From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Fri Jul 04 2003 - 12:12:25 EDT
Hi Howard,
You wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Howard J. Van Till [mailto:hvantill@chartermi.net]
>Sent: Friday, July 04, 2003 10:25 AM
>You're one of a kind, Glenn. No doubt about it.
Even those who know and work with me in the oil industry say the same, with
a certain tone of voice I have grown used to! The curse in all this is that
being a character, almost no one forgets you but trying to put a face with a
name from 20 years ago when they remember you is often embarassing.
>I know that omniscience and omnipotence are attributed to God in
>traditional
>Christian theology. However, given all of the problems that these concepts
>cause, requiring all manner of additional clever theological constructions
>to protect them, I'm of a mind to reexamine them and to look at other
>portraits of the Sacred, the Holy, traditionally personified as God.
>
>I'm not asking you to go there, just being candid about where I am.
It is an interesting thought. Let's do an analogy between humankind's
control of nature with that of God's predictive knoweledge. It seems that we
can control nature via computers because we can predict with certainty what
a gaggle of electrons will do in a wire under certain conditions. Our
entire technological world is based upon our knowing the future behavior of
physical objects controlled by physical laws. Of course we don't know
perfectly but well enough to build the internet.
Now, if God can't predict, how could we know or surmise from OT prophecy,
that this guy Jesus is the messiah rather than a David Koresh? Lots of
people get capital punishment. Sure, he got up from the grave, but Mohammed
was also supposed to have risen to heaven as well. To me, without control,
there can't be prediction. Without prediction, who in the heck was Jesus?
This is not to say that we shouldn't explore alternatives as you are doing.
It's just that I see greater problems right now in that direction than with
the traditional viewpoint on omniscience and omnipotence.
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