Re: [asa] God as Cause

George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
   
  Belief that God is the ultimate cause of all things (which is the classical understanding of omnipotance) does NOT mean that God causes all things directly instead of through secondary causes. ... it would mean that the extensive regularities which science discovers & describes in its laws have nothing to do with the properties of the things which it studies, but are just due to the fact that God chooses to move them in regular ways - rather in the way that the ways in which different chess pieces move have nothing to do with the pieces themselves but are due to arbitrary rules imposed on them from outside.
   
   
  If the physical universe entails the laws and properties that are responsible for it's functioning, then I don't see the place for any God but a watchmaker. I am not sure what the statement "God is the ultimate cause" can mean if physical entities and forces are efficient in-and-of-themselves. If the chess pieces move of their own accord, then what is the chess player doing? Stated another way, if secondary causes are sufficient, then what is the significance of ultimate causes? They are superfluous.
   
  I think that the atheists understand this (for example: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/barbara_forrest/naturalism.html).
   
  This is behind their common "Occam's Razor" in arguing against theism: Why invoke an unobservable deity when observable events are sufficient to explain the universe?
   
  Perhaps we can argue that God is necessary for spiritual reasons, such as morality and meaning, but these values have been assimilated by the naturalists and incorporated into their naturalistic closed-loop of cause and effect as well.
   
   

 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Jan 5 17:03:17 2007