The RTB Science-Scripture Integration

I’m not sure why it would be “contradictory”. And as far as a “deistic God” (by which I will assume for now that you mean a creator who never intervenes in his universe), I’m not saying that there are no such things as miracles or Divine interventions. I am saying (among other things) that I see no reason to assume that the evolution of life on earth required any sort of ongoing intervention or manipulation of mutations or “epigenetic events” or some such. I’m not saying that such is impossible or inconceivable. I simply don’t see why it would need to be presumed as necessary. And I certainly don’t know of any means of detecting and identifying it by means of the Scientific Method.

I find a lot of the “this couldn’t happen by any natural process that I currently understand, therefore it must be God at work” arguments of the ID community fully deserving of the god-of-the-gaps label which is usually heaped on it. Moreover, I don’t see how they can claim their position is a scientific one when they never seem to be able to formulate a scientific theory of ID which is meaningfully subjected to falsification testing. (Philosophically and theologically I may have very much in common with them. But scientifically, I just can’t support them until I see them vindicate themselves by means of some compelling peer-reviewed publications. I’ve been waiting for decades now for ID proponents to get to even first base in that regard.)

By the way, considering how rare and usually very “localized” are most of the miracles (supernatural interventions) in the Bible in terms of both time and space, I get the impression that God acts through such supernatural interventions into natural processes not all that often. But that is just a hunch on my part. (One can basically count the relatively brief eras of major observable supernatural intervention in the Bible on one hand.)

I chose my words carefully there. I’m not saying that God is not supernaturally active in the lives of many millions of people on a daily basis, especially through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Yet, meanwhile, in the natural realm which is explored by science, I can’t cite any scientific evidence that God (or some “supernatural force or agent”) is manipulating natural processes to operate differently than they otherwise would—and certainly I don’t see any evidence of this happening on a frequent basis. Perhaps it does happen but I don’t observe it and have any means of verifying that it is a supernatural intervention.

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