>At 3:17 PM 2/2/96 -0500, Brian D. Harper wrote:
>
>>It might be useful to discuss some terminology, in particular:
>>what is meant by deism and related to this what does it mean to be
>>mechanistic.
>
>This discussion could use a glossary defining a number of the terms used.
>I frequently find I've made an assumption about someone's point of view
>that is unjustified. It comes from looking at the world through different
>paradigms, but wrangling over the definitions might help us understand what
>those paradigms are.
>
>My simplistic definition of deism is the belief that God did not intervene
>after His initial act of creation.
I would tend to say that this is a position likely to be held by a
deist but not necessarily a good definition of a deist (in the sense
that one could hold this position and not be a deist, if that makes
any sense :). I was under the impression that deism involves:
a) rejection of all things supernatural, no miracles etc.
b) God can be fully known through the powers of reason alone,
solely from the observation of nature, i.e. a flat rejection
of revelation.
Lest I be misunderstood let me say quickly that I'm not a deist either
in the a&b sense above or according to Bill's definition. From the point
of view that I'm trying to argue here, God transcending time as we know it,
"the belief that God did not intervene after His initial act of creation"
makes no sense to me at all. This view places God within the universe,
within the causal chain of events that we call "time".
My musings on this topic began after reading an interesting article by
Russell Stannard "God's Purpose in and Beyond Time", in _Evidence of
Purpose_, J.M. Templeton, ed., Continuum, New York, 1994, pp. 33-43.
[BTW, this volume is highly recommended. I would be hard pressed to
think of an article that has had more impact on me than Owen Gingerich's
"Dare a Scientist Believe in Design?", also in this volume. Paul Davies
article "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Science" is also a must
read for those interested in the Anthropic Principle.]
Back to Stannard. I don't feel competent to even attempt a summary
of his arguments. Let me just give a short quote to tweak your interest:
The moment of the Big Bang must not be thought of as being
especially invested with God's creative power, everything
else subsequently being a consequence of this unique act.
The instant of the Big Bang happens to mark one particular
end of the time axis--that and nothing more. God's creative
power is _uniformly_ distributed throughout the whole of
the space-time framework. His traditional roles as Creator
and Sustainer merge. His purpose is at work throughout time
and is not to be thought of as confined to a once-off initial
act.
I kind of like this view, now if only I could understand it ;-). Then
again, if I understood it I might not like it anymore :).
>IMO a mechanistic point of view could
>come in at least two flavors: 1) Mechanism explains everything all the way
>back to the big bang; 2) Mechanism explains everything after God's initial
>creative act.
>
This sounds like a pretty good definition of mechanistic. Now we
have to worry about what "explain" means :). To my way of thinking,
a "mechanistic world view" would be more or less equivalent to
to an ultra-reductionistic world view, i.e. that everything is
reducible to a few simple "blind" mechanisms. I think mechanism
as a world view would also be essentially equivalent to determinism,
i.e. we mignt re-write the above to say "everything is determined
from the moment of the Big Bang onward" or "everything is determined
after God's initial creative act." If we say that a
deist is defined by my a&b above then I believe that deism is
no longer a tenable position given what we now know about quantum
mechanics and chaos theory. The universe is not mechanistic and
its future evolution is unpredictable from its initial conditions.
Remember that I'm taking deism to mean that God's actions are
discernable purely from reason without the aid of revelation. Using
reason alone, the universe is unpredictable from its initial conditions.
Now, I think one could reasonably argue that this would not be a problem
for a transcendent Creator, but I think it clearly is a problem for
one who claims that God's actions are discernable through reason alone.
There is also another interesting issue related to mechanism and the
self-organizing view. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out
just what is meant by the "self" in self-organizing. At its heart, I
think much of the drive to establish a self-organization paradigm comes
from a philosophical repulsion towards the mechanistic point of view.
I think this is well illustrated by the quote I gave earlier, repeated
below:
"The mechanical world view will be swept away and replaced
by the picture of a self-creating world."
The tie in with "self" comes, I think, from interpretting mechanics
as Newtonian mechanics. In Newtonian mechanics systems change due to
external influences. For example, the center of mass of a collection
of particles will accelerate if the *external* forces acting on the
system are not balanced. With this take on things, neo-Darwinism would
be a mechanistic view of evolution in that organisms change due to
external stimuli, they adapt to their environments. With the self-
organizational view, systems change due to internal organizing
principles rather than external pressures. With this in mind, I'll
repeat a couple of definitions of self-organization that I had given
earlier:
Self-organization is to be understood as the spontaneous
emergence of coherence or structure without externally
applied coercion or control.
-- Ho and Saunders
For what follows it will be useful to have a suitable
definition of self-organization at hand. We shall say
that a system is self-organizing if it acquires a spatial,
temporal or functional structure without specific interference
from the outside. By "specific" we mean that the structure or
functioning is not impressed on the system, but that the system
is acted on from the outside in a nonspecific fashion. For
instance, the fluid which forms hexagons is heated from below
in an entirely uniform fashion, and it acquires its specific
structure by self-organization.
-- Haken
One thing I'm really interested in doing is to look at the philosophical
and theological implications of the self-organizational view. One thing
that several people have discussed is that the self-org view gives us
back our free-will, apparently stolen from us by the deterministic,
mechanistic picture.
[...]
bill:==================
>
>I agree. I've often tried to think of analogies which contrast how God
>might view time to our view. One of my favorites is the following: for us
>time is like a river we float in. Let's assume that we have the ability to
>move crosswise to the current, but cannot move up or downstream. Motion
>downstream corresponds to the passage of time. By moving crosswise to the
>current we can influence which particular channels of the river we pass
>through and ultimately which branch of the delta we take as the river
>empties into the sea. But since our ability to see what is coming is
>extremely limited, there is a great deal of guesswork in our maneuvering.
>God on the other hand can view the entire river at one time, and can
>instantaneously see the future effect of any maneuver we make.
>
>Obviously this is an imperfect analogy (aren't they all?). I believe God
>has a greater degree of independence from time than my analogy illustrates,
>but I don't know how to express it.
>
As analogies go, I think this one is very good, in particular it retains
free will and omniscience. A trickier question would be whether God
knows beforehand how we are going navigate, and if so, do we still
have free will? ;-). I guess I shouldn't ask such questions without
giving my own answer to them. yes and yes :) PLEASE, don't ask me to
explain logically how this can be so. I think the answer lies somewhere
in God's being outside of time as we know it.
========================
Brian Harper |
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
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