I can’t parse that sentence and am unable to answer it.
Clarity is not your friend. Couldn’t “Exist without God” could mean that he has to have created it initially, or it could mean that he has to do something continuously to maintain it. I don’t think we’ve been talking about the former, and I’m not sure why the latter would be needed.
That’s an interesting claim, but I don’t know what it means, let alone whether it might be true or whether you might have reasons to believe it. I am morally certain you will be unwilling to clarify, so I won’t ask. Anyone else want to untangle George’s ideas?
My explanation, John, is that I have observed a few things in my life and in recorded history that I regard as divine intervention. I cannot really reach posterior of 100%, but divine intervention seems like the best explanation to me.
That perspective gives me a prior about the relationship between God and nature, namely that God created all of nature and continues to actively uphold it and intervene as He sees fit.
I’m sorry that this is not an extremely deep philosophy, but I think that it’s at the root of Christian faith.
Once again, ALL CAPS does not help anyone understand what you’re saying. I know you will never explain what you mean. I suspect you can’t. I suspect you don’t know what you mean and won’t think about it for fear it will disappear.
Going forward, please flag gratuitous ALL CAPS and bolding. As much as I like @gbrooks9, this is too frantic, and unnecessarily off-putting. Please flag, and it will be taken down as inappropriate by the @moderators.
No, because I’m trying to figure out what George means, and he has disavowed “intervention” as a description. But I would like to know what you, if not George, mean by “uphold it”. Why is upholding necessary?
Fine. I don’t believe (if you analyze what I said carefully) that there is any ultimate difference between my formulation and yours, regarding implications, but I will go with your statement. It adequately outlines the problems.
Sure. I don’t believe that life originated, or could have originated, by blind search for the right chemical combinations in a primeval ocean. I believe that a designer would have been needed. You are welcome to prove that my design inference is wrong, by producing life from simple molecules, without any coaching or sneaky steering.
I’m sticking my neck out here, as you’ve asked. I believe that design is a necessary part of the explanation for the origin of life. I believe that design was an actual causal component which could not have been left out, or life never would have formed.
My position is falsifiable, as you’ve demanded. Now go ahead and falsify it. The moment you do, I will admit that life could have got started in the universe without design.
If Karl Popper is right, the scientist who makes the hypothesis is also the person who proposes the experiment(s) that would falsify the hypothesis.
You are making the hypothesis, so it’s up to you to provide the methods of the experiment(s) that would falsify.
I am not an expert on OOL studies so I am officially over my head with respect to coming up with such a set of experiments. I do suspect that it would take a lot of work for generations of scientists to really explore the subject adequately.
I brought up “god of the gaps” because I knew that @John_Harshman was familiar with that.
Yes, that’s a good example. We can ask “Why is the world such that Newton’s laws work very well?” And that is a kind of gap. It isn’t a gap that the atheist much worries about, but a Christian is likely to see God as explaining that.
Because that’s supernatural engagement. God intervening, which you say isn’t what happens. Say God makes a rock fall on a bad man’s head. He had to exert some force to make that rock fall, a force not found in nature. Or perhaps you say he made a sudden gust of wind block the rock down. But what caused that gust of wind?: some unknown force exerted by God to make air molecules move. In every case, making things happen that don’t follow the ordinary rules of causation is a supernatural intervention. Which you deny happens. So how do you resolve this contradiction?
I’ve given you a blank check regarding methods and experiments. Any method and experiment is fine, as long as produces life by chance, with no coaching, steering, biases introduced in the setup, etc. Produce life without cheating, and my view is falsified. Go to it.
I don’t intend to carry out such experiments myself, for the same reason that I would not attempt to produce a perpetual motion machine. I think that the experiments would be fruitless and a waste of time. But if you think life can be produced, go ahead and do it. I will admit I’m wrong tomorrow.
What are you 2 even talking about? We don’t have to justify the existence of God on this site.
Harshman doesn’t seem to understand the actions of God… and yet he provides the very answer he was looking for… all the time saying “it surely can’t be that”.
Well, here’s how I would prove that the Milky Way galaxy is the product of the condensation of an enormous cloud of gas and dark matter: I would take as much matter as in 700 billion solar masses, squeeze it into 30 million cubic light-years of space, and monitor it for 4 billion years.
You do realize how insulting and reprehensible this statement is, right?
You are morally certain? Which means, you consider it an act of righteousness to literally assert that I am lying about my stated willingness to answer your questions to the best of my ability?
I’m not even going to bother flagging your posting … it’s a free for all in the Wild Wild West of Peaceful Science…
Your attempt at reductio ad absurdum fails, because it is not possible to carry out the Milky Way experiment, whereas it is quite possible to carry out origin of life experiments. So far all of them have failed to prove what they set out to prove. Maybe you can do better.
This is true of most modern evolutionary theory. However, in the past, there were versions of evolution where a sort of teleology was involved (e.g., Lamarck, I mean the real Lamarck as opposed to the popular oversimplification of Lamarck), and in modern writers such as Michael Denton and Scott Turner. Nonetheless, regarding mainstream theory, which follows in the path of Darwin, teleology is rejected.
I’m sure there are Christian biologists like that. The difficulty always comes when one asks them how God “imprints” the teleology onto the natural processes. The discussion then usually becomes either very general, vague, and nebulous, or stops altogether.
If you are talking about predestination regarding choices leading to salvation and damnation, I think that is a whole different topic, pertaining only to human beings after they have emerged, and having nothing to do with evolution of lower creatures into human beings. But if you are using the term more loosely to indicate determinism in natural processes, then it’s a legitimate question whether or not God could determine the outcomes of the evolutionary process by a perfect initial set-up of matter (at the Big Bang) or of life on earth (at the time of the creation of the first cell).
If a TE/EC argued that God determined the outcome “man” by a perfect pool shot made at the time of the Big Bang (or the first cell), that would be logically compatible with the doctrines of omnipotence and sovereignty and providence; but I don’t get the impression that many EC/TE folks envision God’s role in evolution in that way. I’ve never heard any BioLogos or ASA TE advocate that position.
So the question arises: if God didn’t set up a chain of purely natural causes to make evolutionary results both wholly natural and inevitable, how did God guarantee any outcomes? We are told by Gould and many others that the outcomes of evolution are radically contingent, and depend on extremely fine small chances. A hawk turns his head one way, and catches the primitive mammal; it turns its head the other, and doesn’t spot it; and on the outcome hinges the fate of the evolutionary line which that mammal will produce if it lives. So, supposing God wants the mammal to live, because he intends to one day produce man from the line of that mammal, what does he do? Supernaturally incline the hawk to turn the other way? Or leave it to pure chance whether or not the hawk will turn the right way, thus jeopardizing his plan?
Some will say, “God foresees that the hawk will turn away,” but that’s not the same thing as causing the hawk to turn the other way. So the question remains whether God does anything other than let the hawk do its thing, refraining all the time from direct divine action to tip things one way or the other, or in some subtle way intervenes to steer things along.
There can’t be any “in principle” objection to intervention, because Christian scientists have no hesitation in asserting that Jesus “intervened” to turn water into wine or feed five thousand people. So there shouldn’t be any objection to God doing lots of little tiny things all along the course of evolution to keep things flowing the way he wants. But if you ask Venema, Falk, etc., they are very much disinclined to see God as doing such tiny little miracles, even though they have no problem envisioning him doing big splashy miracles which would cause much more disruption to the overall stability of nature. They appear to strongly wish to believe that God never “intervened” in nature in the creation of life and species, while they appear completely easygoing about interventions regarding the history of Israel and the Church.
So that leaves us with a God who never intervenes, and never frontloads, yet – without actually “touching” his creation, evokes from it particular outcomes. The outcomes don’t come from an absolutely necessary chain of natural causes, but they don’t come from breaks in the causal nexus either. Yet somehow they are guaranteed. The explanation is far from satisfying to the philosopher or even the systematic theologian, or at least, to this one.
In answer to your question, there are so many good posts of Jon touching on various aspects of the subject, I don’t know where to start, but I believe that the site contains keywords, and you can search on themes and topics that way. And once you find one of the posts on a topic, you will find internal links to several others.
I would say that we have a pretty good indicator of how things are going:
@John_Harshman is wrong in the first quote: God’s “engaging naturally” is the same thing as causing events that wouldn’t have happened without his action… but not in the sense of irreducible complexity, but in the complete and total sense that without God, not only would everything be different… there might not be anything at all.
@nwrickert scores big with the interpretation that God’s natural engagement in the world “is not merely an hypothesis” to me!
And in the final quote, John is wrong about what he thinks I’m saying.
The irony here is that people seem so much more comfortable imagining God performing miracles… “poooof” ! and as the smoke clears… there is something amazing to behold. But talk about just engaging in the natural processes of the world… the kind of discussion that runs through big chunks of the Book of Job … the kind of discussion that includes God sending rain to the just and the unjust (simply through natural processes of evaporation and condensation)… all of a sudden people want all kinds of specifics.
God makes Adam in a single day … from the ground up … including every one of his DNA molecules… and nobody asks how THAT is done. But when we say God designed and built Mt. Everest, we get “how, how, how, how”…