Re: Might then, your god be "too small"?

John, I can’t really do justice to your thoughts without giving this whole matter a lot more thought, so this may seem a little cursory.

1. How much of a difference is there between creationists and ID proponents at this theoretical level? Both argue that science cannot fully account for human origins.

2. I don’t think I’m saying that ‘science and god are separate entities’. In a theistic worldview God and his creation are necessarily ontologically distinct - that much dualism is unavoidable. Science, however, is not an entity - it is an account of how things are. If our account of how things are must entail both natural and supernatural causation, that sounds to me like an epistemological dualism. My assumption - and it is only really an assumption - is that we should expect epistemological coherence from a coherent universe.

That coherence can be described or made meaningful in many different ways, in terms of many different types of discourse. The scientific and the theological are only two types among many - we might add, for example, the poetic or the childish or the mythological. So I don’t think this argument against ID is susceptible to the charge of being dualistic.

3. I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Is it that proponents of ID share the postmodern resistance to totalizing modern scientific narratives? If that is the case, then fine - but I’m not sure they are resisting it on theologically valid grounds. I don’t think that scripture requires a God-of-the-gaps theory. I think that there are better ways of generating an integrated worldview and that ID is intrinsically sub-biblical.

4. No, what I find stunning about the scientific accounts is not that they point to a designer - that seems too simplistic and too easy an apologetic for faith. The biblical God is not a ‘designer’, he is a creator, and I think that that is an important distinction. In any case, I can’t see the ID argument ever escaping from the fundamental ambiguity or uncertainty of faith, and I think it is not a good thing to expect science to take faith into account.

5. My point 3 was not meant to be read prescriptively. I was simply stating my personal position. My problem is that I would take the latest thinking so seriously that it would become obsessive - and would always be inconclusive. The scientific debate over evolution is an important one, but the most I can reasonably hope to do is listen to other people’s opinions, which are bound to be prejudiced one way or another. If I thought that ID was theologically mandated, it might be different, but as it is, I’m not sure I want to get drawn into the conversation. Past experience suggests that I will be left with a lot of suspicions and unanswered questions.

6. Again, I was only talking personally.

7. The ID debate may have exposed philosophical and scientific flaws in current evolutionary thought, but that doesn’t mean that we should expect direct, unequivocal evidence for design. Marxism freed a lot of minds from the ideological tyranny of capitalism, but that didn’t make Marxism ‘right’ or capitalism ‘wrong’: it merely relativized the capitalist worldview.

Perhaps one other point, on reflection. I wonder whether in a postmodern context many of our flawed rational arguments for God might not function better symbolically as part of a more complex story-telling process about the creator. So I would suggest that the ID argument might be more telling if an element of postmodern playfulness, of story-telling, of prophetic sign-posting, were introduced into the stolidly rationalist argumentation. By all means subvert the scientific worldview, but do so principally as an act of re-imagining creation rather than of scientific revisionism.