Re: [asa] Random and design

I see a great difference between "There is no god so you have to imagine
it" and "God is ineffable except as he reveals himself." The latter is
grounds for theological analysis as well as trust. The former fits
Freud's incessant effort to free himself from everything but science,
with a lousy job of being scientific in his theory construction. Have you
read his silly attempt to make Moses a foreign interloper? If I press
your statement, I come to worship without knowledge as the ideal.
Dave

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 06:47:27 -0800 "Don Winterstein"
<dfwinterstein@msn.com> writes:
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
To: Don Winterstein
Cc: asa
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> 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
MySpace (Music):   http://www.myspace.com/davidbecke 
-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Web:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com 
Blog:  http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
MySpace (Music):  http://www.myspace.com/davidbecke 
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