Re: [asa] God as Cause

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: George Murphy
  To: Bill Green ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 7:27 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] God as Cause

  -- Original Message -----
    From: Bill Green
    To: asa@calvin.edu
    Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 11:51 AM
    Subject: [asa] God as Cause

    George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:

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

    ...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.

    George,

    If God uses physical forces and natural laws as one uses a wrench, then the wrench is not a sufficient explanation for the tightening of the nut. Neither, then, are auxins and cytokinins a sufficient explanation for plant growth, nor are electrostatic forces a sufficient explanation for chemical bonding. In what sense are these scientific explanations not sufficient?

    In the tightening of the wrench, it is clear that it does not happen on its own, but what about in the case of natural processes. Where is the place for God. The atheistic scientist can explain the "natural tightening" without invoking a craftsman. How does God "use" the physical laws and properties? This is what is unclear to me.

    From a theological standpoint explanations in terms of natural processes are not sufficient because they leave out God who operates through those processes. But science attempts to explain things in terms of natural processes (i.e., methodological naturalism) and waives questions about where those processes come from or why there are any such processes. As one of my doctoral profs used to emphasize in his 1st general physics lecture, "Science does not deal in first causes." This doesn't mean that it denies them but it just doesn't deal with them and takes the world as it is as given.

    Then are natural processes sufficient explanations for science? The successes of science over the past ~500 years strongly suggest that the answer is "Yes." (N.B., I do not say "prove that the answer is yes." There are, of course, scientific questions that haven't been answered yet.) They are adequate for an explanation of the world "from the inside" so to speak. That is the sense in which Bonhoeffer said that the world can be understood etsi deus non daretur, "though God were not given."

    But now return to theology & in particular to a theology of the cross which, I have argued, is the proper context in which to view the world. This not only says that God does act through natural processes but, with the concept of kenosis or divine self-limitation, explains why God is not "seen" in what goes on in natural phenomena. It is not that God is absent but that natural processes are both God's "instruments" and "the masks of God" in Luther's phrase.

    I am not rying to develop an argument to prove God's necessity, I am trying to understand how he controls (or might control) nature. I am sure that there is mystery here, but I'm not sure it is intended to be a contradiction. The scripture is clear that he causes all things, and naturalistic science leaves no room for this.

    Science allows no room for God as an agent within the world - but neither does theology. God is not one being among other beings. But as I've said, science simply has nothing to say about God as First Cause or "Ground of Being" which makes possible the existence of the world. Science does need those concepts to operate as science but it doesn't rule them out.

    I think you wrench analogy is a good one, but where is the place for the craftsman? Naturalistic science has an explanation for how the wrench can turn itself.

    Not really, because the question of how the wrench turns itself is really the question "Why are the laws of physics as they are, & why are they actually embodied & activated in a real world instead of just being math abstractions?" & science can't answer those questions.

    But again I don't want to push the instrumental analogy too far. (& even within its limits, the divine instruments - quarks & gluons &c - are more subtle & dynamic than the "6 simple machines.")

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

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Received on Mon Jan 8 19:29:19 2007