Re: Dembski theodicy

I think the 2 views (Dembski's & mine) are quite different. Bear in mind in the following that the ordering of God's decisions before creation is a logical, not a temporal order.

Dembski: God decides to create a world with some set of properties. (What they are isn't clear.) God sees that human beings will sin and because of this introduces suffering and death into the world. God then decides for the Son to become incarnate and die on the cross for salvation. (Or perhaps he thinks that the Incarnation but not the cross would have taken place if humanity had not sinned. I don't know.)

Murphy: God decides to create a world with freedom and functional integrity so that life can evolve with the eventual emergence of an intelligent species in which God can become incarnate and unite all things with himself. Suffering and death will exist in such a world. Furthermore, intelligent creatures who come into being via evolution through natural selection will inevitably (though not as a matter of strict necessity) sin. God knows this and intends that the Incarnation will involve Christ's suffering, death and resurrection in order to accomplish his purpose in spite of sin.
 
Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: George Murphy ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 11:56 AM
  Subject: Re: Dembski theodicy

  George, this is losing me a bit -- if God intended the atonement before the foundation of the world, didn't he forsee sin? And if His purpose before the foundation of the world was to unite all things to Himself in Christ, and the world we inhabit was created towards that purpose, then wouldn't His creation of the kind of world we inhabit be in part a result of the fact that He foresaw sin? Is the problem simply a reductionism -- God's purpose in creating the world as it is was primarily in response to His foreknowledge of sin -- or is it a broader problem with God's foreknowledge of sin factoring at all into why He created as He did? I think I'd have a problem with the latter. Teleology has always seemed to me to be an important component of theodicy -- knowing everything (including that we would sin), God created the world as it is because the best possible outcome will ultimately result.

  On 5/10/06, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com > wrote:
    David -

    I hadn't seen your question below to me when I sent my earlier post. Yes, I think God intended the cross "before the foundation of the world" as part of his intention to "unite all things to himself." That is because the creation of a world with full "functional integrity" which would give rise to rational creatures with free will would inevitably result in sin and its consequences. Thus God is prepared to share in paying the price of suffering & death which is involved in creating that kind of universe - that's the theodicy. (My paper which will deal with this in more detail will, I think, be in the next issue of PSCF.) That is quite different from saying that God created the kind of world we inhabit because he foresaw sin - see my earlier post. I think Dembski has things backwards.

    Shalom
    George
    http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: David Opderbeck
    To: jcannon@washjeff.edu
    Cc: asa@calvin.edu ; Denis O. Lamoureux
    Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 9:35 AM
    Subject: Re: Dembski theodicy

    evangelical Christianity is a
    sociological category describing a group of people who hold (in
    varying degrees) an incoherent set of abstractions, severed from the
    abstractions' roots.

    Lovely. Nothing like opening the morning email to be lumped mindlessly into a "sociological category" by a physicist. Is it really necessary to call people names simply out of reaction to the fact that Bill Dembski is involved?

    I read Dembski's paper a couple weeks ago and personally I found it quite interesting. It seems to me that Dembski at heart is making a pretty traditional move in appealing to God's foreknowledge to address the problem of evil. Doesn't any theodicy ultimately have to appeal to God's foreknowledge?

    If you hold to a TE position, you either have to deny that human pain and suffering are a type of natural evil, or you have to say that God made us (through evolution) to experience pain and suffering at least in part because He knew that we would sin and further knew that our pain and suffering would help lead us to the cross. I can't see how the first option (denying that human pain and suffering are a type of natural evil) is in any way attractive or related to Christian theology or to the Biblical eschatological hope of redemption.

    The second option is more consistent, IMHO, with Christian theology, and further dovetails nicely with the concept that Christ participated in our pain and suffering by becoming flesh and dying on the cross. This also reflects the depth of the atonement, by which Christ not only took our place in receiving God's judgment, but also provided an example of virtuous suffering, and secured ultimate victory over sin and death. George Murhpy -- I confess I haven't gotten through your Cosmos in Light of the Cross book yet, but isn't your approach to TE and theodicy something along these lines?

    .......................
Received on Wed May 10 19:23:35 2006