What's the point of that suffering from God's point of view? How is it beautiful? Doesn't there need to be an answer to these questions, even if we say God is indifferent to animal suffering or that animals have some degree of volition, as Tom has suggested?

 

If the former, why did Christ tell his generation they should get an ox out of the ditch on the sabbath and that God knows when sparrows fall to reassure them of His care for them? But if the latter, is that degree of volition an intelligent volition that entails accountability? If not, why did God give it to animals? It's one thing to say there are other options. It's another thing to explain those options coherently with Christ's words.

 

 

In short, the question is, in a world where there is no LFW but lots of suffering, would God minimize suffering or not? And if not, why not? Most people that read Christ's words get the sense that God would minimize animal suffering, unless there is some beautiful purpose which that suffering contributes to. But what is that beauty? It has nothing to do with occassioning beautiful LFW acts, seemingly, since it supposedly occurred for hundreds of millions of years prior to LFW creatures--if, i.e., we say there were no LFW spirits that could have influenced the course of creation during that time AND that animals have no LFW.

---

 

 

But that's not to say it wasn't a possibility nature could have evolved into on her own without help from menevolent forces.

Even assuming no demonic role, nature was created with the capacity to become THIS violent. Why would God feel it needed THAT much freedom? Why would a probability range for creative becoming sufficient to explain OUR becoming need to include the possibility of nature's becoming as violent as it is IF OUR EVIL IS EXPLAINED BY A MORAL FREEDOM NOT PRESENT IN THE CREATED ORDER? That's the question. Is the possibility of nature's becoming THIS violent ON ITS OWN entailed in the possibility of nature's becoming ON ITS OWN morally responsible as human being? That's what you have to argue if you want to exclude any manevolent sentience at work in the created order, that nature's a CLOSED system. But if one begins with a biblical theistic worldview, why think that? Why think that creation is system open to influence from benevolent wills not entirely circumscribed by the natural order (to allow for something like panentheism, OK?) and then deny that it's equally open to manevolent wills not entirely circumscribed by the natural order if your worldview includes manevolent wills bent on ruing the created order?

I think if one has a philosophical preference for explainations that exclude spookiness, then one just assumes that the possibility of nature's becoming THIS violent on its own was somehow entailed by the possibility of human becoming. The scope of spoteneity/freedom that permits human becoming just includes the possibilty of the violence we see in nature. But one makes this assumption on philosophical, not empirical grounds. How would you prove it?

I'm not sure what to do with ID. I'm inclined to believe it's a genuinely empirical venture and yields justified conclusions about the presence of design and purpose in the world requiring an ordered and sentient benevolence. I'm not sure about Greg's argument that the presence of violence requiring an ordered sentience malevolence in the world. I don't know how to PROVE the latter and so DISPROVE the idea that natural violence is explained MERELY by the presence of the freedom and indeterminism required for human becoming. Biblical/theological considerations incline me to Greg's view. But the point was to step outside biblical/theological assumptions and argue from the violence of the created order a kind of ID inspired belief in the existence of a competing malevolent sentience working at cross purposes in the world. Personally I don't think anybody who doesn't already have a biblical theistic worldview is gonna be at all interested. But if anybody can make a case for it, Greg can!

D, you still with Greg on this. Remember your views about that freekish Amazon fish? Hmmm?

Tom

---

 

Post Edited (MANY) : 6/29/2007 8:19:23 AM (GMT-5)

 

 

Jeff: There's two senses in which we can mean indeterminism. We can use it to include the idea of final causes in conjunction with all other causes that are not deterministic. OR, we can use it to mean those causes that are not deterministic, except for final causes. Let's say the latter for the sake of discussion. Then we have four possibilities of how the carnage of nature might have come about in the animal kingdom under the assumption that man wasn't influencing that becoming for hundreds of millions of years:

 

1) Final causes in the form of some other volitional, created beings--like Satan, e.g.

 

2) Indeterminism (no final causes, just a range of possibilities originally specified by God).

 

3) Determinism (God just made animals that way, period).

 

4) A combination of 1 & 2.

 

Greg holds to 1) or 4). If we reject those, then we have 2) or 3). If 2), and if 2) includes within its range of possibilities the possibility that animals need not have become as violent as they are, then we are left with the conclusion that all possibilities within this range are equally satisfactory (equally beautiful, if you will) to God, since God is the "decider" of that range in the first place. This is the position that I and Lewis (and I think Greg, too, with many others) find hard to square with Christ's words and a common-sensical view of what it means to be benevolent. 3) has the exact same implications for the idea of beauty and benevolence as 2) for the same reasons.

 

I suppose there is one more possibility. And that is that God intended for us to learn that animals suffered for vast periods of time prior to man and that somehow just learning that fact has some benefit. But I have no idea what that benefit would be. It seems to me that that very claim has been used predominantly to argue against a benevolent creator. I know of no one who has argued that the carnage of animals for hundreds of millions of years prior to man's existence is an argument for the benevolence of God. To my mind, the degree of natural evil is no small problem for those of us who believe that a creator that explains human nature must be benevolent.

 

---

 

Post Edited (jefscott) : 6/29/2007 8:49:21 PM (GMT-5)

 

Jeff: I understand the ID folks to argue more probabilistically than deductively. They start with the belief that some things just flat can't come about without intelligence because it's just too improbable, given what we think we know about the 2nd Law, etc. They would say, e.g., that a computer would never come about without intelligence. Once that is accepted as a valid claim on grounds of probability applied to the efficacy of natural forces, it then becomes fair to apply that same standard to all existing things/structures in the universe (and even the universe as a whole, structurally). Doing this, they come to the conclusion that the cell or the universe could not have come about by blind, natural forces.

 

Some of them would probably add in, for good measure, the difficulties of explaining consciousness, sentience, etc., materialistically.

---

 

P1: Design in creation entails a sentient designer (cause)
P2: There is design in creation
Conc: Therefore, there is a sentient designer.

That seems like a valid argument to me. Nobody denies P2. It's P1 that's contested. But P1 looks pretty sound to me. If IC (Irreducible Complexity) is part of the "design" we're talking about, then P1 would be true, wouldn't it? That's why IC is so crucial to the debate.

 

Corey: Yes, this is formally valid. But... aren't you really saying this:

If so, I think the controversy is actually over P2.

 

Consider the patterns that form in sand dunes, optimally tuned to most efficiently allow wind to pass over its surface. I think it's possible we may be seeing the same sort of thing in more complex systems. I used to be fully convinced that there is such a thing as irreducible complexity, but these days I'm not so sure. And yes, I've read Behe, Dembski and others; I was a hardcore advocate for a long time.

Post Edited (Corey) : 6/30/2007 9:22:56 AM (GMT-5)

Corey: If IC (Irreducible Complexity) is part of the "design" we're talking about, then P1 would be true, wouldn't it? That's why IC is so crucial to the debate.

 

Jeff: There are things that seem to be IC from a probabilistic point of view. Even Behe has admitted that it is impossible to absolutely rule out evolution or abiogenesis. But scientiest are stuck believing something in the meanwhile. It only make sense to believe what seems most probable. So the question is, is the idea of God as creator properly basic or virtually fundamental in our thinking? If so, then God is an existing being whose causal capacities become part of the options when we try to explain things. The naturalists don't have that option, so they believe things that are incredibly improbable to an ID adherent.

 

Corey: Consider the patterns that form in sand dunes, optimally tuned to most efficiently allow wind to pass over its surface. I think it's possible we may be seeing the same sort of thing in more complex systems. I used to be fully convinced that there is such a thing as irreducible complexity, but these days I'm not so sure. And yes, I've read Behe, Dembski and others; I was a hardcore advocate for a long time.

 

Jeff: This is a case in point. Behe doesn't absolutely rule out naturalistic abiogenesis and cosmology. But we have empirical evidence of the patterns that form in sand, readily. We have no empirical evidence of causal tendencies/agencies that would explain a cell or a computer without intelligent guidance.

 

So the question that comes to my mind is, "for those who hold that beliefs in God (as creator, i.e.) and LFW are properly basic, should we rule out God's causal capacities when considering the most plausible explanation of origins of beings, forms, and structures?" If so, then it seems to me we have turned methodological naturalism into metaphysical, deistic-naturalism. And I'm wondering what grounds that intellectual move.

 

Many naturalists, when pushed, will resort to the problem of evil. Gould, Dawkins, Ruse, Weinberg, Davies, etc. all do this. That means they don't see belief in God as properly basic. They think the problem of evil is a deductive argument against the existence of God. Their epistemology then allows for and even necessitates believing very non-parsimonious and improbable explanations that those who see belief in God as properly basic have no need in accepting.

 

The difference in epistemologies is what explains this stuff--not the agreed-upon data, itself. But if there is no God that competently designed our minds to know, then belief in the correspondence theory is itself blind faith. If there is no category of final causes, or if it is illusory, then all may be an illusion (except our own self as the experiencer of the illusion). And there is no way, apart from existence of final cause and the correspondence theory it grounds, to even argue about probabilities. David Hume drove a lot of that home, himself.

 

Jeff: I'm glad you see the distinction, because it is important. If a purely ontological concept of God does not entail the fact that He is creator of our universe, then such a concept is of no value morally or scientifically until it becomes part of that "higher order construct" based on religious experience or something.

 

But if God can never be known to be creator until we have a religious experience, and if that religious experience occurred with no natural knowledge of God as creator, then we truly have nothing that can be communicated to unbelievers about God that is relevant to human existence apart from the Spirit working through that communication. Our words alone, are meaningless to them.

 

This seems to be completely contradictory to Romans 1. And it leaves unexplained the fact that billions of people, who are unbelievers in Christian theology, think our universe (or it's form and structure, for process theists etal) is the product of an intelligent, final causER. It's easier, to me, to see final cause as the category that accounts for our belief in a creator. This explains the virtually universal human belief in a designing God.

 

So, apart from divine revelation, how does one go from no belief in a creator to belief in a creator except by the very probablistic reasoning the ID'ests use? And how do we account for the validity of probabilistic reasoning if we don't first start with the belief that our minds are designed to know an objective reality that corresponds to our subjective mental states?

Corey: I'm only pointing out that we are now reasoning FROM our belief in God, not TO it.

Jeff: Absolutely. Most ID'ers are theists. Those who aren't have no more better epistemological grounds for believing they aren't in a matrix than the atheists. But theists can argue probabilistically in the only meaningful sense that my mind can grasp.

---

 

Post Edited (jefscott) : 6/30/2007 12:52:03 PM (GMT-5)

 

Jeff: I see. I guess I wouldn't call that natural. And I guess one could see Romans 1 that way. But let me get back to something I'm still confused about concerning Plantinga. You say, "In rough terms, properly basic beliefs are concrete, direct, without mediation." What would be an example of such a properly basic belief, per Plantinga? And how would he explain how it is "concrete, direct, without mediation?"

---