Welcome to the blogosphere! Related Posts: Evangelism from an Atheist Perspective On Evangelizing Atheists Marks of a Unified Church On Merry Christmas from Last Year The Problem with Stories Powered by Contextual Related Posts ]]> A long time friend of mine has just started a blog, Caraleisa, with her first post, Giving Thanks, this year . . .. I have hopes she’ll get more controversial, as I know very well she can.

Welcome to the blogosphere!

I suspect he’ll talk about antievolution stuff quite a bit, which will be good. [...]]]> I’ve been acquainted with Troy since back in early Religion Forum days. He’s had a web presence for some time, but now he has finally created a blog, Playing Chess with Pigeons (don’t ask me). Welcome to the blogosphere, Troy!

I suspect he’ll talk about antievolution stuff quite a bit, which will be good. He already has a good post on transitional fossils.

HT: Dispatches, where Ed Brayton was also part of the RF crowd in the good old days.

He also links to a post on [...]]]> I really wasn’t going to blog about my blogroll today, but An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution had such a good post that I wanted to link to it, and at the same time I can check off another blog from my blogroll for this round of linking.

He also links to a post on Through a Glass Darkly (got to love that name!), a fellow member of the Moderate Christian Blogroll. Both of those posts are well worth watching. While I’m at it, I should mention both a disclaimer and a sneaky commercial. My company publishes a set of books on Christian apologetics, the Consider Christianity Series. Having had the experience of editing that set, I would see some points of agreement and disagreement between what these two authors had to say and that series.

That aside, I think both authors make important points. I am only going to add a couple of things. Apologetics by nature tends to operate quite differently from science. In apologetics, we have our beliefs, and then we try to back them up. The question is how we will back them up. That, of course, interacts with what those beliefs are in the first place.

An inflexible belief system will tend to produce apologetics that is questionable, simply because one has to work to stretch the facts to accommodate the belief system. A purely evidentiary apologetics will run into this problem, unless it can alter details of that which it defends, and even then it may be difficult simply due to the nature of reality. We simply can’t know enough to tuck in all the loose ends. On the other end of the spectrum, purely presuppositional apologetics often tends to make too many things into presuppositions, and one ends up with a very well ordered package of beliefs and defenses, but very little connection to the real world. Some presuppositionalists will consider that a good thing!

Between those two extremes, however, are various views that recognize both faith and evidence, and in evidence recognize subjective elements that go into a belief system. For example, I would claim to commune with God pretty much on a daily basis. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this makes me inerrant, nor does it mean you should believe me more than the next person. I’m not making any claims based on it–it’s just part of my spiritual life, and is something I think can be part of anyone’s spiritual life, should they so desire. Is that evidence? Well, it certainly isn’t objective evidence. I’m not going to tell you where your dog ran away to, or what the stock market will do during the day because of my mediations. There is no special light that gathers around my head. Yet that has a great deal to do with my own belief system, rational or not.

I like works on apologetics that show some struggle with the issues (both posts I reference make good recommendations) without claiming to finally solve all of the problems. That fits with the universe as I experience it, and with God as I experience him. Neither can be tied up neatly and labeled “closed,” and I think neither is likely to go that way. But both invite me to experience them, think about them, argue about them, and look for evidence as to their nature.

It’s more like a theme park ride than it is like a train ride with a fixed destination.

I have a couple of reasons for including it. First, he disagree with a number of positions I take, but is open to dialog. That’s an excellent start. Second, his position on creation and evolution illustrates one of my key contentions: This is not a black and white issue in which there are only two sides. One of the defining features of the moderate position, as I see it, is refusing to be held to a choice of extremes. That’s why moderates are frequently very annoying to extremists–we refuse to get stuck with only two options. Sometimes even if you give us A, B, C, and D, we want E-none of the above.

Before I go to a particular post, let me look at Geocreationism’s subtitle: Geocreationism – Showing harmony between mainstream science and scripture. It’s very easy to forget that when we look at the interaction between science and scripture that both sides can vary. One can differ on a view of science or of a particular scientific theory, or one can differ on the interpretation of scripture. Any type of reconciliation or harmony involves both. This subtitle is one I would not use, for example, because I don’t think there is any need for harmony simply because I don’t believe science and scripture address the same questions. There are occasional overlaps, but these are incidental, I think. This is one of the issues for Christians. Just what is scripture trying to address, and in what way does it address it?

We’ll see some of this in action in a recent post, “Evidence for Creation” (Review) – Ground Rules for the Review. Geocreationist is reviewing Tom DeRosa’s book Evidence for Creation – Intelligent Answers for Open Minds. In laying out his own ground rules he distinguishes what he calls “Darwinian evolution” and “Theistic Evolution.” He defines Darwinian evolution as largely equivalent to atheistic evolution, though he sees little difference between that and the various deistic views.

He contrasts theistic evolution, in which he says that God not only starts everything, but “He started every wave of Evolution as well.” In his view, God is still distant in this view of theistic evolution, and thus he presents his own third view: geocreationism, or geocreationist theistic evolution. In this case, God is continually present and concerned. I’ll have to read more to see how this impacts the process along the way.

Now I must say that this terminology is somewhat surprising to me. For example, evolution occurring in waves with God starting each wave sounds very much like old earth creationism to me. Further, Geocreationist describes his view in this way: “Evolution would occur with our without the randomness, as long as God remains involved; remove God however, and the randomness would not be enough.” That latter view sounds somewhat like ID or “guided evolution” to me, depending on how one fills in the details.

If I’m reading all of this correctly, I’m going to fall into the “Darwinian evolution” camp. My problem with being placed there is that I don’t think God is distant. For each and every law of nature I believe we can say it happens “because God.” In other words God wills gravity, and should he stop willing it, there would be no gravity. Not to worry, however, he’s pretty fond of gravity. God also wills variation and natural selection, and those produce certain types of order according to that law. Remove God and you remove everything.

Now I know that there are some views that allow for indetectible divine intervention, but I’m not particularly interested at the moment in things that are even theoretically indetectible. I believe that God creates the laws, i.e. the system, which in turn produces everything that we see. God can intervene, but he would do so because he wants to, primarily because he wants to communicate with these weird creatures who have come into being.

I have one further comment initial comment. Geocreationist appears to be looking for at least an historical outline in the Genesis accounts. I think this is doomed to be a disappointing search in the long run. I do not believe that the literature involved was written with the intent to provide a narrative history of anything, but rather to express God’s relationship to creation using the cosmology and symbolic language of the time. I will blog more on it as time goes on, but I have found that everything tends to fit quite nicely when read in that context.