Creation and Sovereignty: What does it mean that God’s in charge?

At the end of my article, I started moving toward a “solution” for which this question and @Eddie’s are not the kind of questions that have to be answered. @Tim_Reddish helpfully pointed out that the wave-particle duality problem is not a perfect metaphor, but insofar as it works, that would be like asking for an answer to how much wavelike-ness can your particle experiments accommodate.

My suggestion was that our talk about God’s providence (and I’d include God’s action here) are just that: our talk. And our talk about our freedom (and the lawlikeness of nature) are also our talk. These are discourses that have developed over many many generations of reflection on God, ourselves, and the world. But they are discourses that make use of different concepts. And if you’ll grant me the claim that our concepts are not one-to-one matches with reality, then it is entirely reasonable to think that different discourses may “carve up” the world in different ways. And though there will be significant overlap between these, there will be areas where they simply do not mesh together–they are incommensurable.

I think it is better to understand Aquinas’s primary and secondary causation in this way. It would take until Kant to get the epistemological framework for this sort of thing. But since Kant, we find a rich tradition of understanding that our language gets us into difficulties when we assume that it is reality, rather than a representation of reality. Folks I’ve been reading lately who are particularly germane to this problem include Cassirer, Buber, later Wittgenstein, John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, Putnam, and Scruton.

I’m under no delusion that it will be satisfactory to you all to suggest that the problem of God’s relationship to the world is dissolved by this approach. But I think it points in the right direction to think more carefully about our talk about God and our talk about ourselves and the world. We adopt a very different perspective about humans when we operate on them as opposed to when we talk to them. We look for efficient and material causes to explain their behavior in the former, and we look for reasons to explain their behavior in the latter. We slide back and forth between these discourses quite easily without ultimately reconciling them. I’m suggesting we do something similar when we look at God’s providential guidance of history (including natural history), versus when we do science and interrogate the natural world to find its causes. Theology and science are our attempts to provide explanations that appeal to different concepts. I might even go so far as to say they have different ontologies in the transcendental idealist perspective I’m pushing.

Perhaps there is a higher level of discourse in which these lower level discourses can be incorporated the way quantum field theory resolves the wave-particle duality in light. But few of us incorporate the discourse of quantum field theory into our language and we are left with talking about light as a wave or as a particle. Remembering these are models frees us from having to provide an all-inclusive answer.

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Jim

Plenty of “deep thort” there, and it may take a while to dig into your list of sources further…

But I want to focus in on your word “understanding”, from which I take (what I think is) your point that the focus of our discourse varies with what kind of activity we’re pursuing. The theory-ladenness of all human perception ties into this (and according to Eddingtom, even into quantum theory, making it possibly more than analogical).

In terms of my brief post, the gambler’s understanding of what’s going on is that the house is getting lucky, perhaps. The casino owner’s is that he understands the percentages of the roulette wheel. There is no view from nowhere.

There is, however, a view from God, which in those particular circumstances he’s not divulging, but which may well entail the thought (for example) that, ultimately, he set up the gambler, the cassino and the very laws of probability on which the wheel operates, in order to fulfil his purposes in creation. Furthermore, of course, he alone understands the other “understandings” involved.

His knowledge is not to be deduced by mere mortals, even if it were far above their capacity to comprehend, but should God reveal he considers himself sovereignly purposeful over all those things, one will be able to consider how that truth might alter the humans’ view their particular situations.

How God’s sovereignty was dealing with the roulette situation might be beyond understanding: that it was doing so could be known through faith in his revelation, and would severely relativise concepts like “luck” or “probabilities”. In so doing it would introduce other concepts like accountability, dependence and even hope to the human dialogues.

How a would-be gambler might act is going to be profoundly affected by whether he is thinking, “Hmm… I’m spending my money on God’s favouring me” or “God will probably be just as surprised if I win as I will be.”

Jim,

The question about Molinism is really not motivated by an agenda. The problem is whether our experience (which now includes evolutionary biology) rationally requires us to move toward transcendental idealism at all. The fact that we can slide easily between two kinds of discourse, or between two perspectives on ourselves, is at least some reason to think the two discourses/perspectives are consistent with each other. We have no reason to think that our “ordinary talk” does not match reality until someone can demonstrate an inconsistency, and it is by no means obvious that anyone has done that in the case we are discussing. We needn’t think that our language is reality, but we probably do need to think that it represents reality accurately until we have reasons to think otherwise. Sometimes we do acquire such reasons, which require us to make the appropriate adjustments and refinements to limited areas of our discourse. But a few limited adjustments do not justify a wholesale rejection of a basic match between language and world. To reject that would land us in a debilitating skepticism, from which I see no remedy at all. So I can grant the claim that our concepts might not be one-to-one matches with reality, but I can’t grant the stronger claim that they just aren’t. They might be. And we should think they are until we are supplied with irresistible reasons to think otherwise.

Every now and then we do discover an area where our ordinary discourses are flatly inconsistent with each other. Are we now in one of them? Most people hold a “common-sense” (libertarian, incompatibilist) view of free will, and some Christians hold it because they are convinced it is also taught in Scripture. Many Christians who have difficulty with evolution also hold a strong (i.e., risk-free) view of Providence because, again, they are convinced that Scripture teaches it. Now consider someone who believes both of these. If Hasker is right, they must think that God knows what they will freely do (to preserve the risk-free view of Providence), but that He doesn’t determine them to do it (to preserve freedom), i.e., they must be Molinists. If thinking both of these together is flatly inconsistent, then they must adjust. But is it? And do they? Until someone can demonstrate an inconsistency, it seems that they are entitled to believe both. Now add evolutionary biology to the mix, and consider the same group of people. Do such people now have to drop one or the other (either common-sense freedom or a risk-free sovereignty) in order to accept that God created through an evolutionary process? I really doubt it. If one seeks to convince such Christians that they should accept evolutionary biology (as BioLogos does), then one should not insist that doing so requires them to abandon of one of two beliefs that they are convinced are taught in Scripture, and that seem compatible with each other, unless of course one has no choice! But then it must be demonstrated that there is no choice, i.e., that these two discourses are flatly inconsistent with each other. But that is precisely what (it seems to me) has not been done.

So don’t we need to see either a demonstration that Molinism is itself inconsistent, or that it is inconsistent with known facts of evolutionary biology, before we must agree that a move toward transcendental idealism is needed?

What may get us into trouble in engaging with the notion of providence is an inability to live with the “essential tension” you note. We are unable to accept the boundaries of what can be known.

God is not anchored in the created order of space and time which means mystery is not merely a label. At some point the tension between sovereignty and free will becomes impossible to cook down any farther. We can’t see into this any more that we can see the inside of singularity of the Big Bang.

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I think that divine and human action, and sovereignty/free will provide the reasons to think otherwise. No offense intended to your sensibilities, but to me Molinism feels like a clever trick. Even if I can’t explain how a magician did a trick on stage, I think I’m still justified in not believing that magic is real. So too with Molinism (though that’s a very dramatic comparison), I’m not sure what to say about it other than it does not fit with how I believe God and reality to operate. I understand the “this is how I would freely choose in certain circumstances”, but I can’t get away from the fact that it is really God choosing which of my choices would be actual. And it just seems too contrived to me to think that God could arrange all the possible worlds he contemplates such that those who wouldn’t ever choose the good are put into places where in the actual world they don’t really have a choice anyway. Perhaps my concerns are largely aesthetic. But then, I can always fall back on a similar excuse as in strict Calvinism: “I can’t help it. God actualized the world in which this is what I would do and this is what I would feel. Maybe I could see things differently in a different possible world, but that’s not the real world.” I can’t really live that way. To me, that is a higher price to pay than the option I sketch.

I think our two discourses (the personal and the scientific) are highly successful. They have long traditions of working well for their purposes. That gives us good reason to think they are “faithful” representations of reality. But they are representations and not unmediated accounts of reality itself. I think that’s all I need in order to suggest that there will be places where the two discourses do not integrate so well. Yes, this is Kantian, but it’s not Kant. I’m not suggesting that we have no clue about the noumena. Just that our discourses give different perspectives on reality.

As another analogy, consider Picasso’s blue period The Old Blind Guitarist and his cubist Guitar Player. These are two different representations of the same reality (or at least close enough for our purposes). And I’d say they are both successful representations. But we can’t integrate them into each other without drastic violence to their “forms of discourse”. It is something similar that I’m pushing for with scientific and personal discourses.

This is a fair and important point to raise. I think I’d have to answer “yes” with plenty of qualification. The propositions in Scripture did not drop out of heaven. I think it is perfectly consistent to affirm the authority and inspiration of Scripture while at the same time affirming that its language is embedded in cultural contexts that are specific and local (and hence subject to those limitations).

Biblical language sometimes suggests that our kidneys and bowels are the seats of emotion, that the firmament is a solid dome, and that slavery is OK. And insert your own favorite examples of the finite humanness that is an ineliminable facet of Scripture. I might have my fundamentalist card revoked for saying so, but I don’t think my evangelical credentials are suspect for affirming that God speaks to us in Scripture through specific cultures. Of course that makes biblical interpretation messier, but I think that is the right view of Scripture. God’s language, of course, would not mislead about reality; but our Scriptures are not the Qur’an or the Book of Mormon.

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It seems the term “evangelicalism” is “buried in cultural contexts” too.

Over here in the UK the umbrella group Evangelical Alliance, not by any means considered Fundamentalist but affiliated with all branches of Evangelicalism, has an extended piece to explain its view of Scripture here.

An extract:

So the mark of an evangelical is not whether someone claims to have a high view of the Bible, but whether they are prepared to let the Bible challenge and correct their church tradition, their own understanding of what is good or just, their cultural norms, and any other basis they might have for belief or action.

In the Evangelical Alliance Basis of Faith, we speak of the “supreme authority” of the Bible. This phrase, it seems to me, perfectly captures this idea that the Bible can correct any other authority.

One important result of the Bible’s authority is that it is “fully trustworthy”: what the Bible teaches, we should believe, confident that we are not being misled; what the Bible commands as good, we should do, confident that it is the best way for human beings to live their lives.

The point here is not how to deal with idiom, domes and slavery - most of us over here would say “study the context” - but what may be said to be “evangelical” before the term ceases to mean anything.

If the central doctrine of providence itself, fully developed centuries or even millennia before Evangelicals ever got a look in, is relativised to “cultural context” in the same breath as ways of talking about emotion, then there is something in the way of modern cultural imperialism going on. There is, after all, a large majority of workers in the biological sciences, not to mention the faculty of philosophy, that considers the whole idea of God to be culturally conditioned,-

There’s a history of that in last century’s theological circles, too - but also, closer to home, of Process Theology and Panentheism in the roots of theistic evolution (Haught and Peackocke, for example. Are those all compatible with the term"evangelical" too? If not, why not?

If there are no firm criteria on which accepting “Scriptural Authority” is so relativised, then the authority it is accorded is purely nominal, and the real authority is more likely to be Promethean autonomy. Maybe that’s “evangelical” (in the American sense of each man his own Pope), but I’m not sure in that case what the point of the label is.

I’m perfectly happy to affirm the extract you quote on Scripture. I don’t see anything in it that stands in tension with what I’ve said. “What the Bible teaches, we should believe.” Of course the trick is determining what the Bible teaches. I hope you’re not implying that everything the human authors of Scripture believed are part of what the Bible teaches. I don’t think the Bible teaches that slavery is OK; I merely think that its human authors held to that, and that fact is reflected in the way those humans wrote. The Holy Spirit’s inspiration of the text did not obliterate these human, cultural packagings of God’s revelation to us.

I’m not convinced that God has to do anything special in evolution, except for the direct creation of white male evangelicals, of course. I assume that God is pretty good at what he does and doesn’t need to constantly make repairs when the things don’t go as desired. I see God more as graciously interacting with us, and not constantly intervening. In the Bible, God is never called a designer, a tweaking tinkerer, or a tinkering tweaker, or an asteroid smasher or a sender of mutating cosmic rays. And if God is intervening in evolution, what is the relationship between God, the environment and evolution? Did God shove the earth into the Solar System’s habitable zone? Does God react to a changing environment? Did the isolation of South America affect evolution there, or was it a coincidence? Did the formation of the isthmus of Panama affect evolution? Did God make the volcanoes that formed the land bridge and then invite North American animals to come down?

And is God finished with human evolution, so he doesn’t have to make changes, or has he yet to get it right?

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I am convinced God sent the meteor 65 million years ago.

Why did he do that? Didn’t like dinosaurs anymore? Wanted mammals to take over?

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He loved the Dinosaurs…very cool. But it was time for the rise of the mammals…

I am 100% in agreement with you, @Eddie. I can only offer the comment that there are LOTS of different kinds of Christians… and many of those kinds don’t make a lot of sense to me.

George

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Does this assignment of a time for everything align with the scientific evidence -say 66 million years ago in the Yucatan? What if further research finds it was something different at a different time. Does Christian theology move it to the new results?

If he slams another one at us I sure hope we’ll be ready to deflect it: NASA’s Efforts to Identify Near-Earth Objects and Mitigate Hazard

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Mammals were already evolving before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. And the dinosaurs might even have been in decline before the asteroid strike.

the bible could be perfect in its language but as the human reading it is not it does not matter what is written as the reading is what each of us makes from the text based in his own transcription by his/her experiences. Thus the correct understanding of the text requires the holy spirit as a transcription factor to get it right to understand its poetic language. And with the holy spirit you will find the consensus on the truth it spells out.

As God put reality under the law he is in charge of it, whatever it does. He will as well provide for it and nothing goes wasted as even the wrong doing of one may be turned into a good like the death of our ancestors allowed us to live. Those who ask themselves were God was in the massacres in Paris, London, New York, Tunesia or Auschwitz just to name a few, he was with those suffering who prayed to him. If one asks oneself why he did not prevent their death one should ask oneself why he does not prevent death - full stop - if one is logically coherent. Being acutely aware of your own earthly death is the greatest trial in which to find your peace. Blessings on those who have no justified hope when that time comes. If you cannot accept that he is in c point there is no way you will make it.

Dear Beagle.

Please do not take offense by what I’m saying here. I do not doubt that you are sincere in your belief of Jesus Christ as savior … But I have to admit your theology is deeply confusing to me.

Do you believe that God subjects all of humanity to death? If so, does that mean we are “fighting against God” to try and live long and healthy lives? I certainly don’t think so. So it utterly confuses me that you characterize us as “fighting against God” because we would choose to try and deflect a meteorite to save ourselves? Are we fighting against God because we chose to pluck up a dandelion that God surely caused to grow? Are we shaking our fists at God because we lie on our deathbeds, about to pass away, saying, “Why would God do this?”

Here’s a classic song from the 60s that I like … And it’s based off of Ecclesiastes 3.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in His time.” — Ecclesiastes 3:11

-Tim