Re: [asa] Anthropic Principle, "proof," and "explanations"

Last week, >>> Jim Armstrong <jarmstro@qwest.net> 12/07/07 5:43 PM >>> asked
me the following question:

Just a question. Does your sense of creation specifically require "ex
nihilo" per se? Or would it also accommodate the more organizational
sort of action described by John Walton. He portrays the ancient
Hebrew's understanding of God's creative act as one of organizing an
existing something ("chaos" perhaps - whatever it starts as is in God's
realm and need not have an existence as we experience it), followed by
giving it a purpose, and a name. Is "ex nihilo" as it commonly appears
here used as shorthand that would not bother to make this distinction,
or is it used literally. If literally, why is that?

****

I wanted to reply at that point, but other things intervened. It's a nice
question.

First, I agree that biblically God in creation moves from chaos to order. I
also agree that other ancient near east creation stories typically have this
feature--I would call it "generical" insofar as it comes with the literary
genre, which is used in the Bible (IMO) as the familiar literary vehicle to
convey the radically unfamilir underlying theological truth that the one,
true, invisible God who is not a creature is the sole maker of heaven and
earth.

Second, my belief in ex nihilo creation is only partly based on a given
reading of this particular text. I am fairly familiar (not intimately
familiar) with the general argument, advanced many years ago by Langdon
Gilkey (Maker of Heaven and Earth) and more recently by Gerhard May
(Creation ex nihilo), that the Hebrews did NOT understand creation in
Genesis to be creatio ex nihilo at the time the text was written. They may
be right, and I do not downplay the significance of this, since I do place
much emphasis on what a text was intended to mean at the time when it was
written to the audience for whom it was written. They may also be wrong.
May looks at Christian interpreters, claiming that it wasn't until the
second century that the father created the doctrine ex nihilo, if I may pun
deliberately. That's pretty darn early, I would say, esp since there are NT
texts that IMO can readily be understood to be teaching this view (the same
texts that May rejects). How much earlier do we need to have explicit
examples of this teaching, in order for us to say that Christians have
understood this to be true since the beginning of the faith, which is what I
believe is likely?

To return to my opening sentence in the previous paragraph: I find very
plausible the argument of Ted Peters, in the volume edited by Russell et al.
(Physics, Philosophy, and Theology). Peters argues that the Hebrews
understood genesis to be teaching creatio ex nihilo, no later than the
Macabbean period, and that they understood it in this way mainly for
theological reasons: God had was the giver of the moral law, who had also
delivered them out of bondage and had created the nation of Israel. The
lawgiver ought to have authority also over nature, hence he was the maker of
heaven and earth. (or something like that--it's been a long time since I
reviewed his essay and I won't have it at hand as I write this). The early
Christians, he goes on to argue, accepted the correctness of this Jewish
theology, b/c of their own experience of the bodily resurrection of Jesus: a
God who can reorder nature to raise His son must also have power to order
nature in the first place--not merely the power to rearrange matter, but to
determine the very nature of nature, and creatio ex nihilo expresses this
power best.

That for me is the bottom line, whether or not Peters' analysis is correct
historically. The part about Christian beliefs is correct theologically,
IMO. For me, in constructing my faith rationally (which is what theology is
about, IMO), I start with the fact (as I take it to be) of the bodily
resurrection of Jesus, without which IMO the church would never have come
into existence at all and without our continued faith in this we will cease
to exist. The God who raised Jesus bodily from the grave MUST have
something pretty darn close to omnipotence (sorry, process theists, even
though I feel your pain about theodicy). Such a God can create from
nothing, or pretty close to it: such a God can give nature the specific
properties and powers that it has, rather than other properties and powers.
That is, nature is radically contingent--and a contingent order, since God
is a God who brings order out of chaos. Furthermore, IMO God did not have
to create at all (sorry, panentheists, God does not need the world and it is
not eternally contained within Godself). Thus, nature is even more
radically contingent on the will of God: there need not be a nature at all,
and the nature of the nature that God freely chose to create is also
contingent on God's free decisions. Our reason does not limit God's freedom
in creation (sorry, Leibniz, but God was not and is not obliged to create
the "best possible world," or more properly what passes for that world in
your created and fallen mind). Hence, given my theological commitments to
radical divine freedom and to the literal truth of the resurrection, it's a
very small step for me also to affirm creatio ex nihilo. AND, as a nice
little bonus, the universe actually does look like it is a contingent order
that is not eternal in time: it actually looks like it was created ex
nihilo! (my views on the multiverse have already been given and I won't
repeat them)

Finally, my view is also influenced by the classic interpretation of Plato's
Timaeus found in the translation/commentary by Francis Macdonald Cornford
from the 1930s (I think). Let me point out first that Timaeus was the
single most important Greek text in the history of the first millenium of
Christian thinking. It was the only one of Plato's texts that the Latin
fathers could get ahold of and read (Cicero had done a translation, if I
remember correctly), and it was seen as the Greek Genesis. Aristotle's
texts on natural philosophy were unavailable in the Latin West for
centuries, but this one text of Plato was available, and it profoundly
influenced the Fathers. My point comes next; I was simply trying to
underscore the importance of my point by not exaggerating the enormous
importance of the text I am about to comment on. Timaeus is about a god of
limited power (the "DEMIURGOS" or craftsman, the same word used in the book
of Hebrews for the Creator), who cannot perfectly impose the perfect forms
that are given to him a priori (the idea of the Good) and deductively from
it (the others). Indeed, since the square roots of two and three are
"irrational" to the Greeks, which is to say that they are "surds," from
which we get the word "absurd," any effort to make actual nature from them
can produce only a nature which is not fully rational. Thus, there is no
such thing as a "science" (ie, genuine knowledge) of nature. Please read
the previous sentence twice more before proceeding. There is only a
"science" of pure form. In Timaeus, then, we have only a "likely story",
not a true description of nature; and in the allegory of the cave in the
Republic, we have only "opinions" about "shadows" of mere imitations of
reality, until/unless we go out into the daylight (where the Sun, the symbol
of reason, illuminates us) and then, and only then, we see the Truth as it
actually is. It was the Christian Neoplatonists of the Renaissance,
however, who proclaimed (as Kepler and Galileo did, e.g.) that God is a
mathematician, and God is also the omnipotent creator who perfectly imposed
form on matter, so that a genuine science OF NATURE is possible, not merely
an abstract science of pure form but an actual science of physical nature.
Following this insight, then--this entirely correct insight, IMO--what we
need theologically to ground a genuine science of nature is a God who can
actually determine the nature of nature, who can perfectly impose form on
matter to make the contingent order that we can go out and discover for
ourselves, to the extent that we bear the image of God with and in our
minds. Every part of this claim is theologically significant, and supports
creatio ex nihilo over the Platonic view of an impotent God who is subject
to the natures of things that God has not determined Godself, prior to the
act of creating.

So, Jim, that is my answer to your question. Sorry to write a short book,
but I can't say less and still do justice to your question.

Ted

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Dec 13 22:15:39 2007