The Evolution Debate
Check out these series of evolution vs. intelligent design debate on The New York Times.* http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/sciencespecial2/index.html.
If such a flurry of arguments are anything to go by, it suggests that the effects of Darwinism - despite its philosophical and social fallacies - continue to have a wide reach and influence among the scientific world... which is ironical - since the belief in it requires even more faith than believing in creation - now you call that science???
Part of the problem - I reckon - is the system of natural theology (proposed by Aquinas) that is at fault here... which sadly many Christians (within evangelical circles) continue to be trapped in.
By trying to "prove" the existence of God within a rationalistic framework, it makes the mistaken assumption that the existence of God can be "proved" - without the necessity for revealed theology.
I am not proposing an existential "leap of faith" here - but rather, for Christians to remember that by trying to prove the existence of an "unmoved mover" or a "unchanged changer" - simply so that the complexities and intricacies of the created world can be explained - is at best a form of Christian deism - that does away with a personal God.
*Thanks to Postmodern Areopagus(http://postmodernareopagus.blogspot.com/) whose blog directed me to the NYT stories.
If such a flurry of arguments are anything to go by, it suggests that the effects of Darwinism - despite its philosophical and social fallacies - continue to have a wide reach and influence among the scientific world... which is ironical - since the belief in it requires even more faith than believing in creation - now you call that science???
Part of the problem - I reckon - is the system of natural theology (proposed by Aquinas) that is at fault here... which sadly many Christians (within evangelical circles) continue to be trapped in.
By trying to "prove" the existence of God within a rationalistic framework, it makes the mistaken assumption that the existence of God can be "proved" - without the necessity for revealed theology.
I am not proposing an existential "leap of faith" here - but rather, for Christians to remember that by trying to prove the existence of an "unmoved mover" or a "unchanged changer" - simply so that the complexities and intricacies of the created world can be explained - is at best a form of Christian deism - that does away with a personal God.
*Thanks to Postmodern Areopagus(http://postmodernareopagus.blogspot.com/) whose blog directed me to the NYT stories.
posted by Benjamin Ho at
6:39 PM
4 Comments:
actually there has been some debate about whether Aquinas is the scapegoat here...
I think Schaeffer gave him some bad press here for being the first one to separate grace from nature.
But there are Reformed scholars who think Aquinas is actually right in defending there is no 'upper story' or 'lower story' truth... all truth is God's truth... so what we learn from science and what we learn from Scripture will meet at the top. There is no final contradiction.
But yea... Darwinism owes more to a philosophical commitment to naturalism than to the methods of science :D
well...i certainly agree with the statement "all truth is God's truth" and that what we learn from science and what we learn from Scripture will certainly meet at the top. Nevertheless, the synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christianity was a error that the Church (particularly the Roman Catholic church) never quite fully recovered from.
Evidently, history seems to bear witness to the fact that whenever the church is in error, the repercussions it leaves behind can often be felt for generations.
Will Durant once likened Aristotle's god "The Unmoved Mover" with the king of England... a do-nothing king who reigns but does not rule!
So, I'd agree that there are bad things that affect the church if we marry greek philosophy with theology too closely.
That said, Aristotle has lots of good things to say too. Aquinas, for example, borrowed a lot of his cosmological arguments for theism.
He also distinguished things we can learn from general revelation (ie movement of stars, combustion) from things we can only learn from Scripture (redemption, eschatology)
It seems that natural theolgy is not grasped by unaided reason of man, but also by the grace of God.
yup- you have a good point there... in fact, the Christian church will be so much more enriched if only it takes "secular" thoughts and philosophy more seriously instead of the anti-intellectual stance that it often adopts.
But having said that, it is also probable that some of Aquinas ideas were propagated beyond what he had initially forseen - similar to that of Kierkegaard's existential philosophy - which only goes to show how "creative but fallible" we can all be.
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