Colin Gunton—“The Doctrine of Creation” (in Cambridge Companion to Christian

Doctrine)
 141: Creedal Christian theology shows that creation is not something we discover
through disinterested reason, but is instead part of response to revelation.
 141: Creation as creedal, creation ex nihilo, and creation as Trinitarian are all bound
up in it.
 142: Creation is free, but not arbitrary; it flows from his love and exists for a purpose.
 142: the ways that God can be immanent in creation and guide it as it becomes
itself.
 144: Humans as distinctive in virtue of special relation to God and to the created
order, as well as Incarnation.
 145: Genesis isn’t the only important text for creation, both because it crystallizes the
rest of the OT and because the NT is the key source on creation.
 147: Neoplatonists call matter evil.
 148: Irenaeus crafts creation ex nihilo and calls all creation good. Basil views matter
and mind as subject to the same creaturely deficiencies.
 149: Augustine’s innovation in the creation of space-time, and his two-stage model of
creation and its diminution of matter.
 150-1: Against Thomistic quasi-pantheism and late scholastic voluntarism.
 151: The Protestant spawning of science: must study the world in its actuality, since it
is logically contingent.
 151-2: Against mechanism and the subsequent “god of the gaps.”
 152-3: the problem of Darwinism is already inherent in mechanism: it disallows
God’s relational involvement with humans. Mechanism disallows love,
rationality, and all the rest.
 153-4: Barth reintegrates creation and redemption, as well as creation and covenant.
 154: Torrance: a consequence of creation, one which highlights parallels between
scientific and theological rationality, is the universe’s contingency, its displaying
rational patterns which are yet open.

Thomas Aquinas—On Creation [Disputed Questions on the Power of God, Q3]

 A5: Whether there can be anything not created by God:
1) Common effect = common cause. But since all things alike have being, it follows
that each does not give it to itself, but rather one cause gives it to all of them.
2) Those which have something perfectly cause it in those which have it imperfectly.
But this suggests a God who has being perfectly.
 A7: Whether God acts in all the operations of nature.
The Answer: Against Occasionalism. But God does act in all operations of nature
through nature and will. First, he continuously maintains everything in being (and a
preserver of power can be said to cause the action). Second, everything is moved
except the unmoved mover, which, therefore, causes the motion of everything else.
Third (p. 63 in CUA edition), only God is common enough as cause to cause being,
so anything else which causes being must be the instrument of God.
Obj, 1, 5, 7, 15 and responses. Esp. Obj. 10: frame your paper as the way to
preserve human distinction between divine causality and natural causality.
Thomas Tracy—“Theologies of Divine Action” (In Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Science)
 597: Bultmann—give up on your miracles; we believe in science!
 599: Do both chance and determinism seem to undercut God?
 599: One response—absorb providence into creation, and make the creative act also
action in the sequence of events.
 600: We should be initially dubious about miracles, but we shouldn’t rule them out
altogether.
 601: We can be methodologically committed to causal completeness without
being committed to universal causal determinism.
 601: In an indeterministic world of the right sort, it would be possible for God to act
through the structures of nature, yet leave those structures entirely undisturbed. (Me:
aren’t those rather mediocre structures, on this reading?)
 602-3: God can totally act in the world even if he doesn’t interact with the stream of
events.
 603-4: Divine action distinguished by causal history, and if it is non-deterministic,
there can be “non-interventionist, objectively special divine action.”
 604: Can God be said to “respond to prayers” if this is part of the creative act? (Me:
yes. This is dumb.)
 606-7: Quantum theory admits of an indeterministic explanation, and it is possible
that these quantum events can be amplified.
 608: This isn’t God in the gaps for two reasons: 1) ex hypothesi (indeterminism),
there isn’t a gap; 2) theologians don’t claim that science must invoke God.
 608-9: God doesn’t require gaps to achieve his purposes; we’re just saying that if
there are gaps, he could act in them.

Alister McGrath—“Darwinism” (In Oxford Handbook)

 681: Darwinism: “the minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively
nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of small random hereditary
changes” (Dawkins).
 682: Darwinism is Lyell’s causal “uniformitarianism” prevailing over Linnaeus’
“fixity of species.”
 683: fixity views trace to Paley’s mechanistic views.
 684: Darwin’s four problems—extinction, adaptation, uneven geographical
distribution, and functionless “rudimentary structures.”
 687-8: Universal Darwinism is dumb; even Darwin wasn’t a
perfectionist/progressivist.
 689-90: God can still be causing things, both by directing an apparently random
evolutionary process and by secondary causation.
 690-1: John Haught—look for creation’s transformation.
 692ff.: The kinds of Christian positions on/against evolution.
 694: Warfield—science gives us reason to reevaluate our biblical interpretation,
and indeed our interpretive notion of the “plain sense.”
 694: Also, Darwinism is provisional.
Peter Van Inwagen—“Science and Scripture” (in Science and Religion in Dialogue,
vol. 2 [W-Blackwell])
 826: If a Darwinian world is possible, then it should be such that an omnipotent being
could create it.
 826: The response: even an omnipotent being could not control the blind mutation
such that it could ensure a given result.
 827: Even if all events of a type are due to chance, that doesn’t mean the universe is
due only to chance—fallacy of composition.
 828: The response: If Biochemical Predestination is false, then the main features of
the biosphere are due to remote possibilities arising. VI’s note: The truth of
Biochemical Predestination used to be the grounds for the inference that
evolution was unguided.
 830: Darwinian incompatibilists may argue that rationality is radically contingent;
given that God would bring about rationality, this shows that God isn’t involved. But
if rationality is radically contingent, then doesn’t its existence make it improbable that
unguided natural selection produces everything?
 831: Can science really say that only biochemical causes operate on mutations to the
exclusion of supernatural causes? Is that part of its domain? Isn’t that metaphysics?
 832: “Chance” has multiple senses, some of which are compatible with
“deliberately chosen”—including the sense in which mutations are merely
random relative to adaptive benefit with respect to the organism’s environment.
This is consistent with the idea that God is guiding the mutations.
 833: Some do not think God would choose to use processes like this. But why should
we have a priori expectations about what a God-created world would look like?
 836-7: Genesaic literalism vs. Saganism.
 838-9: The history of interpretation: non-literalistic.
 839: Most people were literalists before the Reformation as at any other time, since
literalism is kinda the default position. But militant literalism is the product of the
decentralization of interpretation that occurs in the Reformation.
 840-1: If you take Genesis literally, from a Christian perspective, you come to
believe some true things and some false things, but the true things are far more
intrinsically important than the mistakes.
 841: It’s just false that scientific knowledge matters most, as it is that any academic
kind of knowledge matters most.
 842: Genesis achieves its purpose—telling the story of God’s covenant relationship
with humanity. Was God supposed to wait having done this till he could introduce a
number system which accurately explains how old the earth is? Make it scientifically
accurate, and you make it useless to most everyone of every sociotemporal location.
 843: The three reasons it couldn’t be abstracted: 1) some of these truths must be
revealed in stories, 2) an abstract version is hard to teach most everyone at every
time, and 3) inspiration doesn’t work like that; God had to work within the
framework of the person who wrote it. And 844: “people are not naturally inclined to
divest a story they want to tell of the concrete details that give that story its
character…”
 844: To the literalists, “creation science” is nonsense.
 845: To the Saganists, the story is largely right, but there’s no reason we should think
that the cosmos exists on its own or apart from God’s action.

Alvin Plantinga—“Religion, Naturalism, and Science” (in Science and Religion in

Dialogue, vol. 1)
 304: Don’t confuse methodological naturalism with ontological naturalism.
 305: Science clearly endorses methodological naturalism, but it doesn’t require
scientific secularism.
 308: There’s a wide distance between it being possible that unguided Darwinian
processes account for all of life and it being established that God had nothing to do
with it.
 309-10: Darwinism still has not shown how it can account for mind’s emergence
from matter.
 311: In fact, Intelligent Design is compatible with evolution, though not with
unguided evolution.
 312: Again, mutations being “random” is only relative to adaptation, not relative
to God. And why deny that God intervenes in the world? But if you do, it could be
frontloaded into the creative act.
 318-9: Bultmann and others hate the idea of divine intervention. And in a
deterministic universe, intervention is the only kind of action God can perform.
 320: But Newtonian laws only describe the world given a closed system. It is not
part of Newtonian mechanics to declare that the universe is a closed system!
 322: Peacocke on the Tracy-esque picture—“it isn’t different in principle from
interventionism.” And why not intervention?
 325: Couldn’t our beliefs be adaptive and yet false?
 326: Obviously, neurophysiological properties of beliefs have causal efficacy. But
how does content? Shouldn’t we be semantic epiphenomenalists, given naturalism
and evolution?
 327: False belief clearly can produce adaptive behavior; see religion. And isn’t it
true that for every true adaptive belief, we can think of a false, equally adaptive
belief?
 328: So a naturalist has a defeater for the reliability of her faculties.
 329: Objection by the epiphenomenalist—reductivism. A different belief couldn’t
have the same causal efficacy, because those properties are the content. But
Plantinga’s response: even so, the fact that content matters doesn’t mean truth
matters. A false belief could do the same work.
 330: And the proper explanation of the belief’s adaptiveness is its neurophysiological
properties, not its truth. (Me: Is this right?)
 331: So the naturalist has a defeater for reliability, and so for all her beliefs—
including naturalism! And you can’t defeat the defeater with your faculties, since you
have a defeater just for their reliability.
Michael Ruse—Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
 101: the definition of science as methodologically naturalistic is not analytic but
lexical (describing what most people mean by that), and this latter definition is
indisputable.
 102: Granted, many do say that what is outside of science is worthless. But there’s
nothing in Darwinism which commits one to that view. Christian commitments aren’t
scientific, but we knew that already, and there’s no reason to think that they’re stupid
for that reason alone.
 105-6: on miraculous intervention, and God’s not doing everything in terms of
secondary causes, note that Hume did this way before Darwinism.
 107-8: drift (et al.) don’t have gigantic results, certainly not enough to affect our
perception of truth when truth does matter adaptively.
 108: there are sometimes systematic instances of deception, and these are explainable
from Darwinian perspectives. But we can work this out against reliable touchstones
that remain. We don’t come up against wildly counterintuitive phenomena. We
couldn’t be deceived all the time, and we can use the general truthfulness of
evolution to root out the deceitful ones.
 109: sure, empiricism is a problem. But why should the fact that we can’t get behind
everything bother us? Isn’t truth a matter of coherence of all of the parts that matter to
us?
 110: And why should we think Christianity provides any reason to really secure us
against radical skepticism?
 112: The Origin of Species is just as teleological as Paley’s Natural Theology.
 113: Baden Powell—maybe evolution makes God a cooler Creator!
 114: If Wittgenstein is right that “proofs” of God’s existence are really just
intellectual analyses of belief, then one can continue believing even if the proof does
not compel all.
 114: And the idea that God requires an explanation of his existence is not really
related to evolutionary theory.
 117: Against Behe, “no evolutionist ever claimed that all of the parts of a
functioning organic feature had to be in place at once, nor did any evolutionist
ever claim that a part used now for one end must always have had that
function.”
 117-8: The Krebs cycle is “irreducibly complex,” but it was cobbled together from
intermediate processes with other functions. The eye is irreducibly complex, but
we’ve found prototype eyes on other organisms.
 119: There is no fine line for when irreducible complexity requires a non-Darwinian
explanation.
 119: If irreducible complexity were created all at once, how did some of it not get
discarded as unnecessary? If it came about gradually, why not through natural
selection?
 120: If God can make the irreducibly complex, why does he allow evils which aren’t
complex at all?
 120: Dembski—there’s an explanatory filter. You explain what you can in terms of
law, then in terms of chance, then in terms of God.
 121: But “law,” “chance” and “divine design” are not mutually exclusive!
 122: And isn’t that explanatory filter sort of thinking proof that this is “God of the
gaps” thinking?
 127-8: Against Edward O. Wilson, evolutionary genetic analyses of religion only
matter if we have reasons to think religions are false. And while there are
questions about whether religion’s (adaptive) benefits can be achieved independently
of the truth of any particular religion, yet this isn’t really a Darwinian question. If the
atheists are winning the arguments, they’re doing so on the basis of something other
than Darwinism by itself.