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Link: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy To sort out this debate, let us agree (to what is surely the case) that if you are a methodological naturalist, today you are going to accept evolution and conversely to think that evolution supports your cause. Today, methodological naturalism and evolution are a package deal. Take one, and you take the other. Reject one, and you reject the other. Clearly then, if your theism is one which gets its knowledge of God's actions and purposes from a literal reading of the Bible, you have got a conflict. You cannot accept Genesis literally and evolution. That is a fact. In other words, there can be no accommodation between Creationism and evolution. However, what if you think that theologically speaking there is much to be said for a nice shade of grey? What if you think that much of the Bible, although true, should be interpreted in a metaphorical manner? What if you think you can be an evolutionist, and yet take in the essential heart of the Bible? What price consistency and methodological naturalism then? The answer depends on what you take to be the "essential heart" of the Bible. At a minimum we can say that, to the Christian, this heart speaks of our sinful nature, of God's sacrifice, and of the prospect of ultimate salvation. It speaks of the world as a meaningful creation of God (however caused) and of a foreground drama which takes place within this world. One refers particularly to the original sin, Jesus' life and death, and his resurrection and anything which comes after it. And clearly at once we are plunged into the first of the big problems, namely that of miracles — those of Jesus himself (the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Canna), his return to life on the third day, and (especially if you are a Catholic) such ongoing miracles as transubstantiation and those associated, in response to prayer, with the intervention of saints. There are a number of options here for the would-be methodological naturalist. You might simply say that such miracles occurred, that they did involve violations of law, but that they are outside your science. They are simply exceptions to the rule. End of argument. A little abrupt, but not flatly inconsistent with calling yourself a theist. Or you might say that miracles occur but that they are compatible with science, or at least not incompatible. Jesus was in a trance and the cure for cancer after the prayers to Saint Bernadette was according to rare, unknown, but genuine laws. This position is less abrupt, although you might worry whether this strategy is truly Christian, in letter or in spirit. It seems a little bit of a cheat to say that the Jesus taken down from the cross was truly not dead, and the marriage at Canna starts to sound like outright fraud. Of course, you can start stripping away at more and more miracles, downgrading them to regular occurrences blown up and magnified by the Apostles, but in the end this rather defeats the whole purpose. The third option is simply to refuse to get into the battle at all. You argue that the law/miracle dichotomy is a false one. Miracles are just not the sorts of things which conflict with or confirm natural laws. Traditional Christians have always argued this in some respects. Take the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The turning of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is simply not something open to empirical check. You cannot disconfirm religion or prove science by doing an analysis of the host. Likewise even with the resurrection of Jesus. After the Crucifixion, his mortal body was irrelevant. The point was that the disciples felt Jesus in their hearts, and were thus emboldened to go forth and preach the gospel. Something real happened to them, but it was not a physical reality — nor, for instance, was Paul's conversion a physical event, even though it changed his life and those of countless after him. Today's miracles also are really more a matter of the spirit than the flesh. Does one simply go to Lourdes in hope of a lucky lottery ticket to health or for the comfort that one knows one will get, even if there is no physical cure? In the words of the philosophers, it is a category mistake to put miracles and laws in the same set. What has Johnson to say to all of this? Frustratingly, the answer is: "remarkably little"! In main part this stems from a refusal to spell out exactly what is meant by "theism". What Johnson does say is more in the way of sneer or dismissal than argument. Persons who are sufficiently motivated to do so can find ways to resist the easy pathway from M[ethodological] N[aturalism] to atheism, agnosticism or deism. For example, perhaps God actively directs the evolutionary process but (for some inscrutable reason) does so in a way that is empirically imperceptible. No one can disprove that sort of possibility, but not many people seem to regard it as intellectually impressive either. That they seem to rely on "faith" — in the sense of belief without evidence — is why theists are a marginalized minority in the academic world and always on the defensive. Usually they protect their reputation for good judgment by restricting their theism to private life and assuming for professional purposes a position that is indistinguishable from naturalism. (Johnson 1995, 211) He adds: Makeshift compromises between supernaturalism in religion and naturalism in science may satisfy individuals, but they have little standing in the intellectual world because they are recognized as a forced accommodation of conflicting lines of thought (p. 212). At this point, the evolutionist will probably throw up his or her hands in despair. Where did the idea of "makeshift compromise" come from except from Johnson's imagination? In actual fact, many significant theologians of our age think that, with respect to miracles, science and religion have no conflict (Barth 1949; Gilkey 1985). They would add that faith without difficulty and opposition is not true faith, either. "As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard … taught us, too much objective certainty deadens the very soul of faith. Genuine piety is possible only in the face of radical uncertainty" (Haught 1995, 59). Such thinkers, often conservative theologically, are inspired by Martin Buber to find God in the center of personal relationships, I-Thou, rather in science, I-It. For them there is something degrading in the thought of Jesus as a miracle man, a sort of fugitive from the Ed Sullivan Show. What happened with the five thousand? Some hokey-pokey over a few loaves and fishes? Or did Jesus fill the multitude's heart with love, so there was a spontaneous outpouring of generosity and sharing, as every one in the crowd was fed by the food brought by a few? These theologians would agree fully with the first part of Johnson's characterization of "theism". Things were very different thanks to Jesus' presence and actions. What they deny, here or elsewhere, is the need to search for exception to law. Johnson's Creationism and evolution/naturalism are indeed in conflict. But Johnson's Creationism is not all that there is to religion, to Christianity in particular. There are those who call themselves theists, who think that one can be a methodological naturalist (where today this would imply evolution). Johnson has not argued against them. 多看很多的書 多接受很多的訊息 很多思想上的東西是沒有衝突的!!