You’re right. I am operating on those assumptions, and they are pejorative. Those assumptions, however, are derived from observation of nature and the very principles upon which science is founded. If natural law cannot operate predictably, then there is little point in trying to study it, and indeed it should have proved unreliable and so much of our scientific advancements are really based on nothing real.
No, God has shown us His constancy and eternality in the way He authored nature. Creation tells us of Him in these properties, and thus we can rely on natural law. I use those pejorative terms because if nature cannot “run on its own,” then the God we know, the unchanging eternal God, is either not unchanging and eternal or He doesn’t intend us to learn much about Him through His Creation, nor to find anything reliable in His Creation. Either way, since nature has the appearance of operating by constant laws and measurable relationships, if it is not so, then God seems to have created a deceptive universe and given us a faculty (reason) that will be of little avail to us in understanding it, or in fulfilling our given office of dominion and stewardship over creation. Thus, evolution and the scientific method upon which it is based is wholly consistent with what we know of God as Catholics, and Intelligent Design calls many points of that knowledge into dangerous question.
How does He intervene? I agree that He intervenes in human life, and occasionally with a miraculous suspension of natural law. But even the definition of a “miracle,” as being something requiring altering intervention in natural processes or the coordination of “coincidences,” implies that nature operates by constants and divine intervention is the exception rather than the rule.
As to your posts prior to this, you know that I am Catholic, right? And thus believe that God created all of creation? So of course, I believe in an intelligent designer. That belief is not the Intelligent Design that you speak of, however. I believe that God used the method of evolution, based on what we can see. More than what you’d define as micro-evolution (which as I understand it ID-ers accept), since I believe it likely that speciation occurs through evolution. Less than what you’d define as macro-evolution (that God wasn’t necessary), because of course God started it all.
I am no Deist, either; you take my terminology “set in motion” too far. God created nature to function according to observable and predictable laws. He does not need to change those laws to create the various outcomes we’ve observed. He has never abandoned His creation, though, and is most active in relation to humans, since we were made to have a relationship with Him at a level far beyond that of animals and other living and unliving things. It is thus no “watchmaker” scenario to say that God authored natural laws and set them in motion, even perhaps using the Big Bang (“Let there be Light!”) as that initiation point. He still remains in touch and active in the lives of His children.
