My response to Timaeus' comments is below. Since this is a very long post
I've tried to distinguish my current comments by putting them both in a
different font and in red. I know this won't all show up in the archive.If
anyone who uses just the archive has trouble with it please contact me and
I'll get this to you directly.
Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm
Timaeus –
I have apparently missed some of your remarks directed to me and vice versa.
I’ll try to fill in where appropriate below. But let me first refer to one
to which I don’t think you responded, my post under the rubric “Conversation
with Timaeus, part one” of 23 Sept, not only because it helps to make my
basic approach clear but because it’s germane to your statements below about
“theological correctness” and kenosis. In that earlier post I said:
I do not believe that there is any valid independent natural
theology. I.e., we can't know anything about God (i.e., who God is) from
observation of the world & use of reason, independently of
God's historical revelation centered in Jesus Christ. To this point that is
essentially the view of Torrance, his extension of Barth's
purely negative attitude toward natural theology, & has a good deal in
common with the view of McGrath.
That is, however, not where I start. The previous paragraph has
to be understood in the context of a theology of the cross, for which I'll
cite two of Luther's Heidelberg theses of 1518.
19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who
looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly
perceptible in those things which have actually happened.
[Rom.1:20]
20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who
comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering
and the cross.
I.e., I understand Christ, and the cross of Christ in
particular, to be the center of scripture. This is to inform, among other
things, our understanding of God and the way we in which we
read all of scripture. Thus your comments below about the rarity of κενοω
and related words largely misses the point. The Incarnation &
cross were not just isolated tactics God once used but events that are
revelatory of the character of God. More on this below.
> Part B. George Murphy
>
> I am told that George Murphy wants me to continue the conversation of Oct.
> 7th. He feels that I have not answered his comments there. I will try to
> do so. But first, I would add that he did not answer some of my comments,
> either. For example, in Rejoinder 3C (Short Responses) from October 2nd,
> I wrote:
>
> ********************************
> George Murphy wrote:
> “... what does it mean to say that we believe in "impersonal natural
> explanations?" If we use the traditional model of divine action in which
> God cooperates with creatures as "instruments" then the instruments may
> indeed be impersonal but the one who works with & through them isn't. The
> action of a mechanic tightening a bolt with a wrench isn't "impersonal"
> just because the wrench is!”
>
> [Timaeus] This is quite true, but Rev. Murphy overlooks the other half of
> the story, which is that wrenches don’t jump up and tighten bolts by
> themselves. Using his analogy, that’s exactly what classical Darwinism
> claims. There’s a wrench, but no mechanic. Rev. Murphy’s analogy actually
> presupposes a designing intelligence, whereas Darwin’s theory was
> constructed with the express purpose of eliminating any such intelligence
> from the realm of living nature. If Rev. Murphy takes his own analogy
> seriously, then he believes in intelligent design.
> If Mr. Murphy would care to comment on the above, I’d be grateful. But
> now, onto his Oct. 7 posting. He has:
>
> **********************************
I am not speaking simply about “Darwin’s theory” but about a neo-Darwinian
theory (or whatever the best current scientific view is) placed in a
theological context in which God is seen as cooperating with creatures –
i.e., working through natural processes. As I went on to say in that
earlier post:
Where we do know God is stated in thesis 20 - from the cross.
As Luther says in his argument for this thesis, "True theology and the
recognition of God are in the crucified Christ." So I go on
to argue (extrapolating now from Luther) that we can indeed learn something
about God's presence and activity in the world through
scientific investigation (i.e., reason and observation) if scientific
knowledge is viewed from the standpoint of the cross and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. That is why the title of one of my books is
The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross.
Of course wrenches don’t work by themselves but because a human being – who
has some purpose in doing so – works with them. God’s cooperation (or
“concurrence,” but the other term is better) with creatures is analogous.
So do I believe in “intelligent design”? Of course! But do I think that
that design and its designer are discernable scientifically, or that they
should be made part of a scientific theory? That is really what’s in
question in the ID debate & my answer is “No.” Unfortunately the confusion
between “intelligent design” as a theological claim and as an element of a
scientific theory is quite widespread and is exploited by some ID partsans.
That raises the question of whether or not it’s appropriate to speak about
creatures doing things by themselves in science but not in theology – the
issue addressed next.
> *****************************************
> First recall my post of 3 October in response to one of your claims. To
> wit:
> ---- j burg <hossradbourne@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is to Tim, who wrote: "But it is absolutely worthless, from my
>> point of view, to hear that Darwinism isn't the whole story and in the
>> same breath to assert that WITHIN SCIENCE, Darwinism is absolutely
>> true. There is a major blurring going on here ... ."
> ...................
>
> [Murphy] This claim in an example of an all too common confusion about
> different levels
> of causation. It is true that Abraham Lincoln was killed by a bullet, &
> that is
> the only truth that a pathologist will state or is competent to state. But
> it
> isn't the entire truth, & those who are concerned with the whole context
> of
> Lincoln's death will be interested in the historian's claim that Lincoln
> was
> killed by John Wilkes Booth.
>
> I think the parallel with a traditional understanding of divine action via
> God's
> cooperation with creatures is obvious. It's true that concerns about
> "Darwinism" may have more to do with governance rather than with
> cooperation
> (following the conventional 3-fold analysis of providence) but I think
> this is
> enough to show briefly that Timaeus' claims pf worthlessness is
> considerably
> overstated.
>
> Shalom,
> George
>
> ***************************************
>
> The nested replies are really confusing me. It appears that Mr. Murphy is
> quoting a response of Burgy who had quoted me. But only part of my
> paragraph is included. And because Burgy does not give the date of my
> original post here, I cannot find the original post, and therefore cannot
> find the rest of my paragraph. I don’t want to try to defend what I wrote
> when I don’t have the entire message in which the above words was
> contained, because I can’t remember the context in which I was arguing,
> and, as I am replying to about thirty different people here who are all on
> quite different wavelengths, context is vital. So, unless Mr. Murphy can
> find my full original paragraph, which was presumably in a post from Oct.
> 2 or earlier, I will excuse myself from defending that fragment and will
> move straight to his comments.
Burgy was quoting from a post from Ted Davis of 2 October. It’s on the asa
archive at http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200810/0035.html . The
relevant paragraph (with some typological artifacts) is as follows:
Typical responses here have been to reassure me that TEs
aren’t atheists, and that they admit that Darwinism isn’t the whole
story; or to reassure me that Francis Collins or Ken Miller
says that Darwinism isn’t the whole story, etc. But it is absolutely
worthless, from my point of view, to hear that Darwinism isn’t
the whole story and in the same breath to assert that WITHIN SCIENCE,
Darwinism is absolutely true. There is a major blurring going on here, and
I’m not sure how to address it, but I’ll try to do so with a literary
device.
> Mr. Murphy, I have nowhere “confused different levels of causation”. In
> all my probing and questioning here, I have been trying to get people to
> sort out different levels of causation. If you look at my carefully
> worded post (8A) to Randy Isaac regarding “God of the gaps”, you will see
> an extensive discussion of causation which clearly separates the level of
> “design” from the level of “efficient causes”. My earlier discussion with
> Christine, about the architect and the construction workers, was to the
> same end.
>
> Indeed, your example of the bullet and John Wilkes Booth is an attempt to
> get at exactly what I have been saying all along, except that your example
> is not very good, because John Wilkes Booth is in the direct line of
> efficient causation (his finger pulls the trigger) that leads to
> implanting the bullet in President Lincoln. Forensic science can trace
> back the path of the bullet, in some cases, to where Booth may have been
> observed by witnesses to be sitting or standing at the time. My examples
> are better, because the architect of the building has NO efficient-cause
> role in setting up the building. And God, in Denton’s scheme, has no
> efficient-cause role in evolving any species. Both God and the architect
> provide information. But in both cases, the information is every bit as
> real a “cause” of the event (the erection of the building, the evolution
> of species) as are material causes (hammers, nails, molecules attracting
> each other, gene duplication, etc.).
>
> Darwinism, on the other hand, denies the upper level of causality a
> priori. I mean of course real Darwinism, based on Darwin (whose work I
> have actually read carefully, which is more than can be said of 90% of the
> working biologists who accept evolution). In Darwin, God creates the
> frame of nature, with its laws of chemistry and physics. He creates the
> first simple life forms. After that, God backs off, and is involved IN NO
> WAY in the evolutionary process, not even hiding behind “quantum”
> emissions of radiation. He lets the chances of variation and natural
> selection run their course. In the logic of Darwin, absolutely no outcome
> can be said to be necessary, and no outcome is guaranteed. Whether or
> not any given species, including man, will evolve, or whether life will
> remain forever at the level of primordial slime (the first simple forms)
> floating on the ocean surface, is left to the capricious gods of chance.
>
> The fundamental intellectual confusion of TE is that it thinks that it can
> wed this chance-driven cosmology with a Biblical, divine-will-driven
> cosmology. The philosophical fault of TE is not that it prefers
> “evolution” over “miraculous intervention”. Many ID people have no
> problem with “evolution”, and they carry no brief for “miracles”. The
> philosophical fault of TE is that it tries to say that God can be
> sovereign and not-sovereign at the same time. God can be sovereign over
> the evolutionary process only by front-loading, or by intervention. If he
> decides to neither front-load nor intervene, then he is consenting to
> allow nature to spit out whatever it wills, and if nature doesn’t just
> happen to spit out man, well then, so much for all of God’s grand plans.
> And in the Darwinian view of nature, nature may well refuse to spit out
> man, which means no being in the image of God, no fall, no incarnation, no
> redemption, no salvation history, no consummation of history.
I’m not interested in defending details of Darwin’s ~150 year old theory &
would rather replace “Darwinism” by “our best scientific theory of
evolution” – “scientific” meaning “operating within the constraints of
methodological naturalism.” I should be clear though that by this I don’t
mean simply a rejection of the basic idea of Darwin & Wallace in favor of
Lamarck or something of the sort.
But of course when Darwin – or anyone else – presents a deistic or atheistic
picture of God’s involvement with natural processes, he/she is no longer
doing science but theology & I refuse to go along. I believe that God is
involved in everything that happens in the world – not in a remote way, as
you suggest, but cooperating with creatures in ways consistent with their
properties (kenosis) – at least in the vast majority of cases.
Leaving out front loading for now, one of your mistakes appears to be the
assumption that without intervention or somehow doing things that are beyond
the capacities of creatures, God will be locked into whatever nature spits
out. But nature is not deterministic, as both quantum and chaos theories
have shown. Thus even if God kenotically limits his cooperation with
creatures to what is within their capacities (or “is in accord with the laws
of nature”), God still has some freedom in the course which processes take.
& the consequences of that freedom are far from trivial, as the term
“sensitivity to initial conditions” shows. Thus your dire conclusions
simply don’t follow.
In addition, divine “sovereignty,” if it follows the pattern displayed in
Christ, is not one of simply overwhelming creatures. It is that of the God
who told Paul that “power is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor.12:9).
> Mr. Murphy then goes on to say:
>
> “Your original statement was not simply that God _could have_ acted
> miraculously in evolution but amounts to the assertion that God _had to_
> so act if the concept of divine action is not to be "worthless." That
> particular claim is incorrect.”
>
> As I have already said, I can’t find the full context of my original
> argument, but I know that I did not mean what Mr. Murphy here says that I
> meant. I have granted all along that God could have established design
> via front-loading, as opposed to inserting it manually, via miraculous
> intervention.
>
> But I suspect that by “divine action” in evolution, Mr. Murphy means that
> evolution occurs by “divine action” in the same sense that an apple falls
> from a tree by a “divine action”, or that the tides are controlled by
> “divine action”. I suspect that he means “the ordinary course of nature,
> which derives its power and regularity from the divine will”. I have a
> response to this.
>
> I never denied that the term “divine action” can be used, outside of the
> context of creation and miracles, in the sense of “God’s normal sustenance
> of the laws of nature”. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged this sort of
> action in my God-gun scenario, where I referred to it as “divine
> concurrence”. But “divine action” in this sense does not resolve the
> theoretical debate. Regarding falling objects, tides, lightning, the
> development of an embryo, etc., we already know, from long experience,
> exactly what nature is capable of. So we know that God chooses to bring
> babies into the world through a natural process, without special miracles;
> we know that God chooses to create lightning through a natural process
> (static electricity), without a special miracle, etc. But the case of
> Darwinian evolution is quite different. We know that God has chosen to
> lengthen finch beaks through natural processes. We know that God has
> chosen to grant antibiotic resistance to bacteria through natural
> processes. We do not know, and are nowhere near knowing, that God has
> chosen to create a bacterial flagellum, a cardiovascular system, a reptile
> body plan, or a free-living cell through natural processes. We have not
> observed these massive structural transformations, and we have not
> produced any clear, detailed model for how any of them could be produced
> by chance plus natural selection. (If we had, you can be sure that
> Eugenie Scott and her gang at the NCSE would be cranking out 20 propaganda
> books a year showing such detailed models, and gloating.)
>
> For this reason, I might possibly have said that explaining evolution in
> terms of “divine action”, where neither front-end loading nor miracles
> were meant, was a “worthless” activity. It amounts to nothing more than
> saying that Darwinian processes are capable of doing what Darwinians claim
> they can do, and then sticking the name “divine action” on top of the
> unproved claim, to dignify it theologically. But an unproved claim
> remains an unproved claim. We don’t know that God chose to generate major
> phylogenetic change through Darwinian means, because we don’t even know
> that major phylogenetic change was in fact generated through Darwinian
> means. All we know is that it was generated somehow.
Granted. But I do not say “God worked through strictly Darwinian means to
bring about existing lifeforms” as a formal theological claim. Rather, God
works through whatever actual natural processes take place, processes
described to some approximation by our scientific theories, & neo-Darwinian
theory seems to be the best such theory we presently have of the relevant
phenomena. (You may disagree & then are welcome to propose another
scientific theory.) Similarly, I won’t insist that God holds galaxies &
clusters of galaxies together the gravitational effects of WIMPs, even
though that’s the currently popular theory, because – among other things –
we haven’t detected any WIMPs yet. But I do say that God acts through
whatever physical processes do hold clusters together.
> Mr. Murphy then moves into more explicitly theological discussion. I will
> respond to him, but I want to warn everyone that my theological ideas are
> not typical of the ideas of ID supporters. ID supporters tend to be
> orthodox Protestants, Anglicans, or Catholics, whereas my ideas are in key
> respects heretical by everyone’s standard. So it’s important for people
> here to know that if I claim that some theological idea is “unorthodox”, I’m
> not setting up my own, alternate view of Christianity as “orthodox”. I’m
> merely making a historical judgment. For example, John Haught’s theology
> is unorthodox. By that, I don’t mean that Haught’s thought about God is
> false [though I think that, too]; I mean that Haught would be uniformly
> condemned by Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. But if, in
> criticizing Haught, I go on to elaborate my own theological notions, I’m
> not claiming that my notions are orthodox, and that orthodox Christians
> should agree with
> me if they want to be theologically correct. I say this because I know
> that certain ID proponents (some of whom I think you’ve battled with in
> the past here on the ASA list) tend towards an ultra-orthodox Calvinism,
> and, while some of my statements, e.g., that the Bible represents God as
> absolute sovereign, may sound Calvinistic, I assure you that the agreement
> is confined only to particular points, and is reached as the result of
> independent reading of the Bible on my part, and not under any theological
> influence. The last authority on earth that I would acknowledge over my
> thoughts on religion would be Calvin, or any confession or church with the
> strong smell of Calvin about it.
See my statements at the beginning about “theological correctness.” Of
course not all Christians, let alone others, would agree with Luther’s
theology of the cross, especially in its implications about the invalidity
of independent natural theology.
> Mr. Murphy continues:
>
> “But sure, God _could have_ acted miraculously in the evolutionary
> process. Is there any reason to assert that he did? In that book that I
> know a bit about there are lots of texts that make claims about miracles
> as historical events but the origin & development of life aren't among
> them. In fact Genesis 1 ( which, since you're not a literalist or a
> fundamentalist I trust we can agree shouldn't be read as historical
> narrative) suggests a _mediated_ creation of life. A number of the fathers
> recognized this - see Messenger's _Evolution and Theology_ or for a
> briefer summary, Ch.8 of my _The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross_ .”
>
> It is indeed true that I am not a literalist, but my approach to the text
> is still literary, i.e., based on the vocabulary, syntax, style, etc. of
> the Biblical writers. One does not need to consider Genesis as “history”
> to consider its choice of words important. The text of Genesis says “God
> made”, “God created”, “God formed”, etc. The Hebrew author could easily
> have expressed the idea of a self-developing nature had he chosen to. He
> could easily have written: “And God createth the seas and the earth. And
> God watcheth and waiteth. And Lo! On the third day, up poppeth the
> plants. And Lo! on the fourth day, congealeth the sun and the moon into
> their orbs. And Lo! on the fifth day, there emergeth from the sea fishes
> great and small, and the fowl of the air. And Lo! on the sixth day,
> emergeth the creeping things, which doth in turn yield the beasts of the
> field and the domestic beasts, and Lo! later on the sixth day, from some
> of the beasts of the field which do loveth trees, there emergeth Man. And
> God, seeing that Man is the wisest of all creatures, giveth him dominion
> over all the earth. And God seeeth that all that hath proceeded from the
> seas and the earth are good. And on the seventh day he resteth.” But the
> Hebrew writer did not write in this way. He did not use the passive
> language of observed emergence. He speaks of an active, willing being,
> performing deeds of great power. And the language of the relation of God
> to nature is similar throughout the Bible; it’s the language of will,
> activity, command, and power.
>
> As for what the Fathers allegedly “recognized”: with few exceptions, the
> Fathers hadn’t a clue how to read Hebrew narrative. Most of them couldn’t
> read Hebrew at all, and used either the Septuagint or the Vulgate, both of
> which make changes which actually alter the meaning of Genesis 1 in spots.
> (For example, in the Septuagint, the firmament is said to be “good”; it’s
> not said to be “good” in the Hebrew.) And the main literary forms the
> Fathers were trained in were allegory, poetry, oratory, etc. Narrative,
> as such, was poorly developed in classical antiquity, and the Fathers had
> no sophistication in reading it. They therefore did not grasp how Hebrew
> narrative was meant to be read. Thus, they could freely read all kinds of
> allegory and Christological material back into Genesis which has nothing
> whatsoever to do with the meaning of the text. Augustine’s *Literal
> Interpretation of Genesis* is nowhere near literal, but is wildly
> allegorical, imposing!
all kinds of Philonic and other Hellenistic fantasies on the text. As a
guide to the intention of the author of Genesis, it’s sheer rubbish. In
*The City of God*, Augustine is somewhat better, but still nowhere near the
mark. And by and large, that’s true of most of the Fathers. They almost to
a man thought Hellenistically rather than Hebraically, and while I am a
great lover of all things Greek (including even Hellenistic thought, which
was a diminishment of pure Greek thought), I know better than to read a
Hebraic text through a Greek Christian theoretical filter. I can rarely
read pre-Reformation Christian interpretations of the Old Testament without
wincing, they are mostly so bad.
It’s interesting that instead of addressing the real point about the
mediated creation of life in Gen.1 you opted for an anti-patristic speech.
Of course I do not agree with your contempt for the Fathers, whose
limitations I recognize. Your argument is especially inept in the present
case because one of those to whom I refer is Ephrem of Edessa, who probably
didn’t even know Greek. In his commentary on Genesis he makes the point
about the mediated creation of vegetation in Gen.1:11: “Thus, through light
and water the earth brought forth everything. While God is able to bring
forth everything from the earth without these things, it was His will to
show that there was nothing created on earth that was not created for the
purpose of mankind or for his service.” ["Commentary on Genesis" in St.
Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works (The Catholic University of
America, Washington, 1994), p.82.]
But the fundamental point is indeed not what the Fathers thought but what
the text says & it does say “Let the earth put forth vegetation.” I am not
arguing that Genesis 1 “teaches evolution” or anything of that sort. It is
simply that the image that is used in this non-scientific (in modern terms)
& non-historical account is one of mediated, rather than direct, creation.
> And what does Mr. Murphy mean by this?:
>
> “There are lots of [Biblical] texts that make claims about miracles as
> historical events but the origin & development of life aren't among them.”
>
> I have no vested interest in interpreting Genesis in terms of miraculous
> interventions, but as one with a certain familiarity with Biblical texts
> and languages, I must make a methodological objection here. I see no
> difference in basic narrative style between the assertion that Jesus
> walked on water, or healed a blind man, and the assertion that God made
> the cattle, or the sea creatures. The Bible in both cases drily reports
> the events. And if there is no philological difference, then on what
> basis do you distinguish them? And why don’t you apply the principles you
> refer to below (the success of natural science and divine kenosis) to the
> miracle stories in the New Testament, and argue that Jesus was merely
> working through regular natural laws when he fed the five thousand or
> walked on water or cursed the fig tree? You seem to be “cherry picking”
> the miracles you want to interpret as interventionist, and leaving
> everything else to be explained naturalistically. Where are your
> interpretive controls? What would you do with the sun stopping, or the
> walls of Jericho? How about the Exodus miracles? Rather central to the
> whole Biblical teaching, wouldn’t you say? And Elijah’s? What about
> Pentecost? Do these fall on the “real intervention” side or the
> “naturalist” side? Were Jesus’s healings perhaps all psychosomatic? What
> about his Resurrection? Surely, in keeping with “the success of
> naturalism”, we should interpret that as Bultmann or Renan did? And
> wouldn’t it also be more “kenotic” for Jesus to stay dead, than to come
> back? I’d like to see some exegetical justification for your selectivity.
> I don’t want to hear from “authorities”. I don’t care what Luther or the
> Fathers say. I don’t care what Bonhoeffer or Pascal or Barth or Moltmann
> says. I care what the Biblical text says. You’re a Lutheran, so let’s
> have a little “sola scriptura”. Take me through several of the Biblical
> events attributed to God, and tell me (1) which ones never happened; (2)
> which ones happened, but were accomplished wholly through naturalistic
> causation; (3) which ones happened, and were accomplished through special
> intervention. And explain to me the principles you employed to decide in
> each case. I’ve got my Greek and Hebrew Bibles and reference books all
> ready, the better to be able to follow along.
I am indeed a Lutheran so I know the proper confessional sense of sola
scriptura, and it isn’t that one isn’t allowed to look at anything but the
Bible or that the whole interpretive tradition of the church has to be
ignored. I try as much as possible to be a theologian of and for the
church, so I do care what the Fathers, Luther et al said even though I may
not agree with them. That’s probably a major difference between us.
If you want to know my views – which I don’t consider definitive – on
miracles in general you can look at Chapter 6 of The Cosmos in the Light of
the Cross. Briefly, we 1st have to decide what we mean by “miracle.” Then
yes, I think that some of the events in the Bible commonly described as
miracles actually happened. We may be able to decide that in individual
cases by examining both internal & external evidence. & there are several
ways of understanding such events, ranging from rare but “natural” phenomena
whose possibility God has put into creation to the type of logical openness
in the laws of physics that Gődel’s theorem seems to require.
In the case of the Genesis creation accounts, the very fact that there are
two accounts that cannot be “harmonized” without doing violence to one or
the other indicates that one should not read both, or perhaps either, as
accurate or scientific accounts. And the external evidence provided by
science shows that the universe was not created in six days etc. This of
course does not mean that these are not important theological texts. For
the idea of divine accommodation to cultural understandings of the world and
its connection with the theology of the cross, see my brief article
http://archive.elca.org/faithandscience/covalence/story/default.asp?Copyright=06-03-15&Author=Murphy&Pages=2 .
>
> Mr. Murphy then writes:
>
> “God could have acted miraculously in the evolutionary process but both
> the pattern of divine activity suggested by God's kenotic revelation in
> Christ (clumsy wording, I know) & the successes of science operating
> within the constraints of methodological naturalism imply that our default
> setting for understanding divine action ought to be God working with
> creatures as instruments in such a way that creaturely action conceals God
> from our observation - that they are not only God's "instruments" but also
> the "masks" of God in Luther's phrase.”
>
> Mr. Murphy, I have read your fine essay in PEC, which is very fair and
> very scholarly, but the case you make for employing “kenosis” in relation
> to creation there is weak. For one thing, the notion of kenosis is rare
> in the Bible, the noun being absent entirely, and the verb being found
> only 7 times (only 5 in the New Testament), and only once in a doctrinal
> context, i.e., in the Philippians verse (where it's not connected by the
> writer to creation doctrine). Further on this point, the only two uses of
> the verb in the Septuagint have nothing to do with creation, and the
> passages of the Old Testament that discuss creation do not suggest
> kenosis, but the more traditional picture of God's active power. One
> unambiguous verse in the New Testament, which pertains to the Incarnation,
> is a small peg on which to hang a very large parallel between the mode of
> Creation and the mode of Incarnation. Kenosis is a wonderful notion for
> interpreting the Incarnation, but there is just no philological basis for
> extending it to the Old Testament understanding of Creation.
> Second, there's no reason to assume, as you do, that God will act in
> Creation exactly as he acts in Incarnation. God is multi-faceted, as human
> beings are multi-faceted. A great stand-up comic may behave with
> completely proper gravity at a funeral. Someone noted for giving millions
> to the poor may be the most ruthless Monopoly player, bankrupting all his
> opponents with glee. The Muslims were quite ruthless as conquerors but
> frequently exhibited great justice as rulers. There's nothing
> theologically inconsistent in believing that God may show himself in all
> his glory and power sometimes, and may show himself in humility and
> weakness at other times. God can choose to reveal himself however he
> wants, whenever he wants.
> Of course, this is not to say that God couldn't have created "kenotically"
> rather than "magisterially". He may have. But it seems to me that the
> Biblical text should be the decisive factor. And when I look at the
> creation texts -- Genesis, certain Psalms, Job, bits of Isaiah -- I don't
> see much kenosis going on there. It seems odd to suppose that the Old
> Testament writers would have completely missed this theme. You would
> think there would be at least hints of it.
You are not alone in objecting to this broad use of kenosis. I explained at
the beginning why I give it such importance in my theology – in spite of the
weakness of a “philological basis” for the extension of the concept. (The
same type of philological argument rules out the Trinity!) The term has
also been used by many other theologians recently and I should say that I do
not agree with the understanding that some of them have of the concept. By
kenosis I don’t mean that God is absent or inactive. God is active in
everything that happens, but God limits divine action to what is within the
capacities of creatures – or to put it in more modern terms, God acts in
accord with the rational pattern of the universe which we approximate by our
“laws of physics.”
It is an empirical fact that in the vast majority of cases studied, natural
phenomena do obey rational laws and do not behave in arbitrary ways. Thus
if God does cooperate with the things involved in these phenomena (a
theological, not a scientific claim of course) then God must indeed do so in
such a way that these laws are obeyed. (& the laws themselves have their
ultimate origin in God.) The scholastic way of speaking about this is to
distinguish between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power, and to
say that it is the latter that is actualized in the world. Thus the concept
of kenosis doesn’t have to be used, but to make use of it gives the theology
of divine action a much stronger (IMO) grounding in christology.
In addition, the fact that God does so limit divine action is what makes a
rational understanding of the world, and science in particular, possible.
> Mr. Murphy wrote:
>
> “So was God's action in evolution entirely ordinary or did it involve
> extraordinary means? I will not dogmatically rule out miraculous divine
> action at a few points in the process - most likely in the origin of life
> itself. But I see no reason at all to assume that that was the case &
> several, as noted above, to remain open to the possibility that the whole
> process can be understood etsi deus non daretur.”
>
> Mr. Murphy, I don’t think you should assume that all ASA members can
> translate Latin, and I think the casual dropping of Latin phrases is
> unhelpful. (For the non-Latinists out there: the Latin at the end means,
> literally: “as if God were not given”, but more freely: “as if God were
> not there”. The meaning is that the process of evolution no more needs
> the direct intervention of God than the movement of a falling rock needs
> it.)
And I don’t think that you, as a very recent participant on the ASA list,
should be telling someone who’s been involved with it for over ten years
what to say. I’ve frequently used the phrase here and often have given the
English equivalent or translated the Latin. I don’t recall anyone else
objecting. Those who don’t know it and who are interested probably know
that they can google the phrase & if they do they’ll get over 10^4 hits,
most of which will explain it.
Etsi deus non daretur, though God were not given, has become something of a
technical term in science-theology dialogue, largely due to Bonhoeffer’s use
of it. He was not referring to evolution in particular but to our ability
to understand the world in general, and he links it with the theology of the
cross.
> In any case, it’s very generous of you not to “dogmatically rule out
> miraculous divine action at a few points in the process” of creation. I’m
> sure God appreciates that. Should we infer that you DO rule out
> miraculous divine action for most of the process of creation?
Your sarcasm might be appropriate if I had been talking about what God could
do – God’s absolute power – but I am instead speaking of what God has done,
his ordained power. Thus your gibe misfires. But the answer to your
question is yes, of course. The fact that we can understand most of what
goes on in creation in scientific terms means that the phenomena in question
aren’t miraculous, at least in any careful way of speaking.
>
> You know, it’s odd. I spend a lot of time, so to speak, among ID folk,
> and they don’t make nearly as many statements about what God would have
> done, wouldn’t have done, could have done, might have done, must have
> done, as TE people do. What gives TE people their confidence that they
> know so much about the nature, will, and activity of God? Do they have a
> direct pipeline to him, and does he tell them? If so, it must be nice to
> be so close to the Creator. We ID people must be Ishmael to TE’s Isaac,
> because we just aren’t in on the divine information loop. We have to do
> really boring things, like go out and investigate nature and find out what
> God in fact HAS done. And so far, we’ve found out that he sustains the
> universe with apparently regular natural laws, and that he causes species
> to reproduce their kind with astonishing regularity, with only small
> variations. We’ve found that, on both the morphological and genetic
> levels, discontinuity, not continuity, is the dominant fact in the
> arrangement of types of living things. We have not discovered how most
> species came into being. We have discovered some tentative evidence,
> certainly not decisive, that new species and possibly one or two higher
> taxonomic levels have been formed exclusively by Darwinian processes,
> without any need for a supervening design. We have discovered no evidence
> that major structural changes have been brought about by purely Darwinian
> means, without input from some design. Further, we have no clear
> conception of how life could have formed without a designing intelligence.
> And we are hesitant to address these unsolved problems by saying how God
> would have or might have or probably proceeded. God just hasn’t told us.
> If we can believe the Bible (as many ID people do), God has told us that
> he created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. He has not
> told us that he did it “naturalistically”; he has not told us that he did
> it “without miraculous intervention”. He has not told us that he did it
> “kenotically”. He has not told us that he deliberately concealed all
> marks of design in his creation so that there would still be “room for
> faith”. He has not told us that he used an indirect process of evolution
> rather than direct creation, in order not to dirty his hands with “the
> problem of evil”. He has not told us any of these things that TE people
> seem to know with near-certainty. And perhaps Christian ID people are too
> pedestrian, and not theologically adventurous enough, but, for better or
> worse, they are hesitant to go too many steps ahead of what they believe
> God has said. I wonder if something like this isn’t at the heart of ID/TE
> tensions, as much!
as any disagreement about the science behind evolution.
Or perhaps the IDers don’t realize that God has made a world that can be
understood “though God were not given,” wants his intelligent creatures to
use their faculties to understand that world, exercise responsible dominion
in it, and be willing to say “We don’t know yet” about some phenomena
instead of leaping to simp
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Received on Thu Nov 13 07:01:46 2008
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