the ID movement. I could not find a robust defense of theistic belief there. Instead, I found my answer in the philosophical writings of philosophers and theologians like Craig, Plantinga, McGrath and others - those who taught me the proper place of natural science within an overarching epistemological framework, subsuming mainstream science instead of arguing against it.