- Feb 17, 2005
- 8,463
- 515
- 38
- Faith
- Protestant
- Marital Status
- In Relationship
Was snooping around teh interwebz and guess what I bumped into.
The body of the article is a scientific response to irreducible complexity and well worth reading: http://www.asa3.org/evolution/irred_compl.html
Comments?
... The theistic apologetic ought to claim all of reality as evidence of God's eternal power and divine nature. Every fact of creation drips with the evidence of God as the creator. Every time we think or speak about a fact of creation, it is either acknowledging God as the creator or denying him. It is the unbelieving heart and the depraved mind that suppresses this truth. According to Romans 1, these things are evident, both in creation and in the human heart; we don't need some irreducible complexity argument from molecular biology or some probability calculation to see these things.
Narrowly defining our theistic evidences leads to another even more serious problem for theistic apologetics. In the progress of science once unexplainable phenomena sometimes are explained by natural causes. Putting so much weight on God's role in explaining things that we can't explain via natural causes, given the state of present-day science, leads to a minimizing of God's role if, and when, those things are explained. There are even theists who argue that if you can explain the origin and evolution of life by natural causes then God's explanatory role is nil and he is a superfluous addition to our explanation. In my opinion the decreasing impact of theism in the scientific marketplace of ideas stems more from a sometimes implicit, but often explicit belief that God's role is diminished as scientific arguments explain more and more of the world around us. This has been the problem with the past 250 years of science as theists and atheists alike have bought the argument.
The resurgence of the intelligent design argument may give a temporary respite to the eroding influence of theism in the sciences, but the gains will be short-lived. Although many in the design crowd are already cheering the demise of evolutionary theory, I think that there have been spectacular gains in nearly every area of biology and key new developments in the areas of complexity theory, developmental biology, and paleontology. These design arguments will give the general Christian public much ammunition to fight their misguided battles against evolutionary biology. Real gains in the fight against an atheistic naturalistic worldview will come only when we see that the battle is not concerning the details of some theory in biology, but is concerning the deeply rooted anti-Christian religious convictions that take the glorious truths of God's creation and twist them into an anti-Christian apologetic.
Christians need to see the revelation of our Creator Lord in every square inch of reality; we must counter unbelievers' denial of that revelation with the Biblical response that their denial is rooted in their suppression of deeply-rooted enmity with God. This is the basis for a truly theistic science; a science that sees the glory of God's creative and providential activity in every detail.
(emphases added)Narrowly defining our theistic evidences leads to another even more serious problem for theistic apologetics. In the progress of science once unexplainable phenomena sometimes are explained by natural causes. Putting so much weight on God's role in explaining things that we can't explain via natural causes, given the state of present-day science, leads to a minimizing of God's role if, and when, those things are explained. There are even theists who argue that if you can explain the origin and evolution of life by natural causes then God's explanatory role is nil and he is a superfluous addition to our explanation. In my opinion the decreasing impact of theism in the scientific marketplace of ideas stems more from a sometimes implicit, but often explicit belief that God's role is diminished as scientific arguments explain more and more of the world around us. This has been the problem with the past 250 years of science as theists and atheists alike have bought the argument.
The resurgence of the intelligent design argument may give a temporary respite to the eroding influence of theism in the sciences, but the gains will be short-lived. Although many in the design crowd are already cheering the demise of evolutionary theory, I think that there have been spectacular gains in nearly every area of biology and key new developments in the areas of complexity theory, developmental biology, and paleontology. These design arguments will give the general Christian public much ammunition to fight their misguided battles against evolutionary biology. Real gains in the fight against an atheistic naturalistic worldview will come only when we see that the battle is not concerning the details of some theory in biology, but is concerning the deeply rooted anti-Christian religious convictions that take the glorious truths of God's creation and twist them into an anti-Christian apologetic.
Christians need to see the revelation of our Creator Lord in every square inch of reality; we must counter unbelievers' denial of that revelation with the Biblical response that their denial is rooted in their suppression of deeply-rooted enmity with God. This is the basis for a truly theistic science; a science that sees the glory of God's creative and providential activity in every detail.
The body of the article is a scientific response to irreducible complexity and well worth reading: http://www.asa3.org/evolution/irred_compl.html
Comments?
) 
