On Fri, 26 May 1995 20:32:22 -0400 (EDT) you wrote:
>Earlier today Stephen was responding to an earlier post by Glenn about bread
>baking and God's creative involvement;
>
>This brought to mind a seemingly stupid, but quite interesting question.
>
>If I were to drop of rock from waist height, is God' active involvement
>required for it to fall to the ground? Or do the physics require that it
>fall without God's participation. The only possible involvement by God would
>be to "intervene" to change its fall.
>
>I seems to me that the only possible Christian answer worth the name Christain
>is that the rock could not have fallen unless God directly caused it to fall.
>
>Terry, would you agree with my answer?
>
>Do some of you disagree?
Jim, it is *not* a "stupid...question" <g>. I do not believe that in
the final analysis, that there are "laws of nature". I believe that
what man calls "laws of nature" are a description of God's regular
workings in and through nature. We call these things "laws", but
where are they? We can't capture a law and put it on display. They
seem to be mysteriously external to the cosmos. They are the way
things work, but do we really know why?
Jesus said that not even one sparrow could fall to the ground apart
from the will of the Father (Mt 10:29). If not a sparrow, why a rock?
I think the whole naturalistic world-view of modern science based on
the idea of an autonomous nature is fundamentally un-Biblical. Wright
(himself a theistic evolutionist) correctly points out that the Bible
did not even have a word for nature:
"The word "nature" does not appear in the old Testament. The Hebrew
writers did not have a word that would translate into what we commonly
understand as nature (the material world as an independent reality);
it was a concept foreign to their way of thinking." (Wright R.T.,
"Biology Through the Eyes of Faith", 1991, Apollos, p15)
For example, the Bible never says "it rained" but always "God sent
rain" (eg. Gn 2:5; Jer 14:22; Joel 2:23). While it might be useful
to abstract from reality and use a mechanistic model of reality to
exploit the regularity of God's working, that does not mean it is the
whole truth.
We can say a stone fell without (rightly) thinking that God made the
stone to fall, because it is comparatively trivial and partially
correct as far as it goes. However, if we take that useful
mechanistic model, make a metaphysical principle out of it, and try to
fit our theology, the Bible and God to it, then I believe we make a
potentially serious error.
Stephen