From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Gould versus Johnson
Organization: LLNL
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 02:30:21 GMT

	[Ah, yes, Philip Johnson himself...]

In article <1ivjoq$ddm@agate.berkeley.edu> philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson) writes:

	[On difficulties with "theistic Darwinism"...]

	Personally, I feel that it is like making oneself believe that
Zeus puts electricity into the lightning bolts he throws. Or else like
trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, or vice versa. It may
fit, but not very well.

	The Zeus example I chose would presumably be to reconcile
these beliefs:

	Zeus is the cause of lightning.
	Lightning is a giant electric spark.

	I confess I like the mode of belief of some neo-pagans, who
consider their deities metaphors or archetypes or similar sorts of
things, rather than some sort of Universe-controlling superbeings.
Sort of like the ultimate in allegorical interpretation :-) In this
example, one would consider Zeus a metaphor or a symbol rather than
some sentient lightning-maker who just happens to make lightning look
like some big electric spark. Any comments?

	[He complains that science somehow denies the validity of
other sources of knowledge...]

	My first response to this my sound like a crude one-liner, but
here it is:

	_What_ other sources of knowledge?

	I would like to close by suggesting a "design" hypothesis of
my own. Exogenous genetic engineers, or XGE's, who make evolution go
by performing genetic engineering. This gets around the "design"
problem quite neatly, for it is the XGE's who are the designers.
However, Darwinian natural selection has been such a successful theory
that one wonders why the XGE's took the trouble to make their designs
look as if they weren't involved.

	I don't insist on this hypothesis as universal. Darwinian
natural selection can coexist perfectly well with XGE's, and could
even be responsible for the bulk of evolutionary change.

	There is the question of where are the XGE's' genetic
engineering labs. There are _lots_ of places they could be, such as on
seafloors and inside of mountains, especially extinct oceanic
volcanoes. Or they could live on the Moon or someplace else in the
Solar System and just have forward bases on the Earth.

	Why don't we see them today? They're probably just hiding out
or spying on us somehow. Why no arrivals or departures in recent
decades? Maybe they've just decided to hunker down and not risk
anything showy, or else they've cut their schedule to a few a year (or
less!)  while arriving or departing over the neighborhood of
Antarctica, where there wouldn't be many potential observers. By the
time they get far enough to be on the line of sight from most of the
more technically advanced nations of the world, their craft would be
too far away to be readily spotted.

	Or maybe their artifacts or they themselves are all around us
but we just don't know what to look for.

	And let us not forget the question of where the XGE's came
from. But I propose to answer that question when Philip Johnson tells
us all where God come from (how God came into existence, what caused
God to come into existence, or anyway you wish to phrase the
question).
-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov
Newsgroups: talk.origins,talk.religion.misc