Thursday, March 16, 2006

ID - good theology?

Here's one that should rumble on for a while. This is interaction with a commenter.
Good Christian theology doesn't deny the operation of God's creation.
Well, obviously.
Good theology should have a strong commitment to the facts and the truth, and an aversion to denial of reality.
True. If Christianity is true, then at some point, everything that denies Christianity must be false - that is a matter of logic. Of course, this fails to address the question of what Christian truth is, and there is evidently a divergence of opinion at this point.
Were a group to show up at your door and tell you that all theories about air being material are wrong, and its being useful for supporting airplanes flying through the air to be just an illusion, that God alone is responsible for flight -- would you bother to ask them in for tea?
I don't make it a habit to ask door-to-door callers into tea. However, whereas there is plenty of evidence in support of aerodynamics, there is little evidence in support of macroevolution. Macroevolution is accepted by faith, having first accepted the idea that any god couldn't have any impact on creation, which is actually a profoundly anti-Christian idea.

Yes, that's right, I did say it. Denying that God can do anything in his creation is anti-Christian.
Were ID a simple observation that things 'look designed,' coupled with a desire to pursue that thought, it would be no problem. But it is always manifested with a strong bent to claim biology we've known for 5,000 years is wrong.
That is ignorant twaddle. The "biology we've known for 5,000 years" is that things look designed. It is only for the last 150 that people have come to the conclusion that a naturalistic explanation is possible. You are completely back-to-front.
It should be easy to see it as crank theology, too, it seems to me. Does Christianity, or any other faith tested by time, ask us to deny reality in other things?
No. And this is an oddity. Because Dawkins agrees that things look designed, as did Darwin. The funny thing is that liberal theologians now say that things don't look designed, and it's only with eyes of faith that we can perceive the creator. So who is more scientifically accurate in this situation - Darwin and Dawkins, who agree that things look designed, or the liberal theologians, already persuaded by the claims of evolution and that God doesn't have a role in the universe, who deny the obvious evidence of design?

You're right. Christianity doesn't ask us to deny the evidence - that things look designed. It is darwinism that is asking us to do that. And it has no evidence to demonstrate that this is so.