From: Ted Davis (tdavis@messiah.edu)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 22:36:41 EDT
Something seems a bit fishy, in the quotation Bob gave us from Augustine
about God and nature. I suspect it may be rolled up in the meaning of
"nature," which would have to be understood in terms of the "natures" of
things as well as in terms of the "natural" order. I can't quite flesh this
out with confidence, but I have my doubts that Augustine would intend to say
that God never acts in ways that would be "outside" the "ordinary course of
nature," as Boyle would have put it.
In any event, I think God does sometimes act in extraordinary ways, ways
that simply cannot be fully described with natural categories. For example,
I believe that Jesus was conceived without a human father; that the women
and the disciples went to the right tomb and found it empty; that our Lord
made real wine from real water in a trice; and that (for lack of better
language) there was a time when there was no time, before the world was
brought into being by an inscrutable act of divine power and will. None of
these things, IMO, is unscientific, for genuine science cannot proscribe
events it cannot describe--contrary to David Hume, whose own principle of
the uniformity of nature rested precariously on his own faith in the
validity of induction, whose validity he himself doubted.
The question is always, *did* such and such take place, not *could* it
happen. And those who would make God a constitutional monarch, who "cannot
break his own laws," do not understand (IMO) what it means to be "maker of
heaven and earth."
ted davis
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