Re: [asa] God as Cause

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Bill Green
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 5:02 PM
  Subject: 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.

  Secondary causes are not sufficient - that's why they're secondary. I.e., physical entities & forces are not "efficient in-an-of-themselves."

  I introduced the image of chess pieces as an illustration of how the world isn't. An appropriate metaphor for God's cooperation with creatures is the way in which human beings work with tools. If you tighten a bolt with a wrench, both you and the wrench work. The wrench doesn't do anything by itself, but you don't tighhten the bolt with your hand. (Of course this, like all analogies, has limitations.)

  Note that I speak of God cooperating with creatures - things whose ultimate source is God. (That's one limitation of the above analogy: We don't make our tools ex nihilo.) That begins of course with God's origination of the universe, but also includes the fact that God keeps things in existence.

  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.

  We miss the point if we try to argue for the "necessity" of God for the way phenomena take place within the world. In fact, such necessity, by supposedly deriving God's existence from things within the world, makes God dependent upon those things. That's why Juengel, e.g., argues for both "the worldly non-necessity of God" and for the claim that God is "more than necessary."

  IMO the best approach is to start with the claim that the basic level of reality is revealed in the cross-resurrection event, & argue that that provides a broader & deeper understanding of reality that the "naturalistic closed-loop of cause and effect." I describe this approach briefly in an article at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2000/PSCF9-00Murphy.html .

  Shalom
  George
  http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

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Received on Fri Jan 5 19:22:52 2007