On 6/29/04 11:20 AM, "douglas.hayworth@perbio.com"
<douglas.hayworth@perbio.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that there is still a way to have it both ways, i.e., to
> have a miracle-working God without him being coercive with regard to
> overpowering free will.
As I have noted before, you are indeed free to posit this. The question is,
what are the implications of such a dual approach.
> Why can't we allow that miracles ... are part of God's work to communicate
> his presense and will (i.e., to
> persuade), while understanding that the physical and biological evolution
> of creation is not something God has ever bothered to coerce?
I once did posit something of this sort. But once you propose the kind of
God/World relationship that allows supernatural (coercive) action over any
member of the Creation, then why would God not employ this sort of coercive
action in other arenas?
> For example,
> suppose Jesus did literally turn water into wine; surely that act neither
> changed the course of evolution, nor trumped the free will of the observers
> (the disciples then, or us now). It was coercive only at the water-wine
> level, not at the formative history and contingency of Creation level. It
> was not coercive at the human-divine relational level either; it was
> persuasive.
But the primary action -- transforming atoms and molecules of one sort into
other sorts -- was fully coercive divine action. The matter of the universe
was overpowered and coerced to do things contrary to its God-given nature.
> I'm sure that this picture glosses over many difficulties that could be
> raised, but I think that it plots a course that seems more "reasonable" and
> consistent with the totality of human experience with the divine than that
> represented by Howard and Griffin on one end (no special miracles) and
> Vernon or Phil Johnson (regular form-conferring intervention) on the other
> end.
My problem with your proposal is that it requires numerous ad hoc
propositions about when God will use the power to perform coercive action
and when God will choose to withdraw that option.
> One of the things that strikes me as particularly troublesome about
> Howard's view (despite his claims to take seriously the knowledge acquired
> about the God-World relationship through human recorded history of the
> God-World interaction), is that it contemplates a God who is very different
> than what thousands of years of human theology has practiced and understood
> in its experience.
I feel free to do that because I judge those thousands of years of humanly
crafted theology as valuable and informative, but not at all binding. To be
informed of what other humans have said in their own times and historical
circumstances is good. To idolize what was said in the past and voluntarily
to limit one's theologizing to that is, in my judgment, not good at all.
> Although I side with Howard with regard to the robust
> formational economy principle, I must admit that I side with Vernon in
> believing in a God who can and does interact with his creation in regular
> and super natural ways. I realize that for Howard the "God can act
> supernaturally" view equates to a unacceptable theodicy problem, but I just
> don't see it that way.
Yes, we differ there.
> The difference between "God can, but chooses not to
> control evil by constant form-conferring intervention" and "God initiated a
> God-World relationship in which he cannot intervene to control evil" seems
> so minute to me that it does not make the latter sufficiently more
> attractive to convince me to take that process view.
What I would characterize as the "God can, but chooses not to control evil
by episodes of supernatural intervention" position is the one that I have
indeed rejected.
You characterize the other option as "God initiated a God-World relationship
in which he cannot intervene to control evil." That does not describe what I
hold. Your opening words, "God initiated..." suggest that the God/World
relationship is something over which God has some sort of independent
choice. If so, then God is once again accountable for initiating a choice to
withhold coercive action, or to make such action impossible. As you state
it, it sounds like the other option -- to initiate a God/World relationship
in which coercive action is permitted is equally possible to God, but was
rejected. If that is the case, then all of the theodicy problems of
supernaturalism seem to be back in plain view.
Howard Van Till
Received on Thu Jul 1 12:34:20 2004
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