there is an alternative way of looking at things, which sidesteps the whole apparent conflict.
I don't vouch for it, mind you, but it works.
Think of a novel, one of good quality in its craft.
You will note that there are the events in the text, the narrative, the plot on the page. You will note also that the environment, characters, and overall plot are the creations of the author.
These are obvious.
But there is also a BACK HISTORY which never actually precedes page one paragraph one word one, yet upon which the events of the plot to a great extent depend, from which the characters were forged, and through which their world came to be... FOR THEM, the "residents" in the book.
In *really good* novels, the authors frequently spend an immense amount of effort in creating and detailing this back history, even though none of it makes it directly into the intended work, because this back history is *absolutely necessary* for the functioning of the intended work itself.
This back history is non-factual to the author, is non-factual in terms of the book's real genesis, but is very factual for the "lesser" or "internal" reality of the book itself.
Now, replace all iterations in the above of "back history" with "cosmological, geological, fossil, and DNA records"; of "book, lesser internal reality" with "the observable material universe"... and "author" with "God"
As I said, I don't endorse this way of looking at things, but it does seem to resolve the apparent conflict.
The word "author" is one good way to consider God. The biblical texts make this same attribution on occasion. A common author of life will certainly result in the objective discovery that living creatures are of common descent, though not in the way typically deduced by evolutionists.
Hey, you're an analogy kind of guy. I like that! They really are a useful means of communication.
I enjoy writing, and have completed a manuscript that I would love to have published. Right now I am editing. So, this analogy makes complete sense to me, as I went through this very process.
Thank you. That is an interesting way of explaining this perspective.
The fulcrum of the argument is to consider the universe primarily as an artistic or creative feat, rather than as a work of engineering.
Two additional notes:
1) It would be very helpful for many of the disputants on these threads to read another of the essays in the book, "Problem Picture". It is a very lucid exposition of the difficulties of presenting the scientific mindset to a non-scientific world.
PLOT SPOILER BELOW!!!
2) Dorothy Sayers is most famous as a novelist (Lord Peter Wimsey) after having attended Oxford. It speaks to her scientific literacy that she made the key to one of her mystery novels the presence of a racemic mixture of enantiomers of synthetic muscarine. In a novel written in 1930...
It is my opinion that the point raised by Prout is the most accurate metaphysical division between the creationists and scientists: If God did make the universe, why did he lie? The answer presented by Prout is that God didn't lie, he made a work of art. And the mistake, according to this alternative point of view, is to have taken the indications in the art seriously.
For the fundamentalist cre's on the thread, there might be some analogy applicable here to the scripture "he catches the wise in their craftines..." But I'm not sure if it is necessarily applicable, so don't flame with it.
Cheers!
RE: Backhistory and all that- we have a saying at my house, when watching television especially-
"Don't sweat the talking bears."
Sounds sort of like what you just explained.
Doc
Thanks for the ping!