Having suggested criteria for a plausible ‘plausibility structure’ in the earlier posts within this series, I propose now to examine the range of design factors that a plausibility structure must address if it is to suggest the plausibility of the argument from design.
1. Inclusion of data without distortion
The plausibility structure that I wish to outline needs to include a wide range of data without distortion from the widest range of disciplines in order to be plausible. Science, both in terms of its assumptions and its methodology, becomes implausible on this basis because it tends towards a reductionist exclusivism. This can be demonstrated by a return to the beginning of these posts and the claim of Hopkins to experience God in and through nature. Science can do nothing with this claim on its own terms except reject, ignore or belittle it. It can only include Hopkins’ claim - perhaps by claiming that religious belief enhances the chances of survival for many human beings - by distorting the data – in this example, by turning Hopkins’ experience into a beneficial illusion. Christianity, however, can include both scientific claims and Hopkins’ claim within its plausibility structure without distortion of either.
In terms of science and design a Christian plausibility structure can posit God as the creator who “chose the laws for bringing this world (and perhaps others) into existence”. Accordingly, Peter Williams has argued that “Evolution does not destroy the design argument, it merely pushes it back a step, from the objects that make up the world, to the substances and processes that make the objects that make up the world!” Now, if God designed the processes that make up the world then it is these that lead to the particularity of self that Hopkins notes in nature – the combination of individual essence with outward form that he calls inscape and which, when responded to by human beings (instress), communicates God.
This aspect of a Christian plausibility structure also enables the embrace of the wide range of paradoxes that increasingly characterise scientific knowledge of the world: determination and randomness; order and chaos; constancy and change; processes of life which inevitably lead to death. In this respect John Polkinghorne has spoken of God as both the “‘ground of the phenomenal order’ and as ‘free origin of contingent events’, the God of necessity and the God of chance, the ground of both being and becoming, the One who is at once reliable and vulnerable”.
2. Simplicity of line
The concept of God as creator of the laws, or substances and processes, that make up the world is a relatively simple explanation for the origins of life and the universe. That this is so, can be more clearly seen when an alternative such the many universes hypothesis is considered. Richard Swinburne has said of this hypothesis:
“To postulate a trillion other universes rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of the universe, seems the height of irrationality. For the postulation of God is the postulation of one entity of a simple kind … The postulation of the actual existence of an infinite number of worlds, between them exhausting all logical possibilities … is to postulate complexities beyond rational belief.”
Simplicity of concept is not the only benefit of this plausibility structure, however, as it also has a simplicity of storyline. The free evolution of humanity that God has chosen in designing the laws and processes that form the universe provides human beings with a choice about relationship with God. We are free to accept or reject, believe or disbelieve. We have free will due to a separation between God and human beings which John Hick terms, ‘epistemic distance’. This separation is what the Bible calls ‘The Fall’ and it has the effect that human beings tend to exercise their creativity in terms of the bias of biological evolution i.e. in selfish exploitation designed to further survival. This is the human dilemma from which God himself saves us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, human beings can enter relationship with God and freely choose to exercise their creativity within that relationship with God thereby enabling the creation as a whole to reach perfection.
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James MacMillan - Kiss On Wood.
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