>From: "Ted Davis" <tdavis@messiah.edu>
> Howard has quoted David Griffin's definition of God, which at first glance
> sounds like it is consistent with Howard's own idea of God "gifting" the
> creation with certain creaturely capacities, but I very much doubt this.
There is no need for Griffin's approach and what I have written in the past
to be in some kind of one-to-one correspondence. I make no claim that David
Griffin is infallible. Furthermore, I hope that I will be saying things in
the future that are not identical to what I said before. I have no intention
of being an exemplar of stagnant repetition.
> Griffin rejects entirely the notion of a God who can or does act
> "supernaturally," whereas some type of "supernatural" activity certainly
> seems (to me, at least) to be required of a creator who can determine the
> nature of nature.
As I have tried to explain numerous times, for Griffin the term
"supernatural" is explicitly a form of coercive divine intervention in which
a creature that already exists is overpowered and coerced to act in a way
that is incompatible with its being. If you choose to use the same term for
some other concept (such as the giving of being to a creation or determining
the nature of nature) you cannot engage Griffin's discussion.
> For Griffin, God (like Plato's demiurge) is coeval with
> matter/energy, the properties of which God did not determine. (I think this
> is accurate--it certainly describes much of what passes for process
> theology. If Griffin actually says otherwise, I invite correction.)
OK, let's do as I suggested earlier and look at a couple of samples of what
Griffin actually says.
The creation of our particular universe or cosmic epoch, therefore, was "not
the beginning of [finite] matter of fact, but the incoming of a certain type
of order" (from Whitehead's Process and Reality, p. 96). Whitehead's
panentheism involves, in other words, a return to the ancient position,
expressed in the Bible (Levenson 1988; May 1994), that the creation of our
world involved bringing order out of chaos. In Whitehead's view, this would
not have been pure or absolute chaos: "The immanence of God gives reason for
the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible" (from P&R, p. 111).
Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, p. 143. See the note on p.
167 for more on the references to Levenson (Creation and the Persistence of
Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence) and May (Creatio ex Nihilo:
The Doctrine of "Creation out of Nothing" in Early Christian Thought).
In the first instant of the creation of a particular universe, accordingly,
divine persuasion could produce quasi-coercive effects. A divine spirit,
brooding over the chaos, would only have to think "Let there be X!" (with X
standing for the complex, interconnected set of contingent principles
embodied in our world at the outset, constituting its fine tuning). From
then on, however, the divine persuasive activity would always face
competition from the power embodied in the habits reflecting these
contingent principles, so that divine persuasion would never again, as long
as this world exists, be able to guarantee quasi-coercive results. In this
way, process theism, while maintaining that God's agency in our universe is
always persuasive, can nevertheless account for the remarkable contingent
order on which our particular universe is based. Reenchantment, p.
218.
So it would seem to me that, contrary to common opinion about process
theology, Griffin's view is that God did determine the properties of
matter/energy in God's effective "Let there be this particular universe!" In
other words, the God envisioned by process theology is a Creator who does,
in a meaningful way, determine the "nature of nature."
Howard Van Till
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