A free pdf supplement is available.

From here;

One of the most fundamental mistakes that people make, Father Coyne argued, is to construe God as one being among many within the cosmos, as though God is an unusually great and impressive thing alongside of the planets, galaxies and stars.

The problem with this way of thinking is that it undermines God’s status as the creator of the heavens and the earth, the one who brings the whole of finite reality into being from nothing. The Creator of the universe cannot be an object within the universe; the Maker of all things cannot be situated within the nexus of conditioned causes, just as the architect is not part of the building he designed or the author of a book one of the characters in it.

We shouldn’t, therefore, look for God as part of the “mechanics” of nature, as though he enters in a fussy way alongside of other competing causes.  In accounting for the emergence of a planet, for example, we wouldn’t appeal to the detritus of a star, hydrogen gas, God, and the gravitational force! God is, instead, the answer to a different kind of question, viz., “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

This is precisely why Fr. Coyne is impatient with the advocates of intelligent design, who hold that, at certain points in the evolutionary process, God intervened to fine-tune things. He feels that this is not only scientifically superfluous but finally insulting to God. It’s also why he disagrees with one of his colleagues, the Anglican priest-scientist, John Polkinghorne, who argues that the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics gives God “room to work” as he pushes, pulls, and influences the cosmos.

Once again, the problem is an interventionist construal of the God-universe relationship. For the same reason, he disagrees with the Christopher Hitchenses and Richard Dawkinses of the world who maintain that “science” disproves the existence of God by showing that he is not ingredient in the causal processes of nature. Both the “new” atheists and the advocates of intelligent design need to get a clearer sense of who God is.

I have joined BCSE because I agree with its mission of supporting science education, and, more specifically, because of my concerns about the spread of a new, largely US-inspired, brand of Creationist thinking in this country (see, for example, the chilling account at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/21/religion.highereducation).

My own background is in chemistry, which I taught at Glasgow University until 1988, and then the University of North Texas until my formal retirement in 2007. I have been interested in chemical problems related to the origins of life for some 30 years, and this brought me into direct contact with the Creationist movement in the US. When I returned to the UK after a 20 year absence, I was horrified to find that this movement is now targeting the UK, with direct assistance from such wealthy and highly professional bodies as the Discovery Institute (an Intelligent Design thinktank), and the undiscriminatingly creationist cult of Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya).

The avowed aim of both these bodies is to undermine the teaching of naturalistic explanations, and replace it with the untestable and therefore scientifically empty concept of a directing intelligence. Even worse, this aim is ultimately driven by a naïve scriptural literalism, which would consign to the garbage can the central concepts of biology, cosmology, and physics, as well as over 2000 years of rich scholarship and debate within the religious communities themselves.

Welcome aboard Paul.

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H/T to Darwin’s Bulldog

From here;

Also please note that in light of its UK release on DVD, I shall be hosting a Premier Radio screening of “Expelled” the ID film followed by a debatebetween invited guests on different sides of the argument.  You can book tickets to the Event, being held at one of London’s top scientific venues, Imperial College on Sat 27th Feb at 2.30pm.  Find more details and a booking form to attend atwww.premier.org.uk/expelled

This event has been added to our Creation-Watch page.