Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991 Joined: May 2002
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The DI ENV is pushing an article by Stephen Webb that supposedly "schools" Stephen Meredith on IDC and "occasionalism".
Anybody else see the problem in Webb's thing that I do?
Quote | Stephen Merediths Looking for God in All the Wrong Places in the February 2014 issue of First Things accuses Intelligent Design theory (ID) of being a variant of occasionalism, which he defines as the denial that efficient causality occurs outside God. Occasionalism blurs the difference between Gods causal powers, what theologians call primary causation, and the causal powers God builds into nature, what theologians call secondary causation. If God is the efficient cause of every event, then the supernatural replaces rather than guides and completes the natural. Meredith is right that occasionalism is bad theology, but he is wrong that ID is a species of it. In fact, it would be truer to say that Darwinism is.
Merediths definition of occasionalism is accurate, but his claim for its relevance in debates about evolution is not. ID theorists infer their hypothesis from an examination of efficient causality and its empirical limits. They then test their hypothesis by calculating the probability that a specific set of causes can create new biological forms. They might be wrong in everything that they say, but they do not deny efficient causation and thus have no relation to occasionalism.
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If Meredith's definition of "occasionalism" is accurate, as stipulated by Webb, it looks to me that the criticism stands. Webb confuses himself or is confused by the standard Behe-Dembski gambit of testing somebody else's hypothesis and claiming that stands as a test of a "hypothesis" of one's own. What Webb describes as being tested is not anything out of IDC; it is an IDC advocate's conception of a hypothesis that would be made in biological evolutionary terms. Judge Jones caught onto this readily enough, that what IDC advocates "test" is evolutionary biology, which is capable of being tested. They don't "test" anything of their own, because they haven't managed thus far to come up with an IDC hypothesis. Webb manages to miss the forest for the trees, so far as I can tell, because every one of those "tests" Webb refers to from the IDC advocates is specifically done to deny the efficient causation of the result by the mechanism they are testing.
Anybody else see it that way?
-------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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