That’s my point.
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I’m not sure what should be added to the analogy. I think the more interesting question is actually whether we could tell the difference between natural and supernatural intervention. God acting through “supernatural” means could be as simple as causing several low probability events to occur together when we would not otherwise expect it to happen. This could still qualify as supernatural because it stretches probability, but it might not be detectable. This would be a fairly active role in evolution for God, which I don’t know is necessary for him but also not beyond possibility.
I also think that if God is truly omniscient and omnipotent then he could create a universe that wouldn’t require intervention. But that’s beyond my mind to comprehend.
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So @John_Harshman …
go get @swamidass, and stop insisting that I need to use my broken translator device HARDER.
HARDER doesn’t work for you. Joshua seems to be able to reach you … so accept that.
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Really? All that for such a simple point? But that’s a terrible analogy. My hands both operate in the same, clearly understood way. But what I was trying to figure out is what “God influences evolution through natural means” refers to. Telling me that natural and supernatural are just alternatives says nothing about that.
When God is directly evolution through natural means, what happens? What sort of act does he perform, and how does it differ from not acting? Does God act in this way in every single event or just in evolution? Does he cause a rock to fall as well as a sparrow, or does just putting gravitation into place, way back at the beginning, accomplish that all on its own? Does he in truth sculpt Everest through erosion, and if so how does that differ from erosion just being a consequence of purely physical interactions of materials? Perhaps you can explain where George can’t.
I can’t do anything more than you have done there: just putting his nym into a post.
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Perhaps. But I think the more interesting question is whether there is any difference between natural intervention and no intervention. And what does either of those mean, if they mean anything different?
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Point 1: I don’t call performing a miracle intervention… remember? If your right hand is feeding you … and then the left hand brings your orange juice to your lips… is the left hand intervening? No.
Point 2: What APPEARS to be super-natural and what doesn’t can be a relative thing. We both agree on that. But some things are more likely to be super-natural than other things.
When a much needed rainstorm finally arrives… it is probably not super-natural. But if 5 hours of rain comes down from a completely blue sky… maybe that is super-natural?
When the dino-killing asteroid hit Earth… that was probably the result of a natural process… but if the Asteroid was created just inside Jupiter’s orbit… .and sent on its way by a miraculous “pooof” of Yahweh … then ultimately, it was miraculous… that nobody could tell was miraculous (even assuming there were humans or anyone else who could see that far).
Then there is the I.D. angle: Behe says that like the super-amazing Billiards shot that puts all the balls in the pockets, there is no visible divine intervention… only the divinely arranged configuration of the universe at the moment of creation.
Joshua and I are in complete agreement that there is no way for Science to ultimately weigh-in on the issue of Intelligent Design. ID is an issue of faith… not science.
I think this is where people would disagree. I tend to have a more naturalism view of it that for the most part God set up the laws of nature and that it doesn’t need regular intervention to run. Under this idea God would only interact with nature irregularly, but we might not be able to tell if he did.
Others think that God is interacting constantly through both natural and supernatural means, though we still might not detect them. I still think this would be more along the lines of God intervening when he deemed it necessary.
I don’t know that there are many people (though I may be wrong) who think that God must directly cause all natural processes to occur like pulling a rock to earth when I let it go.
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Then do so!
So far, between you and me in this thread, I’m the only one doing it… he is obviously waiting for YOU to ask him to answer.
He’s quite courteous in that regard, don’t you think?
Strangely enough, I am sympathetic with John Harshman’s line of argument here. I doubt very much that I share his motives, but his line of argument captures very much why I find much of “theistic evolution” to be vacuous. Jeff Schloss, an evangelical scientist, has said that God is “mightily hands-on in evolution”, which to the average Christian in the pews means that God is actively steering, guiding, and intervening in the process to get certain results; but I doubt very much that Jeff Schloss means the phrase in that way at all (and he won’t explain what he means by the phrase, since he refuses to engage with commenters on BioLogos). Most of the BioLogos people can’t provide any rational explanation of the difference between God sculpting Everest through erosion, and erosion happening on its own without any special involvement of God. So the “God” part seems to be just a pious gloss put on pure naturalism. They don’t think God is necessary to explain anything that happens, but they affirm God anyway, due to a private and personal religious commitment.
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I don’t think that’s at all obvious, but just in case, @swamidass, @swamidass, @swamidass. It’s like Beetlejuice, is it?
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Still leaves the questions: what’s the difference between natural and supernatural intervention? What would natural intervention entail? I’m presuming that setting up the laws of nature or other initial conditions just counts as intervention at that point, not at later points.
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If God is never NOT designing all the natural events, then all we can say is what Behe said in that videotaped interview regarding the Billiards shot… WITH or WITHOUT extra miracles (like walnuts) added to the mix.
But that’s a very poor use of words. The billiards shot is a single intervention, happening at one particular time. If God is constantly doing something, that’s a completely different thing. So what do you mean? Once more: what is “natural intervention”? (Supernatural intervention may not have a clear mechanism, but it at least has a clear effect in the world, happening to a particular thing at a particular time in a particular place.)
I agree. I don’t think that setting up the laws of nature would count as intervention beyond the moment that he did. This leads us to the question, if God is supernatural then aren’t all of his interventions supernatural as well? I see what you’re saying here. I think I’ve typically looked at it as God “inducing” mutation at the proper time to drive evolution the direction he wants it to go. But depending on how we define natural vs. supernatural that might still be supernatural intervention rather than natural even if he did it through a natural process.
I understand your questioning of this line of reasoning. I’m not certain that I think God works this way or needs to.
What does that mean? If god causes a mutation that would not otherwise have happened, what natural process is he using? He would seem to have to push in some way from outside nature, perhaps creating a force ex nihilo that pushes an atom or molecule in one direction rather than another. I think “natural intervention” is a meaningless phrase, and I suspect that nobody who talks about it has thought much about what it actually refers to. It’s all poofing whether you’re poofing matter or momentum or quantum events.
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It looks like @PdotdQ, @pevaquark, and @Jordan already answered this question (i.e. in what sense is the strength of the gravitational force finely tuned?) but I thought I’d chime in with another way of looking at it.
Physicists can devise a system of “natural units” (such as Planck units) where all physical quantities are actually dimensionless, so you can compare things like the magnitude of a mass to that of a charge. In these unit systems, the gravitational constant G=1, and the Coloumb constant k_e = 1, and it doesn’t really make sense to ask how “strong” either the gravitational force or the electromagnetic force is, innately. What you do have is that the equations for the force take on a simple form:
F_{grav} = \frac{M_1 M_2}{r^2}
F_{em} = \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{r^2}
So using natural units, the comparison of the gravitational and electromagnetic forces between two things just becomes a comparison of the sizes of masses and charges. And what we find is that the masses of fundamental particles are extremely tiny compared to their charges. The only reason gravity dominates at macroscopic scales is that particles end up bound together in atoms and molecules so that their charges balance each other out (because the EM force is strong and attractive between opposite charges), whereas this cancelling doesn’t happen for mass (because there is only one sign of mass, and the attractive gravitational force clumps matter together).
What is surprising about this, basically, is that there doesn’t seem to be a reason for the huge disparity between the sizes of the masses and the sizes of the charges. And that is the starting point of the fine-tuning argument.
A great article looking reviewing examples of fine-tuning in physics, from a physicist, is Luke Barnes’ article here.
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I agree with you. That’s why I said that it depends on what we define as natural vs. supernatural. If we say that any action of a supernatural God must be considered supernatural then there is no such thing as natural intervention. I think that typically people consider it to be natural intervention if for example a mutation was caused by a natural process like UV radiation but directed by God. But if God had to direct that event then I agree that it could still be considered supernatural intervention even though the mechanism for the mutation was one that occurs in nature. I think the mechanism is really the distinction here. Again, I’m not sure this is how God works, it’s only my interpretation of that perspective.
Exactly. In that case, what would “direct” mean? Does he change the direction a UV photon would otherwise have taken? If so, he must be exerting some force that would not otherwise have occurred, one that has no physical origin. That’s supernatural intervention.
I would define it as arranging for that organism to be at the correct place at the correct time for that UV photon to cause that mutation. And I would agree that since the supernatural God would be causing this to happen it would be supernatural intervention. I don’t really think that God could intervene in a non-supernatural way. But he might intervene in a supernatural way that couldn’t be detected as intervention because the mechanisms are natural (ex. UV radiation causing mutation).