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Theistic evolution: All evolution, no real theism

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But you knew that, didn’t you?

From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, :

I’ve jumped to the final (summary chapter, offered by Neil Spurway), because it is one of the more dramatic examples of just how far theistic evolution can go. Here we finally see someone willing to essentially throw in the towel. For starters, he offers “for me a naturalistic account of any aspect of being human is, quite simply, the only sort of account which can be correct.” He emphasizes that many of the things we believe make humans an exception to the animal kingdom (what has been called a “revolution” rather than an “evolution”) are simply points along a sliding scale. “Every owner of a horse or dog is quite clear” of primitive conditions of consciousness, morality and love. He goes on, “For me, the imago dei simply is the sum of such properties: the sum is larger in a human being than in any other animal.”

Spurway then justifies his allegiance to naturalism: “The whole evolutionary process is God-given, not any individual step.” This of course, as I’ve been saying for a while now, is an undemonstrated assumption. Since on his view, no matter what we find, God did it, absolutely any religion could make the same claim with complete immunity. This view that everything can be explained naturalistically, such that all naturalism is God’s way of working, is given far more credence than it should be. On this view, the best evidence for God’s activity in everything is our complete inability to detect Him in anything. That is, on Spurway’s view, we can explain everything in the natural world without invoking God. So why do we include Him?

When written as plainly as Spurway puts it, we can then see why concepts like creationism or intelligent design are anathema to the theistic evolutionist. For those such as Spurway, any suggestion that God (or any agent) would be required to explain any particular phenomenon somehow suggests that the God/agent isn’t present in the others. But is that true? Take the resurrection as an example. More.

Theistic volution can explain away any evidence of design. Its only purpose has been to get Christians used to rule by naturalist atheists. And the first rule is: No design

See also: Theistic evolution empties theism of meaning

and

What the fossils told us in their own words

Comments
No Stephen, you are confusing a materialistic metaphysical interpretation of evolution with the theory of evolution itself. You are also just responding, I think, to you negative preconceptions about TE's (which may fit some TE's) without addressing the theological perspective that I am addressing. A key issue is chance, and you haven't answered my questions: are the things that look like chance to us (the roll of a dice, a fortunate escape from an accident) actually chance to God, or is that what looks like chance to us is not chance to God. The bigger question: is anything chance to God?jdk
July 24, 2016
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Seversky @ 4: You wrote: *************************** Would that include: Cancers? Alzheimer’s disease Diabetes? Malaria? Spontaneous abortions? Earthquakes? Floods? Droughts? Wars? Starvation? Radiation? Just to name a few. ***************************** I answer that: None of those things are incompatible with an ID hypothesis. A designer might have intended a world in which there was destruction and suffering. I think you are hoping that someone will be suckered into launching into one of the various Christian justifications for the existence of evil and suffering. But ID isn't committed to explaining why there is evil and suffering. ID isn't a religion or a philosophy of life. It's an inference to design. If you want a religion or a philosophy of life, read Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Plato or Kahlil Gibran, not Dembski or Behe or Meyer or Wells. So yes, malaria is horrible, and yes, a designer might have intended it. That might make the designer nasty or sadistic, or it might make the designer's purposes inscrutable; it wouldn't disprove that malaria was designed. Medieval torture chambers were filled with designed objects. The aim of those objects was to produce pain. It does not follow from the fact that only a cruel person would design such objects, that they are not designed objects. If you are arguing against the inference of design, argue against that; if you are personally rejecting the kind of God who would create malaria, that's a different argument entirely. But don't mix up the arguments.Timaeus
July 24, 2016
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jdk
Have you looked at any of the material I linked to? Can you be specific about what the problems are?
I have already described the problem. A God-guided evolutionary process that produces a specified result cannot also an unguided, Darwinian process that produces an indeterminate result. If the process is Neo-Darwinism, then the outcome cannot be guaranteed.
Also, as a specific issue, do you agree that what may appear as chance to us may not be chance to God?
Not in the way that TEs mean it, no. According to the Darwinian model, which TEs claim to follow, evolution is (not seems to be) a totally random process. So, the TEs try to have it both ways: First, to please the Darwinists, they provide their talking points: Science confirms that the variations are due to random chance. Then, to please the Christians, they present their contradictory claim: the variations only appear to be due to random chance. Sorry that doesn't work.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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SB: Which YEC’s try to reconcile God with Darwin? Mung:
All of them. John Sandford comes to mind.
Any reference to Darwinism is about Darwin's General Theory of Evolution. It is that theory that cannot be reconciled with God. Sanford does not accept Darwin's general theory of evolution (natural processes created all biodiversity). No YEC does. On the other hand, everyone, Sanford, IDs and all YEC's, accept's Darwin's special theory of evolution (natural processes create micro changes). Why in the world would YECs try to reconcile God with something they don't believe in (Darwin's general theory). Only TEs try to do that. I cannot be done.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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StephenB: Which YEC’s try to reconcile God with Darwin? All of them. John Sandford comes to mind. Most of them by appealing to the Fall and/or God having completed His work on the 6th day. After you remove God from the picture, what's left, other than Darwinism? Do you know of any YEC that claims that God is still creating new species? I don't.Mung
July 24, 2016
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Why isn't YEC'ism called Christian Darwinism? Is it because YEC'ism denies that God has any role whatsoever in evolution/devolution? Why is that better or worse than Theistic Evolution?Mung
July 24, 2016
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#15 should say: Have you looked at any of the material I linked to? Can you be specific about what the problems are? Also, as a specific issue, do you agree that what may appear as chance to us may not be chance to God? In fact, from God’s perspective, is there even anything as a chance event?jdk
July 24, 2016
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Darn. Edit is not working in Chrome. I'll use a different browser.jdk
July 24, 2016
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Have you looked at any of the material I linked to? Can you be specific about the problem is? Also, as a specific issue, do you agree that what we may appear as chance to us may not be chance to God? In fact, from God's perspective, is there even anything as chance?jdk
July 24, 2016
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Keith Miller, not Ken Miller.
Keith Miller has the same problem.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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Keith Miller, not Ken Miller.jdk
July 24, 2016
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And I’m not interested in arguing about what is essentially a sectarian disagreement within Christianity.
The point is that Ken Miller's position is not consistent with Christianity. There is nothing to argue about.
My main point is that your summary of two different ways “TEs try to reconcile God with Darwin” is incomplete, and doesn’t include another possibility.
Your number 3 does not address the issue on the table. So it is not an alternative solution. It is simply a nice sounding phrase that doesn't mean anything. TEs use it all the time even as they avoid discussing the irrational nature of their position.
Whether you think that third way is any more successful than the other two (and you don’t seem to understand it) is irrelevant to me.
If i didn't understand your comment, I wouldn't know what is wrong with it. The third way is neither successful or not successful. It has nothing to do with the specific arguments that TEs make or how they relate evolution's mechanism to Divine action.
However, I encourage interested readers to look at the links I provided.
I encourage anyone to address my arguments. No TE has yet taken them up. Sending me to a link that evades the issue will not suffice.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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I am referring to Keith Miller, not Ken: different people. And I'm not interested in arguing about what is essentially a sectarian disagreement within Christianity. My main point is that your summary of two different ways "TEs try to reconcile God with Darwin" is incomplete, and doesn't include another possibility. Whether you think that third way is any more successful than the other two (and you don't seem to understand it) is irrelevant to me. However, I encourage interested readers to look at the links I provided.jdk
July 24, 2016
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Mung
Is the YEC attempt to reconcile God with Darwin any better?
Which YEC's try to reconcile God with Darwin?StephenB
July 24, 2016
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jdk
Approach #3: The TE’s I know and have learned from believe that all that happens is the will of God, and that the ways he manifests his will are beyond the understanding of man.
Non responsive. A chance-oriented, evolutionary process, acting alone, cannot produce a result that is guaranteed to reflect God’s apriori intent. Thus, Christian Darwinism cannot be reconciled with Christianity.
What is chance to man is not chance to God, and God doesn’t have to manipulate anything (see sentence 1).
You are confusing two ideas. Your first clause reflects the irrational nature of Christian Darwinisn: your second clause reflects TE equivocation by those who know that Darwinism needs help. Christian Darwinists claim that science and religion are compatible, which they are, but then they go on to say that religion reaches the opposite conclusion as science, which means they are not compatible after all. That is one of their many contradictions. Some of them try to provide cover by changing the definition of random to correlation, but that doesn’t help since Neo-Darwinism is clear in its meaning that randomness is purposelessness.
Therefore, both in science and in our daily life, we see contingent and chance events playing major and minor roles in what happens, but the TE accepts that those happen in accordance with God’s purposes, plans, and will.
Chance events do not produce specified results. They produce indeterminate results. I cannot guarantee a seven, for example, if I use a random process by rolling a pair of fair dice. I may get a seven, but it is more likely that I will not. They only way to guarantee a seven is to design the outcome by loading the dice. It is impossible to guarantee a seven with fair dice, just as it is impossible to guarantee evolutions outcome by using a random process.
There is no conflict between this view and evolution.
The conflict screams. Either the outcome was exactly what God wanted (Theology) or the outcome was whatever a random process happened to come up with (Christian Darwinism). It can’t be both. .
Here’s a pdf of a speech that my friend Keith Miller gave at a presentation back in 2006. (I gave the second presentation that night.)
Ken Miller holds that evolution’s result was not specified in advance. He has been very clear about this. Thus, his aberrant brand of Christianity is in direct conflict with classical Christianity, which holds that God deliberately and purposefully created man in the exact form that He wanted.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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The Sev @ 4, instead of showing how randomness can possibly produce such extraordinary fine-tuning on so many different levels in the universe, resorts to the the age old argument from evil that atheistic Darwinists are absolutely reliant on since they have no actual scientific evidence to ever support their claims. Yet, the argument from evil fails on two counts for the atheist. First, in order for objective evil to even exist in the world in the first place there must be an objective moral standard of good that has been departed from. In other words, the argument from evil is based upon Theistic presuppositions as to there actually being objective moral good in the world. i.e. The argument from evil defeats itself by presupposing the truthfulness of Theism in its premises!:
“The strength of materialism is that it obviates the problem of evil altogether. God need not be reconciled with evil, because neither exists. Therefore the problem of evil is no problem at all.,,, And of course since there is no evil, the materialist must, ironically, not use evil to justify atheism. The problem of evil presupposes the existence of an objective evil-the very thing the materialist seems to deny. The argument (from Theodicy) that led to materialism is exhausted just when it is needed most. In other words, the problem of evil is only generated by the prior claims that evil exists. One cannot then conclude, with Dawkins, that there is ‘no evil and no good’ in the universe.,,, The fact that evolution’s acceptance hinges on a theological position would, for many, be enough to expel it from science. But evolution’s reliance on metaphysics is not its worst failing. Evolution’s real problem is not its metaphysics but its denial of its metaphysics.,,, Cornelius Hunter – Darwin’s God – pg. 154 & 159 If Good and Evil Exist, God Exists: Prager University - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xliyujhwhNM Albert Einstein and his answer to his Professor! – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLOZDpE1rkA
The second failure for atheists with their argument from evil is that Theists, especially Christians, never claimed that we are currently living in the perfection of heaven in the first place but that we are, indeed, currently living in a fallen world. In other words, when the atheist belly aches about all the death and suffering in the world he is actually affirming what the Christian holds as a foundational premise. The main difference being that Christians lean on God to help them get through the tough times whilst the atheist angrily blames God for the tough times and refuses to ever ask Him for help. In fact, Charles Darwin, though drifting away from God for a long while, was, sadly, permanently driven away from God because of what he perceived to be the 'unjust' death of his daughter,,
“The death of his daughter was a significant event in Darwin’s life, and certainly consolidated his belief that a bad world is incompatible with a good God.” http://askjohnmackay.com/questions/answer/darwin-did-death-charles-daughter-annie-turn-him-against-god-christianity
Here is a good quote on dealing with extremely hard times:
"We are His masterpiece. The greatest creation he has ever made. See what God has to offer you. See what He can do and you will be amazed. When something hits you hard, don't put that blame on God put that weight on God. Say, "God, take that weight off me." And He will and He will carry you through the shadow of death, because He wants you to come out on the other side." - Mark Herzlich - The Linebacker Who Couldn’t Be Stopped by Cancer - video http://www.cbn.com/tv/3775240000001
Verse and videos:
John 16:33 "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (Centrality Concerns) The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from Death as the “Theory of Everything” – video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1143437869002478/?type=2&theater Shroud of Turin: From discovery of Photographic Negative, to 3D Information, to Quantum Hologram - video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/1119619634717635/?pnref=story Special and General Relativity compared to Heavenly and Hellish Near Death Experiences - video (reworked May 2016 – following two videos referenced in it) https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/1193118270701104/ (Entropic Concerns) The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead is the correct solution for the "Theory of Everything" - video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/1121720701174195/?pnref=story Albert Einstein vs. "The Now" of Philosophers and of Quantum Mechanics – video https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1129789497033982/?type=2&theater
bornagain77
July 24, 2016
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Is the YEC attempt to reconcile God with Darwin any better?Mung
July 24, 2016
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Approach #3: The TE's I know and have learned from believe that all that happens is the will of God, and that the ways he manifests his will are beyond the understanding of man. What is chance to man is not chance to God, and God doesn't have to manipulate anything (see sentence 1). Therefore, both in science and in our daily life, we see contingent and chance events playing major and minor roles in what happens, but the TE accepts that those happen in accordance with God's purposes, plans, and will. There is no conflict between this view and evolution. Of course, there is a conflict between this view and a materialist or naturalistic metaphysics, but that's a different issue. Here's a pdf of a speech that my friend Keith Miller gave at a presentation back in 2006. (I gave the second presentation that night.) http://www.kcfs.org/CFS/MillerCFS.pdf Here is a more scholarly essay: http://www.ouragora.com/archives/essays/evolutionary_theory_and.html, and Keith's website: http://www.scifaithkansas.net/jdk
July 24, 2016
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Mung
I don’t see the problem here.
TEs try to reconcile God with Darwin in two different ways. Neither approach is successful. If, as most TEs believe, Darwinian, chance-driven processes caused biodiversity, then we have a problem: The outcome could not have been determined in advance. That means that God did not necessarily intend to create man in his present form and the Biblical account is false. If, as a few TEs believe, God acted behind the scenes to assure the outcome via quantum manipulations, then it really isn't the mechanism or process that is responsible for the outcome and Darwin has left the building.StephenB
July 24, 2016
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mahuna @ 3
Etc., etc. It was ALL designed.
Would that include: Cancers? Alzheimer's disease Diabetes? Malaria? Spontaneous abortions? Earthquakes? Floods? Droughts? Wars? Starvation? Radiation? Just to name a few.
Peace and Joy.
Live long and prosperSeversky
July 24, 2016
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1. Did the Creator intend for Earth to exist at or before The Big Bang? Undoubtedly yes. 2. Did the Creator arrange for the star Sol to form in exactly the best position in the Milky Way? Undoubtedly yes. 3. Did the Creator arrange for proto-Earth to form at the optimal distance from Sol? Undoubtedly yes. 4. Did the Creator arrange for the collision between proto-Earth and a smaller sacrificial planet? Undoubtedly yes. 5. So, did the Creator always intend Earth to be the home for Humans? Undoubtedly yes. 6. Does the Creator work in strange and mysterious ways? Yes. Discussions of a Creator who can patiently wait hundreds of millions or even billions of years to unveil the non-evolving, fully functional on Day 1 design for Humans (male and female, together at once) don't make much sense if Earth itself is assumed to be an unlikely accident. Earth is here because humans needed a home like Earth. Sol is here because Earth needed a star like Sol. The Milky Way is here because Sol needed a galaxy like the Milky Way. Etc., etc. It was ALL designed. Peace and Joy.mahuna
July 24, 2016
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I don't see the problem here. Even young earth creationists believe that God created the living world and then left it alone to evolve on its own. The Creation. The Fall. And it's been Darwinian devolution ever since!Mung
July 24, 2016
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Ask this question: Did God know what Adam would look like? All will answer "yes". Then, Did Adam look as God planned? Cuts right to the chase.buffalo
July 24, 2016
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