Statement of evangelical Christian Keith Miller
Professor of Geology at Kansas State University
"I believe that all natural processes are the personal, purposeful act of a creator God. God is both transcendent over creation, and immanent in creation. Creation was not a past accomplished act, but rather is a present continuing reality.
"God's creative power is continually at work, even now. I believe that the biblical view is that God upholds all physical reality moment to moment. God is intimately and actively involved in what we perceive as "natural" or "law-governed" processes. I thus see no distinction between God's activity in "natural" and "miraculous" events. If one accepts this theological view, which I believe is thoroughly orthodox, then a completely seamless evolutionary history of life would be entirely acceptable theologically. In other words, such a scientific description would not violate one's understanding of the nature and character of God.
"I would argue that an interventionist view of God [such as implied by ID]is much closer to deism than my view. It implies that God is somehow withdrawn, or at least uninvolved in creation, except during special exceptional events. As others have noted, a doctrine of God's occasional intervention is really a doctrine of God's usual absence."
So, many Christians object to these implications, and resist ID strenuously. ID is both bad science and bad religion. The attempt to empirically "wedge" God into science both corrupts science and diminishes religion.
Ohio Citizens for Science
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Contact:
Patricia Princehouse Department of Biology Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, OH 44106 216-368-8585, patricia@case.edu |