am not suggesting that it is not possible to develop a non-anthropocentric theology that is consistent with evolutionary theory, but this would require ousting humans from their special place in the order of creation. When this type of theology is formulated I confess that I see little reason why this divinity would be worthy of worship or veneration. To worship such an entity makes about as much sense as worshiping gravity;

Now obviously I disagree and think there is a very workable middle ground. The error is in assuming for God to be worshippable he somehow has to have so much purpose that everything is effectively mastered equipment to him. Now one problem when talking about the divine is that clearly there has been a wide range of views through human history. So to say what the divine must be to be worshipped always struck me as a bit odd. To privilege what I perceive to be a mixture of Hebrew and primarily Greek absolutist perceptions of God is just mistaken. I’m actually quite sympathetic to Nietzsche here who thinks such a conception of God is dead. It is, as Levi points out, simply unworkable. I’ll not deal with that objection more, even though I suspect many will disagree with Nietzsche and I there.

The alternative position is a God who is more limited by the constituents of existence. i.e. reject both creation ex nihilo as well as the views closer to pantheism of the Greek philosophers. Since that’s the deity I happen to have faith in anyway, this isn’t much of a problem for me.

In this I think the approach to evolution is quite different. That is I think evolution just becomes one of the entities or structures in a pre-existent universe God finds himself embodied within. As such the issue of evolution is as much a non-issue as the issue of gravity. Stuff evolves just as an inherent aspect of the substance of existence. There’s really nothing else to resolve inherent to evolution itself.

The bigger problem — even for Mormons — is the nature of man. Typically within evolutionary proponents there is a view that evolution entails there be nothing special about man. That is the traditional medieval great chain of being is wrong. There is nothing special about man in terms of creation. I think the theist who accepts evolution can simply say that God could interfere with the environment and that evolution would produce life that adapts to that environment. I see nothing problematic there. So, for instance, if God sent an asteroid to earth to privilege mammals over dinosaurs is there anything wrong with that? I can’t see how.

The main argument is more that evolution with life is a horribly inefficient way to product man and why on earth would you want to believe in such an inefficient God. My sense is this might partially be behind Levi’s comments. I don’t find that terribly persuasive since it is effectively saying man is all that matters – something I don’t believe. Further it is ultimately making an aesthetic argument against God which seems a pretty weak argument at best.

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“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer of the shoreline of the wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman.”

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And moreover, as Graham likes to say, if you only ever find yourself talking about the human-world relation then you’re a correlationist. If your philosophy has nothing significant to say about the relation between a rock and soil, you’re a correlationist. At any rate, it seems to me that we’ve begun to use these terms very loosely.

I wonder, though, if this is fair. Of course much of this hinges on the notoriously enigmatic statement by Heidegger that things only “are” if there is Dasein. However I think the above also gets an other issue that bothers me somewhat. The difference between having a position and having a focus.

Many philosophers have one major focus and never leave that focus. Just because they don’t focus on some other question doesn’t mean we can just assume something about their position on that question. I recognize that Harmon isn’t quite doing this. He is marshaling arguments for Heidegger’s position.

But that said I think that broadening the scope beyond Harman that many of the arguments I have seen tend at best to establish questions of focus rather than position. Just because Heidegger doesn’t say much about object to object relations independent of Dasein doesn’t imply that he believes we can’t say anything about such. (Indeed, I see his notion of de-worlded entities as very much entailing object to object relations)

While this criticism of mine might not apply to many arguments, I think it is a pretty important issue to keep in mind. Beware the argument from silence…

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