Any claim to know anything about God beyond God's bare existence (& even that is problematic since God does not "exist" in the same sense as entities within the world) which doesn't begin with God's own self-revelation is bound to go astray. All human beings without exception are prone to idolatry - the point which Paul makes in Romans 1 - and, unguided by such revelation, will erect their own images of the divine. If we don't begin with the cross and resurrection of Christ, God's fundamental revelation, we will know nothing - or really less than nothing - about who God is.
Yes, Plato & Aristotle were smart guys but they didn't know about the cross of Christ. That doesn't mean that their philosophies should be ignored, but they cannot be where we begin. If we do then we start with the notion of a "simple" immutable & impassible deity & have to try to figure out how God can suffer & experience death & be Father, Son and Holy Spirit within those philosophical constraints. What is supposed to be the fundamental Christian answer to the human problem becomes itself a problem which has to be solved.
We have to begin with the claim that God is revealed in the cross-resurrection event, & anything that we say about the "attributes" of God has to be evaluated in light of that revelation. (& of course that means not just that we don't start with Greek philosophy but also that we don't start with our own notions of divine attributes, as Don seems to suggest.) The fathers tried to do that. They didn't succeed completely. Of course this doesn't mean that we should "blow off" the patristic & conciliar period but we also shouldn't imagine it as a kind of golden age in which all the basic theological problems were solved once & for all.
Shalom,
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
----- Original Message -----
From: David Opderbeck
To: Don Winterstein
Cc: asa
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: [asa] Random and design
The theologians who invented the usual attributes of God were coming from some place in Greek philosophy and simply making philosophical assumptions about "what God had to be in order to be God." They probably had good intentions, but we don't need to take them seriously.
Sorry, Don, but this is reductionist nonsense. Yes, the Fathers integrated Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy with Hebrew thought, but the Hebrew notions of God were there apart from the Aristotelian and Platonic notions. (Read Pelikan's History of Christian Doctrine for a sound debunking of the notion that the Fathers merely molded foreign Greek ideas into a made-up Christianity). And why just write off the Aristotelian and Greek ideas complete as, well, Greek? Aristotle and Plato were pretty smart guys, and though they got lots of stuff wrong, there was common grace at work in their thought as well.
If you want to blow off Patristics and just make it all up as you go along, go for it, but IMHO that's not just a looming slippery slope, it's jumping on the sled and shouting "wheee!" as you plunge into oblivion.
And -- Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
On 11/23/06, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
Those big Latinate theological words! The theologians who invented the usual attributes of God were coming from some place in Greek philosophy and simply making philosophical assumptions about "what God had to be in order to be God." They probably had good intentions, but we don't need to take them seriously.
A large fraction of the scriptural references used to support such attributes are simply pious expressions of devotion or praise never intended to serve as a foundation for absolutist doctrine. In other cases the scriptural references have been extrapolated well beyond original intent by philosophically inclined theologians.
People in their devotions are free to assign whatever attributes to God they feel are appropriate, but that doesn't mean their attributes are guaranteed accurate. The reality is that we don't know how much God knows. We trust he knows enough to accomplish what he intends to accomplish, and that's enough.
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: David Opderbeck
To: Don Winterstein
Cc: D. F. Siemens, Jr. ; asa
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 6:04 AM
Subject: Re: [asa] Random and design
If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and sovereign, I don't see why any of this is such a big deal. Of course, omniscient doesn't mean knowing things that don't exist or violate basic principles (such as the law of non-contradiction) and therefore can't be known, omnipotent doesn't mean being able to do things that are contradictory and nonsensical (like making a rock too big for God to lift), and sovereign doesn't mean mechanically dictatorial such that all freedom is excluded. But once you have a balanced and historical understanding of God's attributes, there's no problem with where God "stores all this info" or how He knows things that are undetermined according to QM. Mr. Beaver famously said Aslan isn't a "tame" lion; we could modernize it and say God isn't a computer with limited bandwidth and memory.
On 11/22/06, Don Winterstein < dfwinterstein@msn.com> wrote:
Dave,
I don't see it that way. I understand that you are contending that, in order for God to foreknow his people, he must foreknow in full detail all events that lead to his people, including the QM choices that every particle in the sequence makes, all the way from the big bang. That gives me a headache just thinking about it. I would hope that God would have better things to do with his cognitive apparatus--whatever it is--than store all this info.
The model I like instead is that yes, God knows the outcome, but there's an infinitude of different ways of reaching it. I visualize God as one who gives a nudge here and there when the world starts taking routes that don't look promising, but otherwise he lets it ferment on its own without such interventions. (Let's not at this point get into what "on its own" might mean!)
And yet--as I've stated here before--I credit God with doing a whole lot better job of running my life than I would have done on my own. That is, things have meshed extraordinarily well in many different ways despite rather than because of my best efforts. So I see him as intimately involved. At the same time I feel free as can be, apart from just a bit of pressure to do for him what I need to do.
So I see God controlling things behind the scenes but not at all like a puppeteer. It's as if things just work themselves out on their own; but I give God the credit. This may be nonsense, but it's the most accurate description I can come up with. The older I get the more clearly I see his hand in my life, and this perception makes me believe he does more than a little behind-the-scenes nudging.
In your terms I'm combining unpredictability with precise prediction: the process is not fully predicted, but the final outcome is. And this is possible because there's an infinitude of routes to an acceptable destination, i.e., a destination compatible with God's foreknowledge. (One possibility is that God knew us at the outset as spiritual beings but didn't know how our physical bodies would turn out. He let the world decide that.)
The big difference between us is that I see God as one who continually interacts in ways that have creative significance while you see God as one who knows it all in detail at the outset and somehow has set it in motion to arrive at its known conclusion. Does this sound right?
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
To: dfwinterstein@msn.com
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 10:25 AM
Subject: Re: [asa] Random and design
Don,
The impossible problem is that God's knowledge must encompass the results of quantum indeterminism and human freedom of choice, neither of which is logically predictable. So all you have to do to validate your outlook is to combine unpredictability with precise prediction, or show that there is neither indeterminism nor freedom. Otherwise, p&~p is not only false but impossible in the strongest sense. This doesn't depend on some logical postulate.
Dave
On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:10:37 -0800 "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com > writes:
Dave,
We've gone over this before. I still believe--similarly to George, I think--that God is eternal and not confined within our space-time but that he also experiences event sequence in a way that makes it possible for him to have real interactions with his world and with humans. George argues from Christ (as usual), while I argue from Christ as well as general human experience of God, including my own experiences (as usual). If we can't follow the logic, we're certainly no worse off in that respect than we are with QM.
There are some issues on which I can't yield to logic even if it makes me look unreasonable. Logic, after all, is based on postulates, one or more of which could be incomplete or mistaken. And QM shows to a degree that the world does not always honor human logic. Our logical postulates come out of our experience, but our experience has been largely irrelevant when it comes to particles. What else might our experience be irrelevant to?
Although I accept Paul's statement that God foreknew us, I'd be willing to entertain unconventional interpretations of the details. But I don't know what you take to be the "impossible problem."
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.<mailto: dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
To: dfwinterstein@msn.com<mailto: dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: mrb22667@kansas.net<mailto: mrb22667@kansas.net> ; asa@calvin.edu<mailto: asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2006 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: [asa] Random and design
Don,
This is correct if God is confined to time. But if God is eternal in the
sense of being timeless, then the path an electron took-takes-will take
will not need to be determined in a picosecond. It is simply known.
George doesn't like this notion, for he insists the Father felt the death
of the Son _when_ it happened. I contend that if this is the temporal
situation with the unincarnate deity, then we have an impossible problem
with human freedom as well as with indeterministic quanta. Paul had to be
wrong when he declared that those God foreknew pre-creation he _has_
glorified.
On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 22:33:00 -0800 "Don Winterstein"
<dfwinterstein@msn.com > writes:
<snip>
Fact is, if God can determine why an electron "decides" to go to one
location on the interference pattern rather than to another, he must be
able to read the electron's "mind" in maybe a picosecond. If the
electron doesn't have a mind but just responds in knee-jerk fashion,
...well, it's all so hard to comprehend. We don't know how to think like
particles. Nevertheless, it still seems reasonable to me that God would
be able to extensively influence the development of the world by
manipulating particles within their probability distributions, all
without violating any physical law.
But as for whether physicists now acknowledge hard limits--no one I've
heard of. What they're likely to readily acknowledge is that the world
is far stranger than our predecessors knew. And it is experiment, often
suggested and illuminated by theory, that tells us this.
Don
--
David W. Opderbeck
Web: http://www.davidopderbeck.com
Blog: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
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--
David W. Opderbeck
Web: http://www.davidopderbeck.com
Blog: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
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Received on Thu Nov 23 21:24:12 2006
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