Chaos and Order-Are Both Needed in Creation?

Terry, what follows is my opinion. Thought of quoting a couple of good Hebrew lexicons, but I’m not sure they answer your questions… as you’ll see

Are righteous and wicked opposite of each other?
Grammatically, they are unrelated though it’s hard to imagine a sinner who is righteous. If you’re a Lutheran, you believe that when God forgives you, your sins are “covered” and not removed. According to this theology you can be sinful and justified. I believe Catholics hold to an opposite view.

On the question of opposites?
In the Bible opposites ofetn occur in a literary figure called a merism. For example two of the most famous merisms in all of literature occur in Genesis I and Genesis II:
In the former, the merism is “the heavens and the earth,” meaning all that one can see. In Genesis II the merism is “good and evil/bad” and carries no moral connotation. Instead, this particular kind of knowledge is the knowledge that adolescents gain upon attaining puberty.

What is the opposite of sin?
Great question because it’s a bit complex. In Hebrew sin is a state. Your question is like asking, “What is the opposite of cancer?” A first attempt to answer such a question might to say, cancer-free is the opposite of cancer. Bit it’s not. Cancer-free is opposite of cancer-ridden.

Does sin make the sinner or does a sinner sin?
First think about this from the Talmud: All wickeness is sinful but not all sin is wicked. There are lots of examples from the Bible, e.g., the two women who disobey pharoah and do not kill the Israeli babies. To top it off, they then lie to pharoah. Does God punish these two liars? No. He gives them land. He gives land to women!!! In biblical days this would have been shocking. Here’s another one: God encourages David to deceive Saul and pretend to be insane.

What is the the opposite of deceitful?
Truthful, honest.

In Hebrew, sin is any deed or word that cause estrangement from your neighbor or from God. Borrowing money from a close friend can (or usually does) cause a strain in the relationship. There is nothing wicked about borrowing money. Nevertheless, it can do real harm to a relationship.

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  • So are you saying that the clockmaker metaphor is a metaphor carried too far" no matter who uses it or just when others use it?

I think confusion enters discussions on chaotic systems (treated as stochastic systems by science) when these are equated with things without purpose. Thus, weather cannot be modelled exactly, but we should not declare weather as pointless or ‘without purpose’. :grin:

If we talk about chaos, there is a need to define what we mean by chaos. As commented above, the scientific term ‘chaos’ is very different from how the word ‘chaos’ is used in everyday life or ancient belief systems. Chaos in the scientific sense is probably needed for the dynamic development of the universe. Chaos in the sense of being ‘bad’ lack of order, caused by uncontrollable forces, is another matter, especially when it is associated with the concept of fight between (equally strong) good and evil.

Chaos, fight between good and evil, and the order that follows the fight seems to be a theme that can be found from many belief systems and many spefi-books (spefi = speculative fiction, including scifi and fiction happening in alternative realities or worlds). At least some ancient stories about the birth of gods or rulers started from chaos.

It is possible that Genesis 1 intentionally used somewhat similar kind of structure than other religious stories about how order or gods were formed from chaos. Genesis 1 gave another explanation about how everything we know was created, not from an initial chaos but by the word of the Creator - even the chaotic waters and the monsters of the chaotic environment were created by God. In that sense, chaos was not necessarily needed. Chaos was just the perception of people about the environments and forces they could not control or understand.

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No, I didn’t say that at all. You can read what I wrote.

Good clarification. As you point out the “chaos” is also a creation of God, with God hovering over the waters symbolizing that chaos, and the chaos monster Leviathan spoke of in Job 41 and Psalm 104.
While not a concordist, I find it interesting to see how that chaos of creation is necessary to have before order can be made, and can be seen as an integral part of life in this creation, and thus the argument falls flat to say that God would not create by a random process.

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And then there are those of us who believe in God’s sovereignty (and omnitemporallity :slightly_smiling_face:), not to mention his providence.

The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

Personally, I prefer the term “stochastic” in the context of science. A bit more neutral and won’t be confused with other meanings of chaos.

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That does order the chaos a bit better :wink:
Also, the often used argument about how evolution can’t happen because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics can be seen as negated theologically, because disorder was ordered as part of the creation process. Of course, miracles are cited as the reason it could be done, but to state that evolution could not take place is also to deny

Oh well, I try to stay out of those arguments, but I think that gives a line of reasoning for those who enjoy them.
In any case, it would be a dull place in this universe if you took out the randomness.

Entropy can be reduced locally by an input of energy, so it really isn’t a problem anyway.

To put it another way, if the 2LoT prevents a single cell organism evolving into a complex mammal over billions of years then it should also prevent a one celled zygote from developing into a human over the span of 9 months.

One of the analogies that comes to my mind is a casino. The machines and table games are designed in such a way that the house will win money in the long run even though the individual outcomes are unpredictable.

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Your interpretation of Genesis 1:2 is interesting but goes perhaps a bit too far. What it speaks about is ‘formless and desolate emptiness’ and ‘darkness over the surface of the deep’ (NASB2020). I cannot read Hebrew language so I do not know if the text could be translated as chaos. At least the translations I have read do not suggest it.

You are better read than I on that, but I was looking to connect it the end of the Bible in Revelation where John writes of there being “no more sea” in the new creation. The sea was seen as dangerous, chaotic, home of Leviathan, unknown and so forth by those in that time, and I would think it also represents such in Genesis. But, we are often in danger of reading too much into scripture that is not there, both literally and figuratively, so perhaps I am so doing.

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God’s providence is very cool – even fun1 and exciting, and to be trusted all of the time.
 


1 It was just your random building being moved. :grin:

This is what the computer search provided:

One of the central concepts in the beginning of creation is tohu v’vohu, which describes the disorderly and shapeless state of the world before God created light and life. The word tohu appears 20 times in the Tanakh, but it is translated into English in different ways, such as: waste, futile, meaningless, confusion and chaos. The word vohu appears only three times in the Tanakh, and always in combination with tohu. It has no clear meaning in Hebrew, but it is translated into English as: void, emptiness or nothing. Another word that sounds similar to tohu is tahu, which means random or chance. The word is often used in the expression “lo mid’varei tahu”, which means: not at random or not by chance.

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Just thinking out loud, but I often think of the chaos and mess I bring into the lab before I create something useful, perhaps even elegant (?). Perhaps before we conceive of creating, we often face a disordered and chaotic state. We use words that mean within our limitations when we try do discuss theologically significant matters.

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Thanks. Tohu va-Vohu is an interesting expression that has been understood in different ways. Some relate it to chaos, another line of interpretation is exemplified in the following citation:

"In the original Hebrew the phrase ‘without form and void’ appears as ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’ {תהו ובהו}and is a difficult one to translate because it is a Hebrew play on words. The first and primary thing that stands out is the ability of the Hebrew language to describe the ‘absence of things’ in one or two words WITHOUT using the negation form.

In other words, while the English translation speaks about a certain condition that was characterized by the ABSENCE of form or ‘FORMLESS,’ the original Hebrew describes the condition of the earth as ‘Tohu Va-Vohu’ which literally means an ’empty desert’ and is another word for a desert without water.

The big difference between the two descriptions – the English translation versus the original Hebrew – is that the English description makes one imagine a total mess and chaos. In contrast, the Hebrew description does not illustrate a mess but rather describes an empty, waterless land…a land without mountains, trees, rivers and so on – a land that ‘awaits’ to be developed."
https://www.hebrewversity.com/chaos-order-hebrew-meaning-tohu-va-vohu/

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Yes, I find the difference and way language is used by various peoples fascinating - thus, a little of topic, I read John1 as a way to understand Genesis (I understand the language and theological insights appear different).

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One theme common in all is God’s sovereignty and omnipotence?

  • One of the interesting things about Chaos Theory, IMO, is that chaos is a deterministic system that is highly sensitive to initial conditions: i.e. small changes in the initial conditions can lead to large changes in the system’s behavior over time. [The sensitivity to initial conditions is known as “the butterfly effect”.]
  • So it seems unlikely that any event–including the origination of the system–does not have a cause, in which case; “a random event” surely is not an uncaused event.
  • Reference:

A history of chaos theory by Christian Oestreicher, PhD*

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