Re: Cross & ID

>>> Janice Matchett <janmatch@earthlink.net> 01/03/06 12:01 PM >>>writes,
concerning George Murphy's ideas:
## I welcome George's correction if I'm wrong, but from what he's
written, he appears to me to be attracted to one or more of the
pantheistic ideas of the new age / process theology movement, so I
would think that he probably leans toward holding the belief that
nature operates according to general principles or laws and doesn't
claim that God temporarily abolishes a natural law in order to
perform a miracle, only to reinstate the natural law afterwards.

Instead, I'd bet that he would say that the laws of nature now in
effect are not the only laws that nature might have - that another
set of natural laws might also be coherent.

That he might argue something to the effect that God, whose mind is
the ultimate guarantee of the coherence of nature, might change the
natural laws if He thought that He could improve the cosmos that way.

My opinion on the subject is merely that these "new age" ideas aren't
new at all; they are merely variations on ideas that have been
proposed many times before and are just being re-cycled.

Ted comments:
Obviously George Murphy can speak for himself on this. I will speak for
myself.

God in creating the world was not bound to create/place into existence any
specific set of "laws of nature"; nor is God bound now to uphold the
specific laws God chose to create, forever, without changing them. As
Janice notes, these are not "new age" ideas at all. They are *classical*
Christian notions, based on the assumptions (which I think Christians should
still hold now) that God is transcendent over the laws and processes of
nature, and that God is not bound by rational necessity to create/uphold any
particular individual laws or set of laws of nature. Robert Boyle's
position, for example, was just the position that I articulated above. So
was Newton's position, for that matter.

Having not followed the thread carefully, I won't comment on the part above
about process theism, except to say that both George and I have serious
problems with key components of process theism--although I am myself open to
open theism, if I may put it that way. Open theism comes in various forms;
when coupled with a denial of omnipotence, we typically end in process
theism; but when omnipotence is affirmed alongside the more limited view of
omniscience that open theism asserts (Namely, that God knows everything that
can be known, but that some things about the future cannot be known by any
agent), process theism does not result.

Ted
Received on Tue Jan 3 12:23:24 2006