Surely you can’t be tired of dissecting Ken Miller yet, can you? Perhaps you’re tired of me going over it, though. In that case, Jon Voisey discusses his talk and the Q & A afterwards (don’t worry, he’s less vicious than I am, despite being an angry astronomer), and Mark Perakh points us to Amiel Rossow’s review of Finding Darwin’s God. Personally, I find it a strange book: pages 1-164 are excellent, among the best and plainest and most direct critiques of Intelligent Design creationism you’ll find; pages 165-292, eh, not so much. It’s like mild-mannered, sensible Dr Miller wrote the first half, then he drank the potion that turned him into the wartily odious Mr Theologian, with his temporal lobe unshackled and the mystical caudate nucleus unleashed, and we get page after page of unearthly prolix rationalizations for superstition. Oh, well…165 pages of first rate biology makes the book worth buying, and you can always read the rest as an exercise in facing down religious apologists.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The Talk Reason article is actually by Amiel Rossow.
I heard of a great panel with Dawkins and Miller on it.
http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-05/features/darwins-rottweiler/?page=2
“I regard Genesis as the spiritual truth,” Miller said. “And I also think that Genesis was written in a language that would explain God that was relevant to the people living at the time. I cannot imagine–cannot imagine–Moses coming down from the Mount and talking about DNA, RNA, punctuated equilibrium. I don’t think he would have gotten very far.” Nonetheless, he reiterated his belief that the biblical stories of the world’s creation “are true in the spiritual sense and that they are written by human beings in the language of the time.”
Dawkins, at the far end of the table, almost levitated out of his seat with indignation. “But what does that mean?” he demanded, voice rising. The audience rewarded his indignation with combustive applause. “Is it a caricature for me to ask you, since you are a Roman Catholic, do you believe Jesus had an earthly father?”
“Ah, this is the famous Richard Dawkins question,” Miller replied, sounding a little defensive.
“No, don’t ridicule it!” Dawkins shouted, relentless.
“If I can just get a fragment of the body of Jesus,” Miller continued, “I could do DNA fingerprinting! I could figure out who gave Mary that Y chromosome!”
“That’s a facetious answer!” Dawkins cried out, his face flushed with conviction, shaking his finger at Miller. “That’s a facetious answer!” The heat was so palpable that, as Margaret Wertheim, the moderator, said later, “At least now we know that Richard actually believes this. Before, I wasn’t sure if it was just a performance.”
No sense of humor == no sense of perspective….
Sense of humor != accepting the use of humor as deflection
PZ-
You are right on in your analysis of Miller’s book, I think. I find it useful to recommend to colleagues & students-they should see diverse expressions of struggle with difficult questions-and this is a sincere one from a prominent scientist. I have suggested this book and also Gould’s Rocks of Ages as good companions-I hope they are an effective counterbalance to some of the irrationality on the other side.
Miller is scheduled to give a speach in Nov. in a series of lectures (E.O. Wilson did one a few years back) in honor of my grandfather who was a professor of Entomology at NC State. I’m interested to see him live and have an opportunity to ask questions. Should be interesting.
What Caledonian said. I’m sure Miller’s pastor would be happy to explain to him (in the very unlikely event that he actually needs the explanation) that the divine ancestry of Jesus is one thing he most definitely cannot take metaphorically rather than literally while remaining a faithful Catholic. I’m 100% in favor of not letting people like Miller off the hook on this kind of blatant cognitive dissonance. As Sam Harris has written, the refusal of the wishy-washies like Miller to honestly confront such issues is one of the factors that makes the continued strength of the fundies possible.
I’m not mean enough? Perhaps it’s because I’ve left my interpretation out of everything thus far and have just been posting a summary.
“I cannot imagine–cannot imagine–Moses coming down from the Mount and talking about DNA, RNA, punctuated equilibrium. I don’t think he would have gotten very far.”
Uh-oh, signs of a screw loose upstairs.
Steve Labonne: I think you’ve misunderstood Miller. He was being sarcastic. He is quite clear in his book that he accepts the virgin birth, calling it a “key doctrine of my own faith.” He states that God is capable of miracles and that miracles are events beyond scientific or natural explanation.
Here is a full quote: “The Christian God isn’t a deist one; neither is Allah, or the God of Abraham. Any God worthy of the name has to be capable of miracles, and each of the
great Western religions attributes a number of very specific miracles to their conception of God. What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense-there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense. They are specific acts of God, designed in most cases to get a message across. Their very rarity is what makes them remarkable.” (pp. 239-40)
Given this context, I think you should understand his reply to Dawkins somewhat like this: how are you going to prove the Virgin Birth didn’t happen? You’re going to produce a piece of Jesus’s body and subject it to a DNA test? And then produce a bit of the father’s body and so prove paternity?
Agreed on Miller’s book. I bought it when it first came out, and – as a layman – thoroughly enjoyed his discussion of evolution. Then, suddenly, it became a treatise on the god of the gaps. As a former Roman Catholic, it struck me as a stark reminder of just how hard it is to let go of silly beliefs…
It is my understanding that a virgin birth is not biologically impossible. True hermaphrodites have the sex organs of both sexes and it is not impossible that such a person could impregnate herself (himself?). Thus, under this scenario, if Mary were a hermaphrodite, she could have self impregnated, which would qualify as a virgin birth.
Michael, at some level you, like Miller, must know that this is meaningless doubletalk of the most asinine kind. That’s what made Dawkins angry and makes many of us angry. For the hundredth time, if “God” can arbitrarily do things that are completely against the laws of nature then we can just give up doing science because we can never be confident that the phenomena we observe are the products of lawlike regularities in the universe rather than of “miracles”. Christianity in anything more than an extremely watered-down Unitarian version is incompatible with the scientific view of the universe. Period. This was the case even in the 4th century CE (when Christianity was snuffing out the last embers of Greek rationality) and is a thousand times moreso today. And kudos to Dawkins for not accepting evasion and bluffing on this point.
And by the way if Miller was actually challenging Dawkins to prove the negative of a ridiculous proposition, that reflects even more discredit on him. He knows better than that.
Miller is an odious dick; stop listening to his BS! Viva Dawkins :)
Steve, for confidence, surely you only need a very low probability of the miraculous to go ahead and do and apply your science. And Miller gives you that, with his extremely rare miracles.
Anyway, I’m not going to keep debating you — you and I both know we’ll go round in circles. I’m going to keep myself to straightening out the record on what Catholics believe. I know full well what you think about those beliefs.
I know damn well what Catholics believe, having been raised as one.
Steve: By “what Catholics believe” I meant not only “what the Church teaches” but also “what individual Catholics believe.” You appeared not to know what the individual Catholic Ken Miller believes about the Virgin Birth. I corrected you on that.
Earlier, PZ had incorrect views about what the Pope believes, or at least made an incorrect prediction about what the Pope was going to say, about evolution and ID. I corrected him about that.
I accept that you know quite a lot about Church teaching. But if others get that wrong I will correct them on that as well. For example Keith Douglas incorrectly asserted that the view that God not only created but also conserves the universe in being is heretical. It is in fact Catholic doctrine, as I pointed out.
The virgin birth is part of Catholic doctrine as is transubstantiantion. To be a Roman Catholic and to deny either makes you an apostate.
… if Mary were a hermaphrodite, she could have self impregnated … .
Moses talking DNA to a bunch of shepherds, Mary self-impregnating… the Bible is starting to sound interesting again.
Seriously, if the best way to get fundies to accept evolution is to have scientists who speak god-talk tell them it is okay, we are in deep trouble.
Come on! Miller’s beliefs only make fundies more unwilling to give up their dumb religious notions. Virgin birth? Heaven? Miracle? They can point to another prominent scientist and say, see, he believes it, so it must be okay.
I’ll take Dawkins the mocking meanie any day. I don’t want to live in a world where faith and reason peacefully co-exist and where everyone compartmentalizes them in their heads and in their books. It’s b.s. We need more holism than that.
Great article from the London Review Of Books by Jerry Coyne which gets to the heart of the matter:
“A recent Radio Four programme had a distinguished retired geneticist, who is also a devout Christian, pondering the virgin birth. Jesus, it turned out, is something of a biological conundrum. As a male, he must have carried a Y-chromosome, which can be transmitted only by the father’s sperm, yet apparently he had no corporeal father. Where, then, did his Y-chromosome come from? The geneticist suggested that one of Mary’s two X-chromosomes might have carried a piece of the Y. Asked whether this would make Mary abnormal, the geneticist changed the subject. He did so for good reason: this condition, sometimes seen in humans, would make Mary a sterile male and the virgin birth thus triply miraculous.
Attempts to reconcile science and religion are usually doomed to failure, as in the Radio 4 exchange, because nearly all religions make claims about the real world – the domain of science – that don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. Faced with these difficulties, advocates resort to circumlocution, sophistry or absurd speculations that offend both scientists and believers.
Despite the difficulties involved, however, reconciling science and faith remains a popular project, especially among academics nearing the end of their careers. Apparently, the urge to take on the Big Problem becomes irresistible to those who have dedicated a lifetime to staring down a microscope at fruit flies or mastering the subjunctive in Aramaic. Many scientists enter the fray from evolutionary biology, the branch of science that conflicts most directly with religion. Their books often try to harmonise the two by declaring that they are mutually exclusive domains, or, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould proposes that science limit itself to studying and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values.”
read it all at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n09/coyn01_.html
“As Sam Harris has written, the refusal of the wishy-washies like Miller to honestly confront such issues is one of the factors that makes the continued strength of the fundies possible.”
I know this is fast becoming a key claim, but Harris is all wet on this. Religious moderates aren’t doing much of anything. The continued strength of the fundies is because they care and very loud, and work hard and donate lots of money, and so on. Harris wants us to believe that Grandama Jones who glances at her rosary every morning before watching the Price is Right is the true threat to civilization. And that’s just batty. Dobson is the threat.
“Michael, at some level you, like Miller, must know that this is meaningless doubletalk of the most asinine kind. That’s what made Dawkins angry and makes many of us angry. For the hundredth time, if “God” can arbitrarily do things that are completely against the laws of nature then we can just give up doing science because we can never be confident that the phenomena we observe are the products of lawlike regularities in the universe rather than of “miracles”.”
If the universe in general operates in a lawlike fashion, then I don’t see the problem. When you hit an occasional and generally very rare miracle, you’ll have an unanswered/unanswerable question. Science is already full of those regardless of whether there are miracles or not.
“And by the way if Miller was actually challenging Dawkins to prove the negative of a ridiculous proposition, that reflects even more discredit on him. He knows better than that.”
If he’s not demanding that Dawkins accept his beliefs (I don’t think he was) why is the burden on him? He admits pretty openly in his book that his beliefs are what shape his arguments, and his arguments about things like quantum hiding or libertarian theology are to other believers, not atheists. If he doesn’t insist that Dawkins believe the virgin birth, then he only needs to demonstrate that he has a plausible way to rebut the claim that it is wrong or impossible in order to justify himself believing it. Hence, the proving a negative.
The real problem he creates for himself is not with atheists, but with Catholics. Because he runs far too close to the Protestant line in talking about belief and faith and possibility such. The Catholic Church is committed to the proposition that reason alone can demonstrate the existence of God.
In that same Discovery article, Dr. Dawkins, somewhat ruefully, mused that he might not always be the best public messenger for what he believes. As someone who Conway-Morris once described as ‘England’s most pious atheist’, he’s got more than a little emotional investment in his positions, and his encounter with Miller shows that.
And, as far as the miraculous goes, science can say nothing about it one way or the other. We exclude it, and we are not allowed as scientists to appeal to it. Even if we had the body of Jesus in our possession, no amount of experimentation would avail either Dr. Miller or Dr. Dawkins. ‘True believers’ on either side would simply refuse to accept the authenticity of the corpse, for their own reasons. There is nothing facetious about that observation.
Scott
Look, the answer is simple for the atheist.
Create life.
From dust.
And do it my a mindless, unintelligent process.
I have just provided a way to falsify intelligent design.
Game. set, match.
Grandama Jones who glances at her rosary every morning before watching the Price is Right is the true threat to civilization. And that’s just batty. Dobson is the threat.
Grandma Jones puts five dollars in an envelope and mails it to Dobson. That’s what keeps him going.
George- bingo!
Prove that your Godd is necessary. At all. For anything.
Two point conversion for the win. (I can do sports metaphors, too.)
I find it odd that Miller clings to Catholicism, but in a way it’s more tolerable than other avenues of belief. I have way too many friends who say they are no longer Christian, but believe in a “higher power” or some spiritual nonsense because they’re too scared to let go of faith. Those are the people I get really mad at! Why cling to faith at all? It just doesn’t make sense. (not that Christianity does either)
Richard,
You are still dust, you silly rabbit. Stardust.
Let’s consider something for a moment: I can actually sit down with you, should I decide to take the time, and explain the chemistry of abiogenesis, how nature builds biomolecules out in your backyard all the time, and how these biomolecules might have come together (in one of many ways) to form protobacteria, and on from there. First question: do you accept a reasonable explanation that no “poof” miracle is necessary? The next question though, is, “does this falsify ID? God?” And the answers are, “No,” and, “No!”
Why? For one thing, ID is not necessarily biological in nature. Indeed, ID-iots and theists can (and do) still say, “But, but, but, God designed the universe with the physical laws that gave rise to life!” “God fine-tuned the fundamental forces so that the citric acid cycle would lead to metabolic processes!” “God built everything so that life had to happen!”
God and ID are unfalsifiable from scientific experiment, my poor nitwitted friend. Their believability just drops precipitously.
God can hide all day long (and always has), you see, in some corner of the possible and unknown. But, don’t raise your hands in victory yet — for even though you needn’t fear your faith will crumble as ignorance is eclipsed by the first successful demonstration of abiogenesis, both God’s existence and subsequent ID-iocy have already fallen to compelling philosophical refutation and argumentation. Here’s a nice collection of them that I’ve amassed.
Don’t walk off the court before the first break point.
Harris does not claim that Grandma Jones is the true threat to civilization. He wouldn’t deny that Dobson is the focus of the problem. What he says is that the obliging attitude of the majority of religious people is “one of the factors”. He’s not all wet, he’s exactly right.
You’re also supporting his thesis with that sentiment I emphasized up there. “Religious moderates aren’t doing much of anything.” Exactly. That’s the problem. Everyone says we’re supposed to suck up to these lazy-assed moderates, but they’ll be content to let the status quo ride, especially if they can trust us opponents of people like Dobson to quiver in fear of the grandmas who send him a piece of their social security check every month.
I Mary was a true hermophrodite who self inpregnated, Joshua of Nazareth got his Y chromosome from his maternal grandfather.
If Mary was a true hermophrodite who self inpregnated, Joshua of Nazareth got his Y chromosome from his maternal grandfather.
I like the idea of actual biological parthogenesis better than the idea of hermophrodititic self-impregnation.
It’s not wholly impossible that some line of humans could just start off doing this, generating lines of clones. It happened to some of the rotifers. It wouldn’t be likely, since as I understand it, mammalian eggs just aren’t very happy with the idea of just duplicating their genes again and growing: stuff still seems to be missing without the introduction of the sperm CELL, not just it’s DNA.
The Christian account of virgin birth, however, has always fascinated me, because here is something that is so obviously a part of the story added in order to impress the pagans of the day. On top of that, it’s, like, totally frivolous and irrelevant and even sort of contradictory to the whole “Jesus as wholly human” or “Jesus, patralineal ancestor of David.” And yet it’s clung to as if it were somehow super-duper important to the whole religion.
The threat is not so much from the Grandma Joneses themselves, but from a culture which endorses, values, fosters, approves of, and fawns all over the basic idea of “having faith” in supernatural forces. It is so, so important to be spiritual, and believe in higher powers guiding or underpinning the world. It is absolutely vital to living a full, meaningful life, to becoming a well-rounded person of mind, body, and spirit.
But don’t get carried away, say the moderates. Draw a line somewhere — using science, preferably. But don’t use science too much. Don’t let it apply to any spiritual facts.
Buridan, over at Buridan’s Ass has an interesting take on all of this.
Hell, if you think that’s overemphasized, just remember how many thousands of people died in riots over the infamous iota- the one-letter difference, in Greek, between “same substance with the Father” and “similar substance with the Father”. Christianity has a decidedly unsavory and profoundly anti-intellectual adn indeed, anti-human history. And some things never change…
Maybe Mary was a parasitoid wasp :)
Wrong. Logic ‘excludes’ it. A miracle explains nothing because it is compatible with anything – it has no content, no meaning, and no implications. It is equivalent to the null statement.
Hmm. Other interesting twists…
1. Some species have no equivalent to a Y chromosome, and other factors determine the sex. Some scientists, it seems precipitously, have tried to argue that our Y may be shrinking and eventually we might lose it. Though, it seems very unlikely and no real evidence exists for that.
2. You get wierd stuff all the time, like the various odd double YYs, XXY, etc. And its not “impossible” for a replication error to produce a Y from an X, just really unlikely that it would happen, or do so in a way that would produce a viable XY combo.
3. Then there is the question of if our entire genetic line has always had XY, but in fact, this version has diverged from the original line at some point, as possibly evidenced by species that don’t have the Y. This means the mechanisms may all still be there to make an XX male anyway, they just aren’t working.
Point being, there are numerous cases that “could”, how ever unlikely, produce such a person, without the need to some crazy intervention. The only real miracle would be finding DNA evidence to suggest that such a person had only an X or Y, but not XX or XY, etc., with the missing bit filled in by something completely non-human and unidentifiable. I personally hate Gods that pull so called miracles that are indistinguishable from things that could have happened anyway without them. lol
“By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur.”
As Dawkins asked “But what does that mean”? Miller’s miracles are observable in principle, yet we don’t observe them. Show me the money … uh, miracles.
plunge:
“He admits pretty openly in his book that his beliefs are what shape his arguments, and his arguments about things like quantum hiding or libertarian theology are to other believers, not atheists.”
You assume that he doesn’t misrepresent science. He does – read Rossow’s review.
Does Miller not realize that once he allows miracles in the back door, the entire scientific enterprise is otiose, for in principle any purported lawful relation could be abandoned tomorrow?
I am an atheist, and I am an evolutionist, but I have never felt that the two were connected. I understand the believers’ idea that ‘evolution is merely the mechanism that god used to create humanity.’ If you accept a god, this is a reasonable statement — it is just the acceptance of a god I find unreasonable.
But what I wanted to add was a quote I just happened to hear as I am finishing last year’s CSIs. It’s a conversation between Greg Sanders, the ex-lab boy now a field operative, and Gil Grissom. (The case involved a murdered psychic.)
GS: “You are a cynic. I just think that you can have beliefs and still do science.”
GG: “I agree, The problems arise when people mistake their beliefs for the science.”
I like that hypothesis, JJP, but I don’t think it works, since she was Jewish.
/reallylamepun
Oh, but Michael Kremer has told us we don’t need to worry about that because it doesn’t happen very often! ;)
Isn’t it a happy coincidence that the miracles you DO allow in the back door are ones from your own religious tradition, whereas all the others are just nonsense?
Steve LaBonne, the Catholic tradition is more severe than other monotheistic ones. while Judaic Orthodox are as severe if Maimonedes definition of it is accepted (it isn’t universally), many Jewish schools and denominations would be cool with the currently accepted archaeological evidence that Torah was written by the same dudes who made claim to discoverying Deuteronomy, in about 600 BCE, and Moses and his thing are mythological just as the Odyssey or Illiad are for Greeks. now, perhaps the “street Jew” buys Moses existence. but the point is the religion isn’t balanced on the point as if standing on a knife balanced upon its edge. Christianity is so balanced on the point of Jesus’ divinity and resurrection.
this is not to defend Judaism as “true monotheism” for it cannot withstand their being no Deity. but there is a point at which if Professor Miller professes he’s a Catholic he’s got to “buy in”. there are many Catholics who retain their doubts, in private. but Miller has put himself Out There. it’s fair to call him on it.
that oughtn’t have been addressed to Steve Labonne. it should be addressed, instead, to the forum.
I think that the Jesus-Christ virgin-birth story is a ripoff of Greco-Roman mythology, pure and simple. That mythology was full of people having gods as their biological fathers, and there were some who believed that about some historical people, like Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander the Great.
By comparison, the Old Testament is rather lacking in divine impregnations, and “son” is often used in it in an adoptive or metaphorical sense.
And as to tracing Joseph back to King David, I think that the authors of Matthew and Luke wanted to have it both ways. That is, to ortray Jesus Christ as being what a Messiah is supposed to be, that is, descended from King David, while also portraying him as the Son of God in the literal, biological sense in the fashion of Greco-Roman mythology.
That being said, I agree with Sam Harris and our host that religious “liberals” and “moderates” are not doing enough to challenge fundies. If they seriously consider fundamentalism a perversion of their religion, then why do they let the fundies speak for them?
Why don’t they criticize fundamentalist forms of interpretation? Like compare it to interpreting Jesus Christ’s “You are the salt of the Earth” to mean “You will be turned into pillars of salt like Lot’s wife.”
Michael Kremer: That is not what I said. I said it has the heretical consequence that god is responsible for all evil. (If one has complete control over a situation, allowing it to happen is an endorsement. God is ex hypothesi omnipotent, so god allows evil to happen.)
Those not interested in theological niceties should skip this (or read on for amusement which I am sure it will provide to many of you).
Keith Douglas:
You first said this: (on http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/vatican_watch.php#more):
“The continual creation view I’ve heard before. Unfortunately, it is probably formally (or was at least) heretical, because it makes god directly responsible for evil.”
So here you claimed that the view was heretical, *because* of its consequence.
Then, I provided three quotations to show that the view is orthodox, not heretical. You replied:
“As for the orthodoxy, well, the sustaining view does make god directly responsible for evil. This is admitted in the Islamic atomist tradition where it is held there is no causation at all in the world other than the direct, repeated intervention of god to “poke” the atoms along at each time slice. This is not a problem in Islam, since as I understand they have bitten the bullet and claim that God is not good in our sense of the word, which makes the claim of omnibenevolence worthless. I suspect you will find this “occaisonalist” position formally condemned at least at some point in the past, regardless of the current claim of orthodoxy.”
First, note that the sources I provided for the orthodoxy of the view that God conserves the universe in being were not all “current”. One was Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
Second, note that the view I proposed, which you are claiming to have heretical consequences, is not the same as occasionalism. Occasionalism is one possible way of understanding the relation between divine causation and creaturely causation, given the view that God causes the existence of the universe at every moment. According to occasionalism, God is the only cause, and the apparent causal powers of creatures are merely apparent. When one event in nature appears to cause another, according to the occasionalist what is really going on is that God causes each of the events, in an order that conforms to the laws he has established for nature. The first event is then said to the “occasion” for God’s causing the second (the reason he does so, in accordance with the laws by which he has decided to rule nature).
I don’t know if occasionalism has ever been condemned, although I doubt it (the Catholic Encyclopedia makes no mention of any condemnation, and they usually do say so if such a condemnation exists).
But anyway occasionalism is not the mainline Catholic view. The mainline view is that God acts in all the acts of his creatures, but that the creatures also act causally (so there is causal overdetermination). Aquinas (Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 105) rejects occasionalism as “impossible” because is would diminish God’s power to say that he could not transmit this power to his creatures. But his own view is that “We must therefore understand that God works in things in such a manner that things have their proper operation,” that “God works in every worker,” that “all agents act in virtue of God Himself: and therefore He is the cause of action in every agent,” and that “in all things God works intimately.” Aquinas thinks there is no problem with the causal overdetermination involved here because the two causes (God and creature) are of different orders of being.
The technical term used here is “concurrence.” God is said to “concur” in the actions of his creatures. The mainline Catholic view as represented by Aquinas is then concurrentism as opposed to occasionalism.
Now this does raise the problem of evil in a particularly strong form, but that does not show the view to be heretical. The problem of evil is there anyway. The traditional solution to the problem, going back to Augustine, involves both the idea that evil is itself a “privation” or purely negative phenomenon (the absence of a good that ought to be there), which Augustine got from the Platonic tradition, and the idea of human free will. The view is then essentially that if I do good, God concurs with my action and its goodness. But if I do evil, there is a voluntary falling away from full positive reality into mere absence. God concurs with whatever is real in my evil action — it is only this that can really be assigned a cause — but what is merely privation in my action, the evil, is my responsibility, not God’s, and in a sense doesn’t have a cause at all. (Augustine says it has no efficient cause, only a deficient cause, that is no cause at all.)
As to whether God endorses evil, the mainline view is that he concurs with evil while foreseeing the good he will bring out of it. God does not endorse evil by allowing it to happen, but he does endorse human freedom and that requires him to allow evil.
I don’t expect you to accept any of this at all. In fact I rather expect you to think that it is all silly nonsense. I am only trying to explain what the orthodox view is. The only point I want to make is that whatever response an occasionalist gives to the problem of evil is going to be available to a concurrentist as well.
Loren Petrich:
You make more than one good point in a short post, and that’s not easy to do. The one that left me shaking my head in rueful agreement, though, was the observation that moderates aren’t doing much to challenge fundies.
Boy, is that ever the truth. The dynamic in the churches is always one-sided. The fundies are aggressive, fearless, willing to provoke schism at the drop of a hat; the moderates are always backing down or pretending that crazy Aunt Edna is still locked in the basement…or worse, that Aunt Edna isn’t really crazy.
In fact, based upon the response I’ve received, in this country the moment you criticize fundamentalism you are no longer perceived as a moderate. You are perceived as a radical.
Somberly…Scott
“For the hundredth time, if ‘God’ can arbitrarily do things that are completely against the laws of nature then we can just give up doing science because we can never be confident that the phenomena we observe are the products of lawlike regularities in the universe rather than of ‘miracles’.
Except that the whole point of a miracle is that it is an obvious irregularity, meant as a display of divine power. A miracle wouldn’t look like a lawlike regularity because then it wouldn’t stand out as something unusual, defeating the whole point of a miracle.
Furthermore, even if one accepts this as true (which as I noted above is dubious to begin with),
“Does Miller not realize that once he allows miracles in the back door, the entire scientific enterprise is otiose, for in principle any purported lawful relation could be abandoned tomorrow?”
it is still an argument from adverse consequences, which is fundamentally fallacious.