This argument seems to depend on eliding the technical and colloquial uses of the word “natural.”
That is: if I find the canonical wristwatch lying in the desert, am I justified in concluding it is a natural product?
In one sense, no: it’s overwhelmingly likely to have been artificially constructed and intelligently designed.
In another sense, yes: there it is in the natural world, what else could it be but natural? Wristwatches are among the things that humans create and occasionally misplace in deserts as an expression of our nature.
The latter sense is technically correct, but the former sense is what most people actually mean. In particular, when creationists and the like declare that life is too complicated to arise naturally, they mean something much more like the former sense than the latter.
Admittedly, they then confuse matters further by contrasting natural phenomena with divine phenomena… but then they model divine phenomena as essentially like human-mediated artificial phenomena, which sort of muddles the whole thing.
I’m reminded of a friend of mine, an atheist and an active member of his local church, who gave a guest sermon a while back on the subject of evolution; his theme was that the traditional creationist model does not give God enough credit.
Even if we take as a given that speciation, or the origin of life itself, is an expression of divine volition, he argued, surely a god who performs miracles to do those things is less impressive than a god who creates the Universe in such a way that those things are natural expressions of its construction?
Seen that way, he concluded, the modern view of the origin and evolution of life gives more glory to God than the traditional view, and should be embraced by the truly devout on those grounds.
This argument seems to depend on eliding the technical and colloquial uses of the word “natural.”
That is: if I find the canonical wristwatch lying in the desert, am I justified in concluding it is a natural product?
In one sense, no: it’s overwhelmingly likely to have been artificially constructed and intelligently designed.
In another sense, yes: there it is in the natural world, what else could it be but natural? Wristwatches are among the things that humans create and occasionally misplace in deserts as an expression of our nature.
The latter sense is technically correct, but the former sense is what most people actually mean. In particular, when creationists and the like declare that life is too complicated to arise naturally, they mean something much more like the former sense than the latter.
Admittedly, they then confuse matters further by contrasting natural phenomena with divine phenomena… but then they model divine phenomena as essentially like human-mediated artificial phenomena, which sort of muddles the whole thing.
I’m reminded of a friend of mine, an atheist and an active member of his local church, who gave a guest sermon a while back on the subject of evolution; his theme was that the traditional creationist model does not give God enough credit.
Even if we take as a given that speciation, or the origin of life itself, is an expression of divine volition, he argued, surely a god who performs miracles to do those things is less impressive than a god who creates the Universe in such a way that those things are natural expressions of its construction?
Seen that way, he concluded, the modern view of the origin and evolution of life gives more glory to God than the traditional view, and should be embraced by the truly devout on those grounds.