our bias towards the extraordinary
In my reading on the creation-evolution-design (CED) debate a pattern is emerging.
That is our bias towards expecting the extraordinary to delineate the hand of God. The young earth creationists (YEC) prefer a God who operates in mysterious, miraculous ways while theistic evolutionists (TE) talk about providence and the ordinary natural ways that God supports creation. Just as our eyes are naturally tuned towards movement, our minds appear to be biased to try to explain things in terms of the extraordinary. People don't seem to have patience for the slow, methodological pace of science, preferring the 'talk show equivalent' of pseudoscience with miracles in every pocket and the so-called unexplainable a constant theme. (think X-files mentality)
Part of the systematic theme of the desacralization of nature has been to rid the natural world of indwelling spirits. Personalities shaped like ours, to allow things to move with the determinism that we see in ourselves and our fellow humans, as an explanatory principle for purposefulness. Science continues this at first a religious task, and now a secular one, to 'normalize', to make ordinary the natural world. And in doing so making the God of the Gaps inhabit ever small, ever less significant gaps.
But the Christian God is a God of the ordinary. To our physical eyes, Jesus was an ordinary man, it is the significance of his life, birth, death that is given meaning in the NT. But he didn't glow, he didn't have a halo over his head, he was ordinary. He didn't land in a flying saucer in the midst of Rome or Jerusalem. He was born, like every other human being. Everywhere God wants us to see the extraordinary, He needs to tell us about it. He needs to use words to tell us the significance and meaning of this ordinary looking events--- Jesus as healer, for instance, substantiates his calling. But like the Pentecostals we would rather see the extraordinary, speaking in tongues, rolling on the floor, barking or shouting, as signs of God. Not the ordinary in listening and internalizing a sermon, displaying little to no outward signs of change until the time for a decision comes. The YEC would propose that God who supernaturally creates 'kinds' is a greater, or more visual, or more worthwhile God than the one seen by TE's who proposes this ordinary providential ordering of the world.
This is where our biases seem to push the conversation, we are not content to read the 'Book of Works', to see the utter contingency of the natural world. But rather we wish to mix huge amounts of miracle with the natural, somehow to preserve the domain of a supernatural God. God doesn't need our help, the world is His, the natural as well as the supernatural, just because we learn somethings about the natural world, doesn't mean it is any less His. It is our arrogance to believe that understanding casts out the Creator, and trying to fight that arrogance by claiming mystery is foolish. Our mistake is to think that our understanding captures the object of our thought and gives us the ability to command it, in the same way that we can manipulate the things we find to do our bidding. We are impressed at the utility and power of our ideas, we look at pictures of atomic bomb blasts and think our physics controls the reactions, we ought not to.
For this is where the secular make a mistake, to believe that their understanding denies God's involvement. That once physics and astronomy showed that heaven wasn't up or out there, that it must be nowhere. That their understanding as a sphere of influence pushes God out of that sphere. They are a lot like the YEC believing that only the extraordinary mirror the supernatural, that only the miracles prove God and since we know there are no miracles then...
I may look at a tree and be amazed that the color green is ("Chlorophylls (Chls) represent a group of tetrapyrrole pigments found in photosynthetic organisms that contain magnesium (Mg) as the centrally chelated metal and contain a fifth five*membered ring" from:
http://metallo.scripps.edu/PROMISE/CHLMAIN.html) as i often do. But the beauty is not decreased through this knowledge but rather greatly increased as i am aware that people like me worked on the ideas and wrote lots of neat books on the things they found by looking at trees, grinding up the leaves and studying the pieces.
I can read the poem:
Trees.
1. I believe that there is nothing in this
whole universe that compares with
the sublime beauty of a tree.
2. I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree;
3. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
4. A tree that looks at God all day,
and lifts her leafy arms to pray;
5. A tree that may in summer wear
a nest of robins in her hair;
6. Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
7. A tree that provides refreshing shade
to all creatures on hot summer days;
8. A tree that provides heavenly fruit
to all creatures without even being asked;
9. A tree that provides sweet honey
to the dainty butterfly;
10. A tree that provides shelter
to the fireflies glittering in darkness;
11. A tree that heralds spring
with its sweet smelling flowers;
12. A tree that became coal for man's use;
13. A tree that made the soil fertile
with the leaves and branches it sheds;
14. A tree that protects the topsoil with its roots;
15. A tree that brings water from the deep folds
of Mother Earth and hands it to the clouds;
16. A tree that produces life-sustaining oxygen;
17. A tree that is the main pillar of the cycle of life;
18. A tree that dances in the gentle breeze;
19. A tree who intimately lives with rain.
20. Poems are made by fools like me,
But God, only you can create a tree.
from:
http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~murty/techhype2/node11.html
and appreciate the beauty of the poem and the tree. But i don't want to dwell in the world at the level of the poetry but do the hard work of science to see what is under that hood of this world. I do not understand, nor do i support this fear of science on the part of the YEC, it seems so badly misplaced.
And this is where my thinking on the ordinariness of the faith leads. It is God's world, He works through means, it is these ordinary things which have beauty and echo the thoughts of their Creator. We do not need, nor must we expect miracles around every corner to substantiate God, for He is here among us in the ordinary.
and lead back to the traditional paradox of Transcendence and Immanence.
TC wrote me his comment while i was reading _Perspectives on an Evolving Creation_ in particular, chapter "Is the Universe Evolving?" by H. Van Till. I had scanned ahead to the next chapter "Special Providence and Genetic Mutation: A New Defense of Theistic Evolution" by Robert Russell and delayed my response to his very succinct and important comment until i had finished the book and thought about these two chapters in particular. I'd like to start my explanation by looking at Van Till's argument.
He defines on pg 323:
The Robust Formational Economy Principle (RFE Principle): The formational economy of the universe is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of all of the types of physical structures (atoms, molecules, starts, planets, and the like) and all of the forms of living organisms that have appeared in the course of the universes's formational history.
Usually i refrain from introducing new terminology to make a point, i'd rather not be accused of solving a problem with a definition. I tried to think about presenting his ideas in terms of methodological versus philosophic naturalism but was unable to really make the point as stronger as Van Till does, so please forgive the definition creation and bear with the argument.
He asks two big questions about the RFE principle: is it true? does naturalism own the principle?
And it is how he answers both that got my attention:
To demonstrate that it is true requires knowledge well beyond our current science. But to show it is false is simply the 'holy grail' of YEC, to show a miracle scientifically. Likewise his answer to the second question is very interesting. The YEC would allow naturalism to own the RFE principle, essentially saying that their viewpoint requires that God created the universe with deliberate gaps in it's abilities. The fact that naturalism requires the RFE principle to be true as a necessary condition (not sufficient naturalism requires the absence of a providental God as well as a 'ex nihilo' creative one) leads Christians to a false position that to attack the philosophy of naturalism requires the denial of RFE, in Van Till's words "I find wholly unacceptable: choosing to reject the RFE principle simply because the preachers of naturalism have staked a claim of ownership for this important concept." (pg 324) Again in Van Till's words "So it would seem to follow that, since naturalism is the enemy of Christian theism, we should reject all of its assumptions, including the assumption that the universe conforms to the RFE principle." (pg 327)
It is while under the influence of Van Till's thinking here that i read TC's words:
"which
> required a subtle God who talked in the whisper, not
> the storm - and for whom miracles where mostly
> infrequent or very subtle, and my understanding of
> New Testament christianity which led me to expect
> frequent and obvious miraculous interventions for
> those who believe. "
and realized that it is this gap between methodological and philosophic materialism/naturalism where the idea of the possibility of miracles versus their probability and even essentialness to certain ways of looking at the faith becomes a big issue. How do we, as orthodox Christians EXPECT God to operate in this world? We have to look at Scripture, we have to look at the universe to see how HE REALLY did do it. This is the radically continguent nature of God and the universe. We do not have the luxury of the ancient Greeks, to sit back and just intellectually ruminate about things, for God could do whatever He chooses to do, HE is not constrainted by anything outside of Himself. The problem is that the Scriptures are full of miracles and things contrary to what we would describe as the rules/laws of physics/nature. This interventionism prejudices us towards seeing the same thing in the universe when we take up the task of science. This is what i describe as 'our bias toward the extraordinary'.
I think this is why J.P.Moreland says something like 'methodological naturalism is provisional atheism', the denial that we can hold a principle without eventually swallowing the whole philosophy which is build by the extension of the method. He wants to be open to seeing miracles or not-expected interventionism on the behalf of God. What i see is a spectrum of possible ways we can relate to this expectation of miracles. We can expect and see them everywhere, something like those living with Jesus and attributing healing to conqueroring demons. I would put the Pentecostal expectation of speaking in tongues into this area. Not just to allow miracles but to expect them, in ways that contradict science. At the far other end would be deism with it's notion of a God who started it all and left. What i see is lots of stable positions between the two. Van Till would be very nearby the deists, with God's providence hidden in human minds, quantum physics indeterminism, the original creatio ex nihilo. The YEC would be very near the Pentecostal expectation of continuous interference in the natural order, God creates new kinds constantly.
What TC's fundamental complaint is that we take the culture of the Bible, with its pre-scientific notions of demons and miraculous healing and look for the same issues played out in the same way today. And make that tie to the interventionism of God into the normal universe a crucial element of the faith. So that you divide the issue so that scientific analysis with its methodology of naturalism is opposed to religious miracles. It is this strong tie that i deny. God's providence underlies the world so that moment to moment His very Word sustains the materials of this physical world. Now can i make scientific claims with this belief? Probably not, nor would i care to. But rather than be so focused on the miracles of God i'd rather look at providence and sustaining as the issues.