@KellyJay
KJ, I am checking back in after a lengthy respite and see that you are still up to your usual shenanigans. Up to no good. π
I think Dr. Lennox’s arguments on this are highly unpersuasive and half-baked. He makes two claims here. First, he claims his conception is not a “god of the gaps” and that scientific advancements (whatever they be) would not serve to displace God but rather only heighten his understanding of how God works. Second, he claims that scientific explanation (or description) is not the only relevant sort but actually works best in tandem with another valid form of explanation related to the agency and intentionality of God. Both of these claims, particularly in the light of his examples given, are disingenuous.
Regarding the first claim, it is an unfortunate bug (not a feature) of any putative explanative program that it provides unfalsifiable content. That Lennox’s god-commitments are not, even in principle, subject to displacement by the deliverances of science is just a natural consequence of unfalsifiability. Unfortunately for Lennox, an upshot is that his god-commitments can explain nothing at all. I am paraphrasing, but Christopher Hitchens put it well when he described such “explanation” as an ever-expanding tautology. For example, a theist can claim that God explains the rich diversity of biological life; an objector can retort, well, what about DNA and the theory of evolution through random mutation and natural selection and all that; and the theist can respond, well, that just shows God is even more clever that we thought now does it not?!? If the scientific understanding changes and gets refined further, God’s cleverness grows all the more. This is not to be taken seriously. This is not a exercise in explanation but rather one in pure ad hoc stipulation. It is profoundly unscientific. In scientific matters, one does not have the luxury of pulling an explanative claim out of his arse and then growing in respect of it under any scientific outcomes whatsoever because no set of circumstances can show it to be wrong. In science you are held to a much higher standard, since putative explanations have to survive respectable attempts at falsification and whatnot. At least in science we try to converge on a solution based on data and evidence, rather than stipulating and hewing to a solution that accommodates any evidence whatever it may possibly be, which appears to be the opposite of trying.
Regarding his second claim, where is the beef? Please provide a model for the validity of just stipulating god’s agency and intentionality onto the back of scientific understanding. Or at least explain how it would add any understanding at all. His example regarding gravity is bizarre. Newton thought gravity was a force in a classical sense and got it wrong on that count, although his equations are still good enough to explain a profound amount of phenomena; Einstein came along and showed that gravity is better interpreted as a geometric feature of spacetime and his equations explain even more. What exactly is Lennox’s addendum to all this vis-a-vis the agency of God? Does it have any more content than just that God intended such things to be as such? What precise understanding does that add? The example about heating up water for tea or coffee is also profoundly disingenuous as well. We of course can work off of theories of agency where agency is empirically evidenced, such as humans’ desiring coffee. Where is prior evidence for the agency of God?