Re: Fwd: [asa] Creation and Incarnation

David:
It seems to me that what you are saying is human beings are unique at
the natural level, rather than they are unique in their ability to
respond to their Creator in a meaningful manner. . I accept the latter
but I question the former. It seems to me that Michael's puppy does make
a choice, based on its memory of the consequences of its past actions.
Science is concerned with the actions of human beings (and other created
beings and things) as part of the natural world. It is not concerned
with any ongoing relationships between human beings (and other created
beings and things) and their Creator.
Don

David Opderbeck wrote:

> Note: I replied as follows to George offline, thinking it was online,
> and then we agreed to put this back online:
>
> /Can science explain the choices that human beings make? To a certain
> extent it can, bringing out the various factors that influence those
> choices & explaining why they're effective. But ultimately no -
> science isn't going to be able to give a precise explanation for why
> Nebuchadrezar chooses to lay seige to Jerusalem instead of Rabbah (
> Ez.21:18-22). But does it have to?/
>
> George, thanks for taking the time to make these very helpful
> observations. I think we're talking on somewhat different tracks
> here, though. I didn't mean to suggest that, if science can't explain
> human choices fully, the rest of the explanation /must/ be "God." I
> was trying to focus more on the question of whether we can conclude
> that the cause of an observed phenomenon is the result of a conscious
> choice rather than the result only of the operation of natural laws.
>
> Here you all will have to excuse me for putting my lawyer hat on, but
> maybe it will help clarify or add a different perspective. (And this
> has gotten kind of long winded, so I hope you'll all forgive me for
> that as well -- I'm not trying to prove a point so much as I find this
> all very interesting.)
>
> The law is very concerned with questions of causation. In the recent
> drug product liability cases that have been in the news, for example,
> the justice system has to answer these kinds of questions: What
> caused the plaintiff's heart attack -- was it genetic, or was it a
> dangerous side effect of the prescription medication he was taking?
> Or did the plaintiff cause his own problems through overeating and
> lack of exercise? Or if it was a combination of all those factors,
> how should the judge or jury weight each factor in order to determine
> the drug manufacturer's share of liability? As a lawyer, a big part
> of my professional culture and training involves determining when an
> event is caused, in whole or part, by human action rather than by
> "natural" events. We have a notion in the law of a "chain of
> causation," which can be broken by "intervening" or "superceding" causes.
>
> So, I tend to think of the operation of natural laws as a chain of
> causation. I know this analogy can't be pressed very far because of
> quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, but it still seems
> sound to me at a basic level, and it seems to be how natural
> scientists operate at a practical level. When natural scientists
> examine a phenomenon, they try to suss out the physical causes of the
> phenomenon. At a macro level, Science seeks to do this through the
> entire chain of causation, all the way back to fundamental physical
> laws (and perhaps, in the case of some cosmological science, before
> that to the cause of the physical laws).
>
> If a human choice is inserted into the chain of causation, it seems to
> me that the resulting phenomenon no longer falls purely into the realm
> of the natural sciences. Like you said, science (I'd clarify and say
> the natural sciences) can't fully determine the causes of things like
> Nebuchadnezzar's choice of which city to attack. So, if a conscious
> decision of an autonomous agent is involved, at some point the chain
> of causation is interrupted and the natural sciences are incapable of
> determining fully the truth of what happened. (Footnote -- I
> think I'd distinguish this from Michael's comment about his collie
> puppy -- natural science, as I understand it, presumes some sort of
> determinism for non-human choices; otherwise, the concept of natural
> selection would make no sense at all.)
>
> But even if the natural sciences are incapable of fully explaining a
> chain of causation that involves human choice, as a general matter
> human beings are highly competent to determine that a human choice
> intervened in or superceded on the chain. If we were to visit Lebanon
> today, we wouldn't throw up our hands and say "the laws of physics
> clearly suggest all these buildings shouldn't suddenly explode; I have
> no idea why that happened." Instead, we'd immediately recognize that
> the buildings were destroyed through a human choice. And, natural
> science could come right back into the picture and help determine what
> sorts of bombs were used and such.
>
> So, here's where I wanted to bring in the /imago Dei/ concept. If we
> can determine when a human choice has intervened in or superceded on
> the chain of causation, why, in principle, can't we determine, at
> least some of the time, when a Divine choice has done so? Our very
> ability to make free choices (or to use your typology, to exercise the
> "R" or Reason), is part of the /imago Dei/. In this sense, we are
> "like God," and it seems reasonable to expect that we would at least
> sometimes be able to recognize when God acts to change a chain of
> causation. We certainly wouldn't call this kind of recognition
> "natural science," but it seems as much an area of rational
> investigation as other "soft" sciences like psychology or anthropology.
>
> The biggest objection I can see to this is that (setting aside process
> theology), there are /no/ events in any chain of causation that are
> not "caused" in some sense by God. But, it seems to me that there has
> to be some way to distinguish "ordinary" causation by God -- causation
> that is fully consistent with the natural laws He established at
> creation -- from "extraordinary" causation by God that intervenes in
> or supercedes on what was otherwise probable given those natural
> laws. A miracle like the resurrection of Christ seems to me to fall
> into that latter category. Yet we are quite capable of recognizing in
> an event like the resurrection that some agent apparently has made
> something happen. Perhaps we need revelation to explain who that
> agent was and why the event was caused to occur, but reason tells us
> there apparently was a conscious cause of the event.
>
> <>So this is where I end up: whether we call it "science" or not, why
> can't human beings use their capacity of reason to investigate whether
> another entity with an analogous capacity, such as God, may have
> intervened in or superceded on the chain of causation in the
> development of life in the universe?
>
>
>

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Received on Fri Aug 25 22:58:52 2006