Altabin
Posts: 308 Joined: Sep. 2006
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Quote (heddle @ Jan. 25 2007,16:18) | Atlabin,
Quote | They [Behe and Dembski]are the materialists, because they reduce God to a tinkerer in matter, fixing up bacteria much as a highly-skilled human engineer might do it; they simply cannot conceive that the divine may be bigger than any of their categories.
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Regardless of the truth of Behe/Dembski ID (and Dembski’s, based on faulty mathematics, is trivially false), you have not made any case that ID per se is incompatible with the “Christian” god.
Nothing at all precludes the “Christian” god, even with all his omni-attributes, from getting involved with minutiae, should he choose to do so. And describing God as personal and involved in the little details (such as one of my favorite stories, when Gideon is speaking with God and says “wait here while I get a present for you” and God replies “OK, I’ll wait.”) does not detract from those times when God acts in all his majesty.
I agree that ID is less compatible with new age Gnostic type ideas. But in the Christian model, we see time and time again that God is indeed a “tinkerer in matter.” So ID, in principle, does not belittle God.
On the other hand, the methods of the ID community and its leadership are absolutely incompatible with Christian living. |
Well, my purpose wasn't to argue that Behe/Dembski ID was incompatible with Christian theism. It would be kind of strange if it were incompatible, don't you think?
That said, it's hardly surprising that ID was "intelligently designed" to go hand-in-hand with American evangelical religion - the most thoroughly materialistic* version of Christianity. Somehow, I don't see Meister Eckhart, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or Duns Scotus, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or any number of other great Christian thinkers and writers falling for the bacterial flagellum. Their vision was greater than that - a vision I can acknowledge and admire, even without sharing it. And then there's the whole school of process theology which sees evolution as the only possible way for God - the Christian God - to have acted. They're certainly not going to be beating a path to Dembski or Behe's doors either.
The question is not, or shouldn't be, whether theism or non-theistic spirituality is compatible with evolution. The truth of evolution is not going to be altered one whit by how we wish God's relationship with the world to be.
Nor is the question whether we can form a conception of the divine that is simply compatible with experience. That's like fitting spirituality into the cracks left in matter, and is just one step up from the "God of the gaps."
Rather, the question is whether we can grasp the divine in a way that embraces and celebrates our experience, while at the same time transcending and unifying it.
Or we can take the Dembski/Behe route: lie and obfuscate, deny empirical fact in order to prop up an impoverished notion of the divine, one which is a blend of fundamentalist pieties and their own self-image (God the biochemical engineer; God the probability-busting mathematician).
Or you can say "to #### with all of that" and just love the science - as most regulars here would say! I'm not trying to preach here.
So many of the numbskulls at UD, and afdave, are quite simply unreachable. They're already committed to their thoroughly limited conception of god, for which Behe/Dembski ID is a perfect apologetic. No amount of explaining that, "no, God didn't make the flagellum, it's quite explicable by normal natural processes" is ever going to reach them.
In avocationist, on the other hand, we have someone who seems almost as blindly devoted to the Behe/Dembski flimflam as an other UDer, yet claims to have a worldview, a metaphysics which is entirely incompatible with ID. That puzzles me, but also interests me. I'd like to hear more from her about this: which part of her belief-system does she not follow through to the end? Not being snarky - we're all imperfect, inconsistent animals - but genuinely interested.
*By "materialistic" here I mean vulgar, crass and self-serving. Since I think that matter is all there is, and that it is quite marvelous, I don't usually use the term as an insult, or with this sense!
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