On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Chuck Grimes wrote:
> I suspect I'm in agreement with Lacan, that evolutionary biology needs
> God as a presupposition somewhere down the line.
> ...
> Come on guys. Evolution doesn't need shit from god. If Lacan thinks so,
> he is out of his tree. Or in a more academic tone, could you please
> explain how god is required as a prerequisite to evolution?
Perhaps Lacan had been talking to his brother, a Benedictine monk...
Most of the standard debates about God and evolution consider God as the ultimate efficient cause, necessary (or not) to get the system going. But classic theism (Augustine, Aquinas) didn't think of creation like that. "God" (as a matter of philosophy, not revelation) was the name given to the answer (which, they insisted, we do not know) to the question, Why is there anything, instead of nothing? God accounted for the fact *that* there was a universe, not (directly) for *how* it was. The latter question was the province of science (science for, e.g., Aquinas being primarily Aristotle, the biologist). Hence Augustine could talk in a way that later seemed quite evolutionary, and Aquinas could contend that one could not prove that the universe was not eternal. Creation was not a change or a cause like any other, and therefore there were no "marks" on the universe that showed it was created. Augustine and Aquinas (and their Muslim and Judaic interlocutors, e.g., Ibn Sina and Maimonides) would agree that "evolution doesn't need shit from god." --C. G. Estabrook