The Hump of the Camel

I thought I’d withdrawn from the BioLogos thread on Darrel Falk’s piece, but Ted Davis threw me a challenge in a response to a reply I made to penman on the Reformed view of creation. He picked up a reference to John Owen  on this blog, and suggested his views on sovereignty and freedom were so particular that I’d be optimistic to find a TE website that endorsed them. I replied along the lines that Owen wasn’t the only name I cited, and that Reformed views on providence are hardly a forgotten footnote in Evangelicalism.

But as I wrote, I was musing on the fact that, given his circumstances, a 17th century Congregationalist probably, even in his large body of work, wrote little on the natural creation itself, apart from the complicating factors of free agents like men and angels  and the question of sin.

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I guess I need to summarise the discussion I’ve had over the last five days on the thread about Darrel Falk’s reply to William Dembski over on BioLogos. I may be a little clearer now about what he meant to say, but in truth I’m little closer to knowing, except by inference, what he actually believes. I’ve probably, regretfully, made an enemy in trying to find out.

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Regular readers may know that I’ve been trying to clarify Darrel Falk’s post responding to William Dembski’s essay on BioLogos. The key issue is what BioLogos actually understands by God’s government, as opposed to his sustaining, of nature. Darrel’s initial essay restricts this to the role of a very deterministically framed natural law (with a let-out for “possible” supernatural intervention), though Ted Davis has tossed some discussion of the deep mysteries of randomness, and the profound debates in the academy about the extent of God’s direction of events.

Well here’s me, a retired quack, dialoguing with these heavyweights late into the evening, and I guess it produces a degree of stress. Anyway, last night I had this very strange dream.

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If we’re really serious about teleology and a God of eternal purpose, then maybe we look at the laws of physics the wrong way round. I mused a little on the question of teleology  here  last year.  It seemed to me that our natural methodology – and not only within scientific endeavour – is always to look at cause and effect. But if we believe in the God who starts with the purpose of uniting all things together in Christ, then we ought to be thinking instead of means and ends.

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Now that Darrel Falk’s second post is up on BioLogos, I want to see what kind of discussion it generates. But one thought emerges to me immediately, and that is on the question of human exceptionalism. Dembski raised the issue of how a Darwinian evolutionary process could possibly give rise to mankind “in the image of God.” Darrel has rather pulled the rug out from under him by distancing himself, and Biologos as a whole, from “Darwinism”, obviously accepting, for the purposes of self-identification, that the metaphysical baggage that comes with the name is heavy enough to load down BioLogos‘ theological credentials. His actual reply to the point is interesting, though:

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The first part of Darrel Falk’s reply to William Dembski on BioLogos actually does clarify (a little) the issue I’ve alluded to a lot on The Hump of the Camel, that is the idea of God’s having give creation “freedom”, especially in the realm of evolution. To remind you, Darrel’s last summary of this to me included the words:

God’s design, however, is intelligent and God, through that intelligence wills freedom for his creation, including the constrained freedom of allowing creation to “make itself.”

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The first of Darrel Falk’s two-part response to William Dembski’s article on BioLogos  is, once again, more significant for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. Given, from previous writings, his preference for the idea of a creation permitted constrained freedom to “make itself”, which was stated more or less as the official BioLogos position in my last interaction with him, it is surprising that this receives no mention in the first part, which lays out the theoretical grounds on which he means to engage Dembski.

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I’ve been heavily involved on a sub-thread over at Uncommon Descent, basically denying the assertion that Calvin’s view of human will is deterministic. The actual point made was that this determinism renders Darwinian evolution particularly congenial to Calvinists, but I’ve steered clear of that as its logic completely escapes me. Nevertheless I’ve stuck on the thread not because I expect to persuade my interlocutor (how could I? He has written a book spelling out his own, unique, view of the Scriptures) but because other readers may find the questions raised of value, given the superficial Arminianism prevalent in Evangelicalism both in the US and here in the UK.

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One of the most difficult things to get into our modern minds is that ancient worldviews were not less informed than ours, so much as simply concerned with completely different things. A statement such as “we now know life derives from a common ancestor” actually contains the unstated assumption, “We are now bothered about the ancestry of life-forms.”
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