Creation Moment 6/21/2022 - The imago Dei vs. being just an epiphenomenon

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. Acts 17:22

When the superstition of pagan philosophers crept into "science" ...

 

"With the acceptance of Darwinism .... Western civilization took the final step back to the atomism, materialism, and many-worlds doctrine of Democritus and other pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. 

As the Darwinian paradigm tightened its grip on science, all vestiges of the old teleological-organismic universe, all notions which placed humankind or life on Earth in any special or privileged place in the order of things, were banished from mainstream academic debate. 

The implications of the final Darwinian unraveling for mainstream evolutionary biologists was memorably captured by French biochemist Jacques Monod in his materialist manifesto Chance and Necessity. “The thesis I shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events,” he wrote, “but constitutes a particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore essentially unpredictable… unpredictable for the same reason — neither more nor less — that the particular configuration of atoms constituting this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable.”

According to Monod the human race was adrift in an uncaring cosmos which knew nothing of its becoming or fate, an infinite universe said to manifest not the slightest evidence of anthropocentric bias. 

 

Instead, as Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are merely “the embodiment of contingency,” our species but “a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree… we are a detail, not a purpose… in a vast universe, a wildly improbable evolutionary event.” 

Or as astronomer Carl Sagan framed the matter, “one voice in the cosmic fugue.”

Thus was humanity demoted to a mere epiphenomenon, to one un-purposed by-product among many, from the imago Dei as understood in the medieval vision of humanity — that of a being made in the image of God and pre-ordained from the beginning — to a meaningless contingency, something less than a cosmic afterthought.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. 

Even as the scientific vision of humankind as an accidental by-product of the cosmos consolidated its position of ascendancy in Western thought, the first seeds of a new scientific anthropocentricism were sprouting, in the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s. The multivolume work included such contributions as William Whewell’s discussion of the striking fitness of water for life and William Prout’s discussion of the special properties of the carbon atom for life, revealed by the development of organic chemistry in the first quarter of the 19th century. 

Wallace showed that the natural environment gave various compelling indications of having been pre-arranged for carbon-based life as it occurs on Earth.

Two years later, in 1913, Lawrence Henderson published his classic The Fitness of the Environment, whichpresented basically the same argument but in much more scholarly detail. Henderson not only argued that the natural environment was peculiarly fit for carbon-based life but also in certain intriguing ways for beings of our physiological design. He refers to two of the thermal properties of water, its specific heat and the cooling effect of evaporation, as well as the gaseous nature of CO₂ as special elements of environmental fitness in nature for beings of our biological design." EN&V