On the Use of the Term "Creationism" in Popular Debate in the Past Century or So

[Jonathan_Burke]

@Eddie

Even if that is true, which I doubt,

I can prove it. Do you want that? Remember how you claimed “I’d prefer never to talk about qualifications and experience”? That was obviously false.

@Eddie

you could still reduce the number of times I make such statements

No. You are the only person who can reduce the number of times you make such statements. You are responsible for your own statements. You continually make digs about my lack of qualifications (and those of others here, such as Tim and Mercer and Chris), and I do the complete opposite to you; I agree I lack certain qualifications, and I point out that I never appeal to the authority of even the qualifications I do have. You could try that.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Jonathan_Burke

You are responsible for your own statements.

As are you responsible for yours. So let’s see if you can go a month without sticking in a single “dig” in any of your posts to me. I doubt you can, but if you prove me wrong, you will improve the tone of conversation around here.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

you could still reduce the number of times I make such statements

No. You are the only person who can reduce the number of times you make such statements. You are responsible for your own statements. You continually make digs about my lack of qualifications (and those of others here, such as Tim and Mercer and Chris), and I do the complete opposite to you; I agree I lack certain qualifications, and I point out that I never appeal to the authority of even the qualifications I do have. You could try that.

Never gonna happen.

Right-wingers are all about avoiding personal responsibility while claiming that others don’t accept enough.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Jonathan_Burke

Then don’t quote me providing the translation, and then say it’s wrong.

Which I never did. I objected to your Latin scholarship, but not your translation. Your Latin scholarship was defective in jumping to a conclusion on the basis of the “we” without considering the parallel expressions in the rest of the article, where the word “all” thrice appears in place of “we.” That should have cautioned you from leaping to the conclusion that “we Christians” was necessarily implied.

@Jonathan_Burke

No. If you had read my post properly you would have found that I already quoted the Latin text myself, because I have the Latin text.

It was obvious to me that you had the Latin text for the sentence you were translating, but I did not know if you had the Latin text for the whole article. When I asked if you wanted me to provide the Latin, I thought you were challenging my Latin translations for the other paragraphs, the ones that had the word “all”. That’s why I asked you if you needed me to prove that the word “all” was there. I apologize for trying to be helpful.

@Jonathan_Burke

Please demonstrate that these three uses of the same noun have different referents.

Why would I want to do that? I’ve already said that Aquinas identifies the God who can be known by reason alone with the God who is known by revelation. Of course he is going to use the same word for both. This proves nothing.

@Jonathan_Burke

So when he speaks of “the God [singular] that all men worship”,

I’m sorry; I don’t recall introducing the word “worship.” How did that get into the discussion? Did I say that Aquinas used the word “worship” in the article? Did I draw any inference from the word “worship”? And in fact, I don’t see “worship” in the article. I see “understand to be God”, “name as God,” and “say to be God.” If “worship” is in there, please show me where, so I can follow what you are getting at.

Our difference comes down to this:

You think that the point of the article is:

“Hey, guess what? The God that reason can prove, that’s OUR BIBLICAL GOD!”

I think that the point of the article is:

"The existence of God – who, by the way, is the God referred to in Exodus – can be established by natural reason alone.

For me, the identification of the God proved by reason with the God of revelation is an aside – as far as the structure of the article is concerned. It sits up in the “on the contrary section” and isn’t involved in the section where the argument of the article is executed. You’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

We’re not going to agree on this. So I’m going to discontinue this subject here.

@Jonathan_Burke

I don’t see them as scare quotes.

How convenient. Why didn’t he write the word without quotation marks, then?

@Jonathan_Burke

I am not disputing that.

Good. So you agree with my statement that “ID, as such, is not against evolutionary creation”?

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Eddie

@Jonathan_Burke

You are responsible for your own statements.

As are you responsible for yours. So let’s see if you can go a month without sticking in a single “dig” in any of your posts to me. I doubt you can, but if you prove me wrong, you will improve the tone of conversation around here.

Eddie challenges Jon to change behaviour, but offers no corresponding challenge re his own behaviour. Jon should tell Eddie to [redacted].

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

Another steaming pile from Eddie.

@Eddie

@Roy

With current search engines it’s frequently easier to find the full text of a document given a long quote from it than it is to find

I’ll ignore your justification of for not citing your source. You could have quoted the block you quoted and told me what Day and Page of the Kitzmiller judgment it was from; or you could have quoted the block and given me the URL. I wasn’t complaining about your quoting the block; I was complaining only about your failure to say where you got it.

No, you weren’t “complaining only about your failure to say where you got it”, you were also trying to denigrate my level of experience: “It’s obvious you have no training in the humanities…”, albeit failing badly unless you’re also admitting that ID is humanities, not science.

That attempted denigration also shows that your later claim that you’d “prefer never to talk about qualifications and experience” is a lie, since there was no need for you to do so there.

@Roy

So what? I’m trying to determine what Behe believes, not what he’s said, which may be two different things

That’s fine, if you make that distinction and hold to it. But as you can see, Tim and Faizal are insisting that Behe actually said it, …

I can’t see that at all. I see you claiming that about Faizal, but I can’t see Faizal actually doing it. Instead, I see Faizal saying you’re lying, and you unwilling or unable to deny the charge.

… and thus dragging out the argument unnecessarily. If they had conceded right away that he didn’t say it, then we could have focused on the more interesting question about whether he believed it.

No, the person dragging out the argument unnecessarily is you. No-one else has insisted on determining whether it’s an assertion of Behe’s or only an inference.

@Roy

But it’s irrelevant, since I’m not pointing out what Behe has said, or even the consequences thereof, but that you are wrong when you say that those passages are compatible with front-loading. They aren’t.

There are several separate questions here, which need to be distinguished.

No, there’s only one question here: whether those passages are compatible with front-loading.

If you look closely at all that I have written over the years here, I have usually tried to distinguish them fairly precisely, but in these frictional free-for-alls, where people jump in from all directions, often slightly shifting the topic when they do so, I may have occasionally said things that aren’t as clear as they could have been.

Looking closely at what you write highlights that it is usually you that slightly shifts the topic, mostly in an attempt to avoid admitting error. Such as by adding “tenured” or “permanent” to questions about your academic status, or seguing frpm “neo-Darwinian” to “non-Darwinian”.

You also have a habit of selective omission of relevant facts that is so frequently convenient that it is less likely to be accidental than the assembly of a 300-piece protein from a random selection of amino-acids.

For example:

3 – Behe has said a number of things about how evolution works which lead a number of his readers to think that he favors the interventionist model, i.e., God tinkers with evolution, altering the natural course of events.

Behe has also said a large number of things which are incompatible with a non-interventionist model. It’s not merely that people think he favours the interventionist model, it’s that his whole line of argument is based on it.

Now, to be clear about my own view, …

Your view? I’ve highlighted the parts of what followed which are about your view, rather than about “People” or “they” or “T. aquaticus” or “he” or “his view” or George" or “we”. It isn’t much:

I think there are grounds in certain of Behe’s phrases for thinking he personally favors the interventionist model. So if people want to argue, “This statement of Behe doesn’t make sense unless he is envisioning some kind of divine tinkering,” I have no objection to that, provided that they can make a good case. I believe that this is what T. aquaticus has been saying all along. And I’m not saying he’s wrong. He may be right. I’ve only been opposing his habit of representing his inference (about where Behe’s thought logically leads) as something Behe has asserted. What Behe has asserted is nowhere near so clear.

George is convinced that Behe advocates a front-loaded model. I would not go that far. I would say that Behe allows a front-loaded model. I don’t think we can be sure that Behe personally endorses such a model.

You have serious commitment issues.

@Roy

If some-one wants to remain anonymous, then their qualifications and experience become unverifiable assertions, and can be rejected as such.

I’d prefer never to talk about qualifications and experience, but a number of people here, especially Burke, keep making false assertions about them.

Poppycock. Some-one who preferred never to talk about qualifications would not have written this:

Two comments here. The first is that you shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia for good scholarship on Biblical exegesis. Most of the people writing the articles on religion on Wikipedia are rank amateurs. (I say that as someone with a doctorate in religion from a top secular university, and with a lot of graduate work on Hebrew Bible under my belt, plus several publications on the interpretation of Genesis.)

No-one could have made false assertions about your qualifications without you first mentioning them.

And they know I’m helpless to respond, without giving away my identity, which I don’t want to do. If others would drop all malicious attacks on my supposed lack of training, I could easily refrain from talking about my qualifications at all.

You could easily refrain from talking about them anyway. The problem as I see it is that most of what you write is not reflective of the qualifications you claim to have. You remind me of the blowhard who claims to have five advanced degrees and be an expert yachtsman as well, but then writes about “knots per hour”.

@Roy

and that evolution could not have produced today’s diversity of life

The quotation specified “Darwinian mechanisms” and “neo-Darwinian processes”, not “evolution” (which under front-loading would not proceed by “Darwinian” mechanisms).

Most people would have included the quotation so that they could highlight the relevant section(s). But I understand why you didn’t, since you’ve completely misrepresented its contents:

The point is that if evolutionary change were limited to what Darwinian mechanisms can do, evolutionary change would need a supernatural boost to produce the goods. However, if evolutionary change proceeds by a different method, it might well be that some front-loaded naturalistic path would be possible. Behe is here allowing both possibilities: (1) Darwinian mechanism supplemented by miracles, or (2) non-Darwinian, front-loaded evolution without miracles.

Behe didn’t say anything about evolutionary change requiring a different, non-Darwinian method for front-loading to work (unless you;re pretending that “neo-Darwinian processes” are “non-Darwinian”). Here’s the relevant sentence:
"If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today.”

Behe is allowing neo-Darwinian front-loaded evolution without miracles. No different method is mentioned.

Again, it may well be that Behe conceives of evolution as proceeding by a combination of natural means (e.g., he grants neo-Darwinian mechanisms some capacity) and supernatural additions. If anyone here thinks that is his view, I won’t say they are wrong, as long as they admit that they have reached this conclusion by their own possibly fallible inferences and not found it in his direct statements.

So it’s not enough for people to admit they are inferring, they must admit they are possibly fallibly inferring.

So ID is not, as such, incompatible with the acceptance of macroevolution, even though it is incompatible with any wholly Darwinian account of how evolution works.

Behe’s description of front-loading is compatible with a wholly Darwinian account of how evolution works.

So I’m in the minority among ID proponents. But our number includes some of the most illustrious ID people, Behe and Denton.

One-and-a-bit is not “some”.

Out of your very long post, I cannot find a single section which is not misleading, dishonest or irrelevant.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Eddie

@Roy

If Behe is right about front-loading being a possibility, then evolutionary biologists are right about the capabilities of evolution, and Behe has refuted himself.

No, because Behe denies that evolution works the way current evolutionary theory says it does.

No he doesn’t. It’s clear that he accepts that evolution works the way evolutionary theory says it does, He merely thinks that this way is inadequate without divine tweaking or front-loading:

If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today.

@Roy

You want us to concede that Behe takes care never to unambiguously state that in his opinion God tweaks nature,

Yes to that part of your sentence.

But you won’t examine the implications.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Mercer

What about all the variation THAT ALREADY EXISTS, George?

Why would Darwinian evolution ever depend on new mutations?

@Mercer

I don’t think Behe is staking down any important ground about “new mutations” vs. “old mutations”.

His implicit denial of existing variation is an essential part of the deception he’s pushing (and you seem to be buying), as it leads laypeople to intuitively underestimate the capability of Darwinian evolution by a million-fold.

By the way, your calling an existing allele that was created by a mutation thousands of years ago a “mutation” helps to perpetuate Behe’s deception.

@gbrooks9

I think you could say that Behe think Darwinian evolution is equally vulnerable to ANY category of mutations.

I think that you could say that by ignoring existing variation, Behe either doesn’t think about evolution in a realistic way or that he is thinking about deceiving others. Most likely both.

@Roy quoting Behe

If there was not direct intervention (tweaking, guiding, steering, etc.) or advance planning (“front-loading”), neo-Darwinian processes would never have been able to produce all the complex varieties of living things that we see today.

The problem here is that Behe’s (and @Eddie’s) sophomoric straw-man version of “neo-Darwinian processes” never includes preexisting variation; he’s always pretending that any variation has to be new for selection to do anything.

Ironically, Behe is misrepresenting paleo-Darwinian processes, as existing variation was all Darwin saw.

[Rich_Hampton]

@Eddie

Omniscience isn’t enough. God has to not merely foresee but also foredetermine events. Otherwise, he’s not a Creator, but just an observer of what matter and energy happen to spit out.

You wanted a quotation of contradiction. Here you’re saying the Catholic/Thomist model is impossible because foredetermination is required, which C/T explains is not only unecessary, but removes autonomy from us (free will) and creation (randomness, possibilities, etc)

[Rich_Hampton]

No offense to Torley, but he’s as much as a recognized Thomist as I.

Google “famous” Thomists and you will see that they have a body of published work, teaching positions, etc. Google Torley or I on Thomism and it’s a different story.

Now I’m not saying that he (or I) can’t be correct, but that to call ourselves Thomists as being peers of Carroll, Feser, Tkacz, Beckwith, Barr, et al., is disingenuous.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

No, because Behe denies that evolution works the way current evolutionary theory says it does.

Not really, because Behe misrepresents current evolutionary theory by steadfastly ignoring the fact that selection is acting on a vast pool (in healthy populations) of existing variation.

Darwinian evolution can’t work if selection only acts on new mutations.

The reality is actually a kind of front-loading.

[gbrooks9 (GeorgeB)]

@Mercer

The problem here is that Behe’s (and @Eddie’s) sophomoric straw-man version of “neo-Darwinian processes” never includes preexisting variation; he’s always pretending that any variation has to be new for selection to do anything.

@mercer

You hit him high… I’ll hit him low. Either way, he is going to continue to be speechless.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Mercer

The problem here is that Behe’s (and @Eddie’s) sophomoric straw-man version of “neo-Darwinian processes” never includes preexisting variation; he’s always pretending that any variation has to be new for selection to do anything.

He also makes an equally important blunder in thinking every single mutation involved in a new trait must be itself subject to positive selection, rather only the final trait.

He’s an actual trained biologist, and this has been explained to him more than once. So it’s hard for me to believe that his failure to acknowledge this is anything other than deliberate dishonesty. Though I guess it is possible he could simply be that dense.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Faizal_Ali

He’s an actual trained biologist, and this has been explained to him more than once. So it’s hard for me to believe that his failure to acknowledge this is anything other than deliberate dishonesty. Though I guess it is possible he could simply be that dense.

He does extract significant financial and social rewards from doing this instead of science. Science involves much more work than anything Behe has done in the past 25 years since he abandoned science for pseudoscience.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Roy

you were also trying to denigrate my level of experience

I unnecessarily showed irritation. That’s my fault. It seems to happen when I respond to your posts and those of a few others, who quite regularly show irritation with me – and quite frequently make similar comments about me. That doesn’t justify responding in kind. I will try to improve.

@Roy

No-one else has insisted on determining whether it’s an assertion of Behe’s or only an inference.

I have quoted direct statements of Tim which use the word “asserts” rather than “implies.” And he is still insisting that “asserts” has been demonstrated here. And others said that Behe asserted intervention as well. Faizal ferociously attacked me for criticizing others who said that Behe “asserted,” and since that was the only thing I objected to in their statements (I never objected to “implied”), I took it that Faizal was agreeing with them. Later, after long bickering, Faizal said that he never said Behe “asserted,” and that I couldn’t justifiably include him in with the others, and I accepted his claim; but then he said that no one else said that Behe “asserted” – and I proved that dead wrong with direct quotations. And there it sits; several people did say that Behe asserted or stated there was intervention; Faizal didn’t, but now claims no one else did, either, which is false.

The difference between asserted and implied might not in the end be important; but it is significant that some people have been fighting tooth and nail either to justify using “asserted” where Behe only implies, or to deny that they or others ever said “asserted.”

All of this long and pointless quarrel could have been cut off at the root if the very first person who said that Behe “asserted” intervention had backtracked, and admitted, “OK, he didn’t actually say it, by I think intervention is implied in his arguments.” I would have immediately said, “I agree,” and that would have been the end of it, and thousands of quarreling words would never have been written. But something about the ethos here causes people to plant their feet and not budge even an inch, not even to modify a word choice to make it more accurate. And that’s either childishness, or pride, or both.

That said, the discussion over asserts vs. implies has gone on far too long, so let’s you and I agree to end it.

@Roy

No, there’s only one question here:

Now you’re being dogmatic rather than dialogical. I presented, in good faith, some distinctions that I thought might help clarify the issues and make the conversation more peaceful and constructive, and here you slap down the attempt.

@Roy

You have serious commitment issues.

Scholars are like that. Deciding what’s true isn’t a matter of the will. When a thing is uncertain, a scholar will say so; when there is more than one way of interpreting an author, a scholar will say so. Being “decisive” may be a virtue for politicians, or football coaches, or military leaders; it’s not a virtue for a scholar.

I’ve given reasons for why people have trouble interpreting Behe; I’ve indicated that his direct statements don’t come down decisively one way or the other. I’ve linked to an article where he directly responds to a questioner who was trying to get more clarity about his view on front-loading vs. intervention. In that article, given an opportunity to clearly endorse one side or the other, he declined to do so. It’s not wrong to point this out when people are trying to determine what Behe means.

If you want to argue that even if Behe never decisively pronounces on a position, an interventionist position is implied in what he writes, you can do that; I never objected to inference as such. But it has to be labeled as inference, not as a report of what Behe has explicitly declared.

I will not comment on your remarks about Behe’s quoted statement re Darwinian and front-loaded evolution. I find that your remarks are confusing, and misrepresent both the quoted words which Behe assented to and what I was trying to say. But sorting that out would take many more detailed parsings of terms and phrases, and I’ve run out of patience.

Besides, we are far from the original topic here: look at the top of the page and ask yourself why we, yet another time, have fallen into quarreling about Behe, intervention, etc. when that is not the topic. I would suggest that those who want to wage a battle royal about Behe and intervention start their own new topic and discuss the subject there.

@Roy

I cannot find a single section which is not misleading, dishonest or irrelevant.

The accusations of dishonesty that pepper your posts make it impossible to have decent dialogue with you. I have not been dishonest. I may have made errors in interpreting this or that author. I have not been dishonest. I notice that accusations of dishonesty come quite frequently here from people in the atheist camp. It seems to be a habit of many atheist blog writers and commenters to infer that people who disagree with them must be dishonest.

This was the habit on BioLogos. When Peaceful Science got started, the mood was different. But as time has gone on, the mood has become more like it used to be on BioLogos, with the atheists violently bashing anyone perceived of as defending ID or even just wanting it given a fair hearing. People who defend ID or even just want it given a fair hearing are called ignorant or dishonest; their arguments are characterized as childish or dishonest. The general tone here is pretty savage.

And when someone stands up to the savage tone coming from the atheists with a little bit of indignation, that person is savaged still further, for not maintaining perfect decorum in the fact of brutal verbal aggression. I’m judged here by a standard far higher than is insisted on for Tim, Faizal, etc. – anyone who looks fairly at their replies to me will see that they have been guilty of dialogical violations at least as bad as mine, but the other atheists here “look the other way” and never correct them. It’s only the ID folks who have the whistle blown on their verbal infractions by the atheists here. I would suggest that you and your atheist friends here (minus T. aquaticus and John Harshman, who attempt to actually carry on dialogue rather than just to savage their foes) look in the mirror, and ask whether you are 100% blameless regarding tone and contents of your posts, for the fact that the dialogue here often descends to crude gauntlet-throwing. But I’m not sure if most of the atheists here are capable of such moral introspection; or if they are, I have never seen that capability.

[Timothy_Horton]

@Eddie

All of this long and pointless quarrel could have been cut off at the root if the very first person who said that Behe “asserted” intervention had backtracked, and admitted, “OK, he didn’t actually say it, by I think intervention is implied in his arguments.” I would have immediately said, “I agree,” and that would have been the end of it, and thousands of quarreling words would never have been written. But something about the ethos here causes people to plant their feet and not budge even an inch, not even to modify a word choice to make it more accurate. And that’s either childishness, or pride, or both

Heh. Olympic caliber projection from the man who can’t be wrong about anything, ever. It’s always someone else’s fault, someone else is using the wrong word, someone just doesn’t understand ID or the DI stooges who push it, Eddie is just the poor victim of savage atheists out to get him, there would be no problem if everyone just listened to Eddie!

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Rich_Hampton

Here you’re saying the Catholic/Thomist model is impossible because foredetermination is required, which C/T explains is not only unecessary, but removes autonomy from us (free will) and creation (randomness, possibilities, etc)

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying you have an erroneous understanding of what Catholic theology says about God, predetermination, foreknowledge, creation, etc.

My argument does not remove free will; as I stated very explicitly, free will pertains to human beings (and angels, but they are incorporeal and not relevant to evolution), and we are discussing the evolutionary process that led to human beings from subhuman beings. Dragging free will into the discussion introduces a confusion caused by a failure to recognized the different levels of being in Thomist thought. In Catholic theology, only man has free will. Bacteria don’t. Even apes don’t. God would not be violating the free will of any being by compelling evolution to go in certain directions. You are acting as if any enforcement of God’s will upon matter to cause evolution to reach pre-determined ends (and I say “pre-determined” advisedly, because it means more than just foreseen) would be a tyranny that overruled something’s “free will”, but it would not be. Free will doesn’t enter the corporeal universe until after the creation of man.

@Rich_Hampton

peers of Carroll, Feser, Tkacz, Beckwith, Barr,

Among those peers is Michael Chaberek, O.P. Have you read his objections to Carroll, etc.?

Torley, by the way, has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and Jay Richards, another Catholic who admires and studies Thomas Aquinas, has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion from Princeton. These people are academic peers of the people you mention. I think you mean they aren’t Thomist specialists. But Chaberek is – and his arguments are much along the same lines as theirs. You are reading only one side of the argument. Try reading both sides before you decide. See the link I provided above for Torley’s article – loaded with detailed citations of Aquinas specifically on the animal nature, special divine action in creation, etc. – passages which Feser, Beckwith, etc. conveniently avoid discussing. Or read Chaberek’s revised edition of Aquinas and Evolution. He includes material from Aquinas that his opponents either fail to mention, or gloss over.

[Jonathan_Burke]

@Eddie

Your Latin scholarship was defective in jumping to a conclusion on the basis of the “we” without considering the parallel expressions in the rest of the article, where the word “all” thrice appears in place of “we.”

But this is simply your unsubstantiated opinion. To date you’ve given no evidence to support this whatsoever. In contrast I demonstrated that this is the same reading found in actual scholarship (citing several examples), and I provided three lilnes of evidence.

1. The deus of et hoc dicimus Deum cannot refer to the gods of the heathen, so dicimus cannot refer to “all men”.
2. Right at the start of his argument, Thomas makes it clear that he is speaking of the deus of Exodus 3:14. Consequently the burden rests on you that after quoting Exodus 3:14 he immediately stops talking about the deus of Exodus 3:14 and speaks of some generic deus.
3. Thomas identifies the Aristotelian esse tantum as referring necessarily to the deus of Exodus 3:14.

You haven’t addressed any of that. There are additional lines of evidence.

1. The attributes he ascribes to the deus he describes, were very obviously not attributed by “all men” to their gods. So when he describes an attribute, ascribes it to the deus and says that this is the deus “all men” call deus, he cannot be referring to all non-Christians, since they did not all ascribe such features to their gods.
2. Later, in STh., I q.6 a.4 resp., he again uses the phrase quod dicimus Deum, citing his previous usage in STh., I q.2 a.3, and in this case he uses it in a way which excludes Aristotle.

“Et quamvis haec opinio irrationabilis videatur quantum ad hoc, quod ponebat species rerum naturalium separatas per se subsistentes, ut Aristot. multipliciter improbat (lib. 3. Met. a tex. 10. usq. ad finem lib.) tamen hoc absolute verum est, quod aliquid est primum, quod per suam essentiam est ens, et bonum, quod dicimus Deum, ut ex superioribus patet (q. 2. art. 3.), huic etiam sententiae concordat Aristot.”, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Editio altera Romana. (Romae: Forzani et Sodalis, 1894), I q.6 a.4 resp.

If Aristotle is intended to be included in quod dicimus Deum, it would make no sense to say huic etiam sententiae concordat Aristot[le]. Here a statement is made which “we say”, and Aristotle is said to agree with this. Consequently, Aristotle cannot be included in dicimus, and nor can “all men”.

@Eddie

It was obvious to me that you had the Latin text for the sentence you were translating, but I did not know if you had the Latin text for the whole article.

That does not make any sense at all. I quoted several parts of it in Latin, and gave specific citations each time, even down to including specific section notation.

@Eddie

Why would I want to do that?

Let me explain it to you. Here are the three sentences.

Nulla igitur necessitas est ponere Deum esse.

Sed contra est, quod dicitur Exod. 3. ex persona Dei : Ego sum, qui sum.

Respondeo dicendum, quod Deum esse, quinque modis probari potest.

The deus of the second sentence is manifestly the Christian God. If you want to argue that Thomas is not making an argument for the Christian God, you need to demonstrate that the deus of the first and second sentences (and all other instances of deus subsequent), are not referring to the Christian God. I suggest this is going to be extremely difficult, and you seem to realise this because you are now implying you agree that all three instances of deus here refer to the Christian God. The idea that the deus of the second sentence refers to the Christian God but the deus of the third sentence and following sentences does not, has a high burden of proof.

@Eddie

You’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

If that’s your only disagreement, then we agree; Thomas is referring to the Christian God. I understand that you don’t want to discuss this further, so I will repeat the fact that despite all your floundering you have still failed to disprove my statement “Traditional natural theology attempts to provide evidence supporting the Bible”. I guess you suddenly realised that providing evidence supporting the Bible is exactly what Aquinas is doing here.

@Eddie

Why didn’t he write the word without quotation marks, then?

Because that’s a standard convention when identifying a phrase or term as a specific or technical term.
You haven’t provided any evidence that when he wrote “creationist” he didn’t really mean “creationist”.

@Eddie

So you agree with my statement that “ID, as such, is not against evolutionary creation”?

No. On the contrary, it is typically presented as in opposition to evolutionary creationism. As I said, while the DI claims to be open to the possibility of evolution being planned and/or guided, they constantly argue against it. I note you were unable to dispute this with any evidence.

So now we know these things.

1. ID currently exists only in the form of creationism dressed up as ID, or non-science.
2. Persons who believe that the earth is billions of years old, and that simple forms of life evolved gradually to become more complex forms including humans, are “creationists” if they believe that a supernatural Creator not only initiated this process but in some meaningful sense controls it in furtherance of a purpose.
3. The DI argues that evolutionary creationism raises significant challenges to traditional Christian theology.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

And others said that Behe asserted intervention as well. Faizal ferociously attacked me for criticizing others who said that Behe “asserted,” and since that was the only thing I objected to in their statements (I never objected to “implied”), I took it that Faizal was agreeing with them.

Don’t lie. I objected to your claiming that people had said that Behe had “explicitly stated” anything. And you were unable to provide any quotes where they had done so.

To be clear, I don’t think that is a significant issue. But since you disagree and insist on such picayune details and wordplay regarding what Behe has said, it is only fair that you apply the same standards when assessing the comments of others.

Is that finally clear?

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

But as time has gone on, the mood has become more like it used to be on BioLogos, with the atheists violently bashing anyone perceived of as defending ID or even just wanting it given a fair hearing.

@swamidass is an atheist? @Jonathan_Burke is one, too?