As if to prove the thesis of my last post about the North American Intelligent Designe (NAIDs) community being unable to think out of the box they've created for themselves up pops an article on Evolution and News from the same author I quoted in that post which plays right into my hands. Viz:
Intelligence Is Unnatural, and Why That Matters | Evolution News
I will concede that it is just possible the Good Creator, over the course of millions of years, has patched in living material configurations ad-hoc style. But I have my doubts about that given my understanding of the way the Creator works and also given the insights of my Melancolia I project. Therefore, I keep in my mind the competing idea that God has provisioned His creation, perhaps via the spongeam, with a high probability of generating life given cosmic dimensions. It is this possibility, as we saw in my last post, which the NAIDs are committed to denying. They also, apparently, are committed to denying that intelligence "in-house" to the cosmos (such as human intelligence) can be simulated algorithmically and that it is an application of created matter. And here's the evidence that they put the intelligence of human beings into a category which cannot be reduced to "natural forces"; for at the end of the above article, we find this conclusion (my emphases):
Human expression manifests the unnatural attributes of creating art, literature, and technology — outcomes that would never arise by the influence of natural processes alone. Freedom and creativity complement one another; neither will flourish under controlling forces. If the forces of nature governed our thoughts and actions, would we see the vast panoply of creative human expression displayed throughout the history of civilization? It seems not.
Reading the article it is clear that this conclusion is largely based on the author's gut reactions. But if God is omnipotent and immanent (Acts 17:28) then those "forces of nature" are constantly maintained by the thoughts and actions of God - in particular the rich complex novelty of randomness would require the complex thoughts of an omni-author to maintain it: "Natural forces" (sic) never act alone. And if I'm right it is that very randomness which gives humanity both its creativity and its consciousness. (See here and here).
The fear of those so-called "natural forces" runs deep in our culture. The ghosts of deism haunt Western culture even today. The creation is a very unnecessary contingency, everywhere and everywhen; it has no property of Aseity and in that sense it is unnatural as unnatural can be.
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