[lbo-talk] Neo-Lamarckianism???? Come on!

C. G. Estabrook galliher at uiuc.edu
Mon Jan 14 15:34:31 PST 2008


You claim that science necessarily excludes belief in a creator. But that's not true of the classical Christian notion of creation.

Why is there anything instead of nothing? The Judeo-Christian notion of creation is that we call the answer to that question (which we do not know) "God." ("Et hoc dicimus deum," says Aquinas.)

Obviously the answer is not a being in the universe. Science deals with how the universe is; creation, that the universe is.

From the article I posted:

"...we do not appeal specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way rather than that, for this we need only appeal to explanations within the universe. For this reason there can, it seems to me, be no feature of the universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing. I have said that whatever God is, he is not a member of everything, not an inhabitant of the universe, not a thing or a kind of thing...

"...I hope it will be evident that creation is here being used in a quite different sense from the way it is used by people who seek to discover the origin of the universe (was it a big bang or a lot of little pops or whatever). Whatever processes took place in remote periods of time is of course in itself a fascinating topic but it is irrelevant to the question of creation in the sense that makes us speak of God. When we have concluded that God created the world, there still remains the scientific question to ask about what kind of world it is and was and how, if ever, it began. It is probably unnecessary to say that the proposition that the universe is made by God and that everything that is, is begun and sustained in existence by God, does not entail that the universe has only existed for a finite time. There may be reasons for thinking that the universe is finite in time and space but the fact that its existence depends on God is not one of them..."

--CGE

John Thornton wrote:
>
> The fact that one can work in a science field and believe in a god
> doesn't change the fact that the two are incompatible. People believe
> contradictory things all the time. This is just one more example. In
> most instances the contradiction will never manifest itself so no
> problem will arise.



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