From: Dr. Blake Nelson (bnelson301@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 09:52:25 EST
This "God has nothing to do" is a hold over from the
Enlightenment and a logical fallacy of deism. Even in
a creation fully endowed with all the necessary
potentials to achieve his ends, there is no logical
reason to assume that this means that God has nothing
to do. First of all, it imposes a particular relation
of God to time that may or many not be the case.
Second, a creation can be fully endowed to achieve
particular ends, but God still participates in it
through the creatures (not necessarily just mankind)
or the stuff of the universe. Third, isn't continuing
to sustain the creation acting? The list goes on of
why there is no support for the principle that "God
has nothing to do". Interestingly, the God has
nothing to do idea was trotted out when it was
presumed that the universe was entirely deterministic,
a la LaPlace's apocryphal statement. Now, the
argument is not that God has nothing to do not because
the universe is deterministic, but God doesn't do
anything because the universe is "random".
The degree of the conundrum of haphazardness, of
course, depends first on how you metaphysically
characterize probabilistic processes. Probabilistic
processes are not necessarily haphazard.
Theologically, the idea of kenosis has good insights
into whether God providing some degree of freedom to
the world is within the character of God. We seem to
have no problem with believing in some amount of free
will for individuals, what is necessarily haphazard
about a measure of free will to the stuff of the
universe?
--- Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
(SNIP)
> You accept God as creator, but I get the impression
> from what you say that
> the creator may not have anything to do. Do you
> possibly accept that the
> properties of energy/matter from the Big Bang are
> such that intelligent
> beings arise necessarily from strictly natural
> processes? In other words,
> that God up until Adam's time had no input except at
> the Big Bang? Such
> would be consistent with Paul Davies' fond
> speculation that ".the laws of
> the universe [may] have engineered their own
> comprehension."
>
> My personal faith requires God to be involved at
> least weakly every step of
> the way. We can't prove he was involved, but no one
> can prove he wasn't.
> To say he wasn't involved is to argue for atheism,
> unless you hold that God
> did all that was necessary at the Big Bang. But if
> God was involved, the
> conundrum is the haphazardness. Anyway, that's how
> I see it.
>
> Don
>
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