Re: Nature article on ID

Iain,
I know you don't intend to be a deist, but splitting power and program
has that tendency. My point is that the work of God in creation and
providence is seamless, that power and program cannot be sundered as they
are in human devices. This does not mean that he does not intervene in
creation. This involves time, but does not place God in time. Human
beings were not present in the original creation though foreknown. Though
Moorad seems to think I make God temporal, I know better. But we are so
totally children of time that eternity is difficult to express. In John
1:1-3, the use of the past tense would normally indicate a previous time.
But the Word was not in time until he became flesh.

To note your alternate version, I do not believe that God intervenes when
the "unfolding gets stuck." Nothing gets stuck when God is totally
present in the entire process. Or, to note a later item, there is nothing
to fix. That's where IDers makes a god a little smarter than they, but
not bright enough to get it right. Even the old deists did better with a
universe that ran properly without divine tinkering to keep it working.
Dave

On Mon, 2 May 2005 13:46:42 +0100 Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
writes:
Thanks for all the replies - I don't have time to address all of them,
but I'd like to respond to this one..

But the point I was trying to make is that there are no "cliffs" when God
is on top of everything every yoctosecond. You get the possibility of
"cliffs" when the program with all its algorithms has to be specified so
that it can run without supervision. This latter is essentially deistic,
not theistic. Omniscience is competent for this task, to be sure, but
denies the Lord's constant providential care.
Dave

I certainly would not consider myself to be a deist (in the sense of God
lighting the blue touch paper at the start and then standing well back -
a position that also implies that God is constrained in time). But I
don't see God's "providential care" as helping evolution to scale the
cliffs by lending a miraculous helping hand now and again (not sure if
that's what you meant, but that's the way I took it when you said there
were no cliffs when God is on top of everything all the time). This sort
of view of God is one of a fallible software programmer who releases his
product on the public (like Microsoft Windows XP) and then continually
provides bug-fixes as problems occur. But this, it seems to me is in
direct contradiction of Genesis Ch 1, which I do take seriously, that in
the beginning God created everything there is and it was "very good".
The creating and the unfolding are two separate processes, and I don't
find it a helpful idea to think that God intervenes when the unfolding
gets stuck.

Instead I see God's providential care in that the universe keeps on
running ("creator and sustainer") - if you pursue the algorithm analogy,
it's what supplies the power to the computer that's running the
algorithm. Or as Stephen Hawking put it in the last chapter of "Brief
History of Time" : "What is it that breathes fire into the equations?".

But more than that, surely God's providential care is exhibited in the
fact that he has revealed himself to us through Scripture, and in the
ultimate intervention, as Jesus Christ, giving us the gift of everlasting
life. But these interventions are to do with His relationship to us, and
not in fixing an imperfect creation so that we might come about. I would
suggest that he got that bit right, right "in the beginning".

Iain.

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