For Scrawly. Those two WLC links you provided.

[wattsr1]

In your Macroevolution the evidence thread you offered two links from WLC. You were hoping for comment. Given that the thread is becoming bogged down with other things, I’ll make a couple of quick comments on your links, here.

First this one, in which Craig begins to address the question asked at the start, with ...

You raise quite a number of points in your response to my answer to Question 82 on “Scepticism about the Neo-Darwinian Paradigm,” Paul, so let me attempt to tease them apart and answer one at a time.

It is naïve to think that science and philosophy are two distinct disciplines that can be neatly separated from one another. I don’t confound them, but I do see them as inextricably united. Your own letter illustrates my point. For your main objection to “invok[ing] God as an explanation for a natural phenomenon” is a philosophical claim about the limits of science. This is not itself a claim made by any scientific theory but is an assertion from the philosophy of science. Thus, your own position is rooted ultimately in philosophy, not in science. ...

Science and philosophy are indeed intricately linked. But then everything you, I, and all other humans do, think or say, are intricately linked to philosophy.

Metaphysical considerations underpin all human thinking, not just those of theology, philosophy and Darwinism.
And this seems to be a big mistake that IDers make. Whenever they discuss science, it seems to be in terms of biology generally and Darwin’s version of evolution specifically.

However, Darwin’s idea on evolution is only a part of evolutionary theory and it’s only a much, much smaller part of science.

Hence to couch this claim in terms of Darwinism is misleading.

Metaphysical considerations underpin all science, and so WLC’s opinion here, covers all science, not just Darwin's version of evolution and Lane's religious convictions.

The same point can be made - about bringing the non-natural/supernatural into all other science. The problem is, no one has been able to show how to do this and have a productive scientific methodology in the process. Not in the case of evolutionary biology specifically, and not in the case of science generally.

It’s why belief that God exists, or belief that God does not exist is kept out of science. Scientists simply get their test tubes out and explore the natural world and report on these explorations. They leave their speculations regarding God’s existence or non existence to any books they might write, or radio/TV interviews they might make.


Then there is this from WLC, with Craig writing:-

As I explained in my exposition of the Doctrine of Creation, when it comes to questions of the origin of life and biological complexity, biblical Christians enjoy the advantage over the naturalist of being truly open to follow the evidence where it leads. Since I think, for the reasons explained in the podcast, that an evolutionary theory is compatible with the biblical account in Genesis 1, the question of biological origins is for me a straightforward scientific question: what does the evidence indicate about the means by which God brought about life and biological complexity? My honest, layman’s assessment of the evidence makes me sceptical of the neo-Darwinian account and leaves me with a probing agnosticism about the theory.

The neo-Darwinian paradigm is a synthesis of two overarching theses: the Thesis of Common Ancestry and the Thesis of Random Mutation and Natural Selection as the means of evolutionary development. ...

WLC seems to conflate different things here. The Darwinian paradigm is not about the origin of life. Darwin offered a very brief speculation as to how life might have originated, but his book The Origin was about life, once it got started.

The origin of life is essentially a question of chemistry. Certainly Darwin’s considerations (and/or other considerations) come into the question once a replicator comes about. Nevertheless, the origin of that replicator is largely a question of chemistry and physics.

Another point needs to be made and it illustrates the claim I made above, about the fruitfulness of bringing the supernatural into natural science. If you look at evolutionary biology research papers, they are full of mechanistic explanation based on real live tests done in laboratories, and real live tests done in the field.

I’ve yet to see anything like this from any supernatural concept that’s attempted to be brought within the domain of science.

Once the claim is made - “God created that particular animal” - where do you go from there?

On the other hand, insofar as ToE is, like any other science, a field of continuing exploration, discovery, and explanation, then it continually demonstrates where it goes from “That animal evolved”. Articles in research journals illustrate this point repeatedly.

Natural/empirical science is all about mechanistic explanation and the testing of those explanations. By mechanistic I mean a nuts-and-bolts kind of explanation, with evidence presented by a scientist kind of saying, "Here, come to my lab and I'll show you what I mean."

No one has ever been able to show how to do this kind of thing by invoking the supernatural.

That God/the supernatural exists or not, is a matter for the faith of the individual. It's a practical consideration that's allowed science to work.

[wattsr1]

Another quick comment, from the following link:-

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/scept...ism-re-visited

Once you divest yourself of the idea that the account means to narrate six consecutive, 24 hour days—and there are good reasons in the text for thinking that its author did not so intend it—, then it’s striking that the narrative says absolutely nothing about how God made the plants and animals. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not claiming that Genesis 1 teaches evolution—that would be anachronistic—but merely that there is no inconsistency between Genesis 1 and an evolutionary theory. Augustine understood this point already 1500 years before Darwin.

Yes. I’d be inclined to agree with Craig here, but, with a couple of comments.

One
There is the possibility that the author did intend it that way, namely six consecutive 24 hour days. But so what? There are texts in the Bible which literally claim that it rains because God tells the rain to fall; that frost forms when God blows with his breath; that droughts occur because God commands them to; that we know absolutely nothing about how babies are knitted together in the womb. Nowhere, in the (Protestant) Bible, as far as I know, does it even hint that God created natural processes to cause weather phenomena, either in part or in total. It’s clear, God does these things by his direct command or direct action. Nowhere in the Bible, does it say, as far as I know, that we actually do have some idea as to how babies develop in the womb.

So it would seem that if the author of these associated verses did actually mean what he/she wrote, yet creationists don’t take them literally. They accommodate the literal meaning of these verses with the scientific (meteorological and developmental/embryological) theories of men.

Hence there is no reason why the authors of those texts in Genesis did not mean what they wrote, and just like creationists don’t take the meteorological and embryological verses on face value, so there is no need for the believer to take the verses in Genesis on face value.

They point to the ultimate authority of God in/over what we refer to as “creation” or “nature”, and that’s it. This is perhaps the safest message that can be taken from those verses.

Two
Yes, there is every possibility that the author(s) of Genesis knew that those text were a poetic idea, or a narrative they knew not to be factually correct. I doubt if we have the evidence to say one way or the other.

Three
I come across an awful lot of YECs who maintain that ToE is bunk because we were not there to observe macro evolutionary events happening, because they occurred in the past. It’s as if the evidence that past events leave in the present for us to observe, count for nothing.

The irony of the above argument is that these same creationists claim that the Bible was written by God, or that God inspired the writing of the Bible. Yet those very same creationists were not there to observe the process of the writing of any Biblical text. It all happened in the past. They appear to think that they have eyewitness accounts, namely the accounts of the authors of those words. But again, no creationist was there to observe those words being written to ensure that the authors were:-

1) Eyewitnesses,

2) Telling the truth,

3) Not misunderstanding what they claimed to have seen, (that is, they could have been thinking they were telling the truth, but were mistaken),

4) Indeed being guided by God,

5) Etc.