I think it's fair to say the OT and early NT Jews thought of religion almost exclusively as a relationship with God, while philosophically inclined theologians in the early church felt a large part of religion had to do with defining God, constructing a box for him that would ever after allow them to treat God as an object independent of their relationship with him. In Scripture we seldom if ever hear people talking about God's attributes independent of their relationship with him; but the early philosopher-theologians frequently did that. And while I agree that we certainly can't ignore--for historical reasons--many of the teachings of the Fathers, and we can't say they weren't good Christians, some of the reasoning evident in their many writings is bizarre by modern standards. How much confidence can we put in the teachings of people who reasoned the way some of them did?
Much of the doctrinal outcome--especially with respect to attributes--was of a sort that allowed people like Sigmund Freud to assert that God was just a projection of all imaginable virtues onto some imaginary Big Daddy in the sky. When you start interpreting "omniscience" as referring to God's knowing all the details of every particle interaction since the big bang, how can you defend yourself against Freud's accusation?
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: David Opderbeck<mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com>
To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 7:12 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<mailto: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<mailto:dopderbeck@gmail.com>
To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: D. F. Siemens, Jr.<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com> ; asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
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<mailto: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.<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
To: dfwinterstein@msn.com<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>
Cc: asa@calvin.edu<mailto: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 <mailto: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<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com>>
To: dfwinterstein@msn.com<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com><mailto: dfwinterstein@msn.com<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com>>
Cc: mrb22667@kansas.net<mailto:mrb22667@kansas.net><mailto: mrb22667@kansas.net<mailto:mrb22667@kansas.net>> ; asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu><mailto: 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 <mailto: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
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David W. Opderbeck
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Blog: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html<http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html>
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Received on Fri Nov 24 10:02:56 2006
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