Divine causality

Faith & Science Conversation
41

And Hebrew words are derived from the letters that surround them. Someone, somehwere decided which word fitted, A translator, not the author. You are then claiming that because this ne word was used it classifies the whole passage.

I amsorry but we are back to the understanding of concepts. Y have a miindset. A way of thinking. It works in science. It works less well when assessing scripture. itis not about learning

Knowledge says a tomato is a fruit… I probably do not need to complete the saying.

A quite large part of Scripture is about wisdom. It seems to me that you have not understood that part.

Richard

42

Cha-ching! :smile:

Or on the boundary of a blackhole where reality blurs and you can see the back of your head… Did you catch the scene from The 3 Body Problem where the VR headset scans back to image the characters in their current location?

I recently picked up a copy of Foundation with an intro by Asimov on the backstory for the book. Hard to believe it was written in the 40s before we knew about blackholes.

43

Any theist would say that deists commited a grave theological error. But this error was almost necessitated by the dominant theological approaches of the “orthodox” theologians. If one imagines God as a homologue of human absolute monarchs who subdue the subjects, give orders, enforce the implementation of their will, and so on - then, of course, the direct divine rule is incompatible with having the universal or just stable natural laws.

So, Deism was honestly trying to harmonize the perception of God as an absolute monarch with the new scientific data and theories. Deists turned God into a constitutional monarch that reigns but not governs. In the end, their theological project went horribly wrong - not because it’s a wrong idea to harmonize theology and science, but because the basic theological vision was wrong.

God is not a homologue of human monarchs but a paradoxical King. It’s wrong to assume that God Incarnate and God who creates and preserves nature is one and the same God - but that he, nevertheless, acts in two deeply different, even incompatible ways. The God who creates the world is the crucified Jesus Christ - and to grasp his manner of action, one should look only at him (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2, 8:6). Thus, his manner of action is to let the world be; to suffer, and to wait in order to achieve reconciliation and healing in due time.

It means that, contrary to Deism, God is no way remote from the created world. Everything that happens here and now - every process and every event - is a divine action. But it is the self-constrained divine action: the divine action that relegates itself to the role of natural processes’ provider and sustainer, in order to let the created world develop and mature consistently, according to its inherent logic.

Are you sure that quantum physics demands such a comprehensive reappraisal of causality? I suppose that its consequences are often exaggerated by philosophers looking for some novelty. After all, quantum indeterminacy is not absolute. Surely, it’s impossible to determine all properties of a quantum particle; still the quantum processes are well described by quantum field equations. In this sense, quantum events remain dependent on their conditions and fairly predictable. Any quantum process has a definite range of possible outcomes - so, not everything is possible. To put it simple, no quantum particle would instantaneously turn to a yellow elephant.

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44

Nope. This is incorrect. God as a constitutional monarch or as a supreme sovereign has absolutely NOTHING to do with it. That is a different issue entirely.

It is much simpler than this. Does everything in the universe have a physical cause or not? If everything has a physical cause then there is no room for any involvement of God in the events of the universe. All that is left is how God set things up at the beginning which is the Deist conception of God. And thus anyone who took science seriously became a Deist. And the earliest definitions of Deism were simply those who wanted a rational version of theism which accepted the work of science.

What changes with QM is not to restore God to an absolute monarch but to allow any role for God in events at all, that is without demolishing the laws of nature. To be sure many “theologians” and other religious people had no problem with God being utterly inconsistent and ignoring the laws of nature He created and thus showing off and constantly rubbing it in our faces that He didn’t have to obey any of the laws which He made.

But for most of mankind that God was more like a devil and not worth believing in. I certainly was not going to believe in such a thing. So without QM I would be an atheist for sure.

And frankly the big failure of Deism is that it made God irrelevant for the living of our lives and thus like my father led them to embracing atheism also.

Well yes… this sort of pantheism was another route people took. But like Deism that is also too much like believing in no God at all. You might as well just believe in the universe and let science tell us what the universe is like while the religious and theologians can be ignored as nothing more than obsolete antiquated failures at science.

That quantum physics demands a comprehensive reappraisal the restriction of causality to physical determinism is glaringly obvious by the fact that so many scientist had a very difficult time believing it.

For me this back door in the laws of physics allowing God to participate in events seemed a bit too much like smoking gun and thus became one of the reasons I DO believe God exists.

45

Here you postulate an alternative: an event is either the result of some physical causes - or a consequence of divine action. But this postulate is extremely weird, although widespread. Classical pre-modern scholastics knew better - while not denying that natural phenomena usually have natural causes, it has nevertheless insisted that all natural things continue to exist and to interact only because God preserves the world at each moment of time.

In other words, every event in nature has some physical causes - but the very ability of natural phenomena to cause effects, to form the web of interdependent processes is divine action; and every constellation of natural factors is divine action.

Natural causality is not an alternative to divine causality but an expression of the latter.

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46

Are you suggesting that God is permanently tinkering or adjusting rather than systems being set in motion and self contained?

The traditional view of the weather is that it is due tp imbalances of air pressure ,heat and moisture which the ecosystem is designed to compensate and balance. The more severe the imbalance the more severe the weather . God has made this system and does not need to interfere. Of course, despite the assertions of Eccl 3 humanity has found ways to disrupt or amplify these differences and caused the more violent storms and severe weather or recent times.

Richard

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47

I read the books, decided not to see the movie.

Black holes were predicted by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916; if Einstein’s work was right, they had to exist.

48

Only if that monarch is inconsistent and acting arbitrarily.

As opposed to a monarch who governs according to a constitution.

As the Orthodox would say, if you want to know God, look at the Crucifixion.

I forget which church Father said that God rules all things, but that He does so according to His nature which is faithful love. Another wrote that God creates the entire universe anew each instant, but does so in accord with His laws.

Though Hawking once said that anything could pop out of a black hole, including a kitchen sink – though it was more likely that anything emitted would just be what is now called Hawking Radiation.

In honor of our old philosophy musings about the essences of things, exemplified by “the essence of being a duck, or ‘duckness’”, I noted that therefore a black hole might also emit a duck, in which case the black hole would take on the essence of “anti-duckness”.

At least until the supply of pink elephants is exhausted. :laughing:

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49

Except those who followed those church Fathers who said that God rules all things directly, but does so in accord with the rules He made.

One wonders why certain U.S. Founding Fathers who were deists bothered paying for a reserved pew – the deist deity certainly didn’t care if they paid or not.

Especially when one considers that in the quantum world it is possible for an effect to precede its cause (causal reversal), or – and I wish I understood the math for this! – even to serve as its own cause (causal loop).

God doesn’t play dice with the universe because He doesn’t need to; He’s in charge of all the quarks.

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50

That was Asimov’s statement about the state of scientific knkwledge in the 40s. In 1982 Foundation’s Edge incorporated them, I suppose, based on how Asimov worded it.

51

It incorporated some other items too!

I think the first evidence of black holes was found in 1956, which remained sketchy until about the early 1970s.

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52

Incorrect. By “everything” I meant ALL the causes of events are physical causes. Of course we know that things have multiple causes. I have said the same thing in many discussions. But if all the causes are physical so that knowing all those causes we can precisely calculate what happens (look up Laplace’s demon) then tacking God on as an additional cause to the list is quite pointless since that so called “cause” doesn’t change what happens.

This is precisely why quantum physics changes everything. It is not to say that events do not have physical causes. They still do. But quantum physics shows that the physical causes are insufficient to determine what happens. In that case, tacking on God as an additional cause is not pointless for God can then choose which of the many possibilities actually happen.

That is pantheism again and the problem with this is that science then demonstrates that this so called “God” is nothing more than mathematical equations which we can predict, manipulate, and control. That is not theism at all but in fact indistinguishable from atheism/naturalism.

People cling to social forms no matter how meaningless they have become. The problem is that people will eventually discard such meaningless things.

It is part of one of the many interpretations of quantum physics rather than part of quantum physics itself.

I don’t believe God is such a control freak and the science doesn’t support this either. Just as dice exist so also do the probability distributions at the foundation of natural law. It leaves room for God to play a role and intervene in miraculous exceptions, but actually controlling everything as you suggest would be an alteration of natural law.

What you quote is part of Einstein’s inability to believe in the quantum physics he discovered. He was just wrong. God does play dice – i.e. God has incorporated a fundamental randomness in the cause of events of this universe. It is an understandable thing for God to do if He chose love and freedom over power and control, as I believe He did. God didn’t want a clockwork mechanism or a mere extension of Himself. He wanted conditions favorable for freedom of will in the self-organizing process of life.

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53

My point is that God is much more than an additional cause. When a physical cause generates a physical consequence, this is also a divine action.

This would really be indistinguishable from atheism/naturalism if I claimed that the laws of nature were the first, the last, and the only possible self-expression of God. But I claim nothing of the kind.

Certainly, God has established the law of this system’s motion (and the laws of all other systems’ motion as well) and is not likely to overturn them until the end-times. But I would not say that God doesn’t interfere. Every natural process may be reduced to fundamental interactions, fundamental forces of nature. But do these forces exist on their own? Or are they the expressions of a free and intentional activity - that is, of divine action? I choose the second option - and suppose it can be proven even without the Scripture, just by means of natural theology (of course, the definition of God in natural theology falls short of the Christian understanding of God as outlined in the Nicene Creed - but nobody has ever claimed that Christianity could rest only on natural theology without revelation).

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54

Certainly, Hawking could say something like this as a matter of joke. But I doubt he could model the appearance of a kitchen sink from a black hole mathematically, as a matter of science :slight_smile:

55

Why would God “tinker” with something so mundane as the weather? I see no reason for it.

If you tried to prove it with Scripture you would be abusing Scripture, Scripture is not about such things.

Richard

56

This reminds me of the “wizard of Oz” telling us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

It’s like you saying that when you flip a switch, God makes the lights go on. We can reveal the wires going from the switch to the light bulb and demonstrate how an electric current goes through the wires, which makes it sound like you are saying these wires are God.

It doesn’t really help when you say God is so much more than these wires. It makes more sense when the atheist says you are just making the “more” stuff up. Pretending the wires and laws of nature are not there is counterproductive, when these can be revealed for all people to see. Calling such things God just makes the atheists more honest and truthful than you are.

The mathematical laws of nature are demonstrable. They exist. And a making these into an action of God looks more to be an absurd deception. It is not a God worth believing in – worse than Sagan’s dragon in the garage, because claiming the invisible dragon is responsible for things we can demonstrate to be accomplished by wiring just makes it worse.

Maybe such desperate pointless sophistry is all people had in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to support a belief in God. So the point is that such trickery is no longer needed. Quantum physics has shown that the wires are not actually connected to every single one of the lights. There are gaps and attributing everything to the laws of nature no longer works. Sure the atheist/naturalist can say it is random chance, but now we can say, “maybe not!”

57

No, I’m saying that these wires are the action of God - and, by the way, you have noticed this position of mine, as you discuss it below. Then why do you propose what I didn’t say?

Surely, they are there! I’ve never denied their existence.

Now you are finally arguing against my thesis.

Your POV as I get it is as follows:

  1. Nature understood as a web of deterministic processes, which are described by a number of natural laws, is obviously operating on its own.
  2. Therefore, it can’t be named an action of God without sophistry.
  3. So you rejoice over quantum mechanics that allows of certain indeterminacies in nature; maybe, the latter are used by God to intervene (and maybe not - it’s principally impossible to say whether an unpredictable outcome was caused by some alien intervention or was purely random).

First of all, I don’t see how the point 3 may be compatible with Christian faith. The God of the Bible is not an alien who leaks into the world through the “narrow window” of natural indeterminacies - but a creator who makes everything, takes care of everything, is present everywhere, and so forth.

But the most important contention is that I don’t buy “obviously” from the point 1.

Let’s assume the naturalist premise (i.e., that world equals nature, and nature exists on its own) and look what are the conclusions.

A) The existence of nature is an inherent and spontaneous activity: the fundamental forces of nature have either begun to interact at the first moment of time without any preceding cause, out of nothing, or they interact eternally without any causes.

B) Despite being spontaneous, the fundamental forces of nature are characterized by certain regularities, which are habitually called the laws of nature. In other words, these forces are ordered.

C) Certainly, a current order of nature is likely to be produced by evolutionary processes. But no evolutionary processes could unfold unless they were already preceded by some natural regularities, by some kind of order. At the very least, phenomena must already be interdependent, so that events would depend on conditions and cause their own consequences; there must also be a certain stability of the most basic natural regularities to ensure that some changes would accumulate and lead to complex structures’ formation.

D) Some pre-evolutionary order remains indispensable even if one puts the Universe into a hypothetical multiverse. There must be some order since multiple universes emerge and mature. They don’t collapse immediately, don’t mutually destroy each other, etc.

E) To sum everything up: the basic, pre-evolutionary order of nature neither stems from any external cause (we have earlier assumed the naturalist premise) nor is shaped by any evolutionary process. This order is just how the most fundamental forces of nature, whatever they are (that’s up to scientists to decide) have initially shaped themselves. They shaped themselves without being dependent on any causes - that is to say, they shaped themselves freely.

F) Having started from the naturalist premise, one has to conclude that a spontaneous and intentional activity undergirds nature. Thus, naturalist premise overthrows itself.

Certainly, this notion of spontaneous and intentional (that is to say, self-shaping, self-restraining) ground of the world is not the same as Christian, biblical, Trinitarian faith. But the two are quite compatible. Here the natural theology has approached, as much as it could, the revealed truth about the Logos of God, who creates and holds together all things that exist (John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1: 16-17, Hebrews 1:2-3). The Logos that creates and preserves the world is the same one that became human in Jesus Christ; so that the apostle even states that everything is created through Christ (and not “through the [un-incarnated] Logos”). Hence, Jesus is representative of Logos’ manner of action - instead of dominating and trumping, he gives way to what is happening; he suffers - and through this suffering he achieves the final victory, the resuscitation and salvation of everything that is to be saved.

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58

I really don’t care whether you want to imagine some supernatural force making the wires work or not. It remains an extraneous and unnecessary addition to an explanation which works well without it. It looks like a waste of everyone’s time. Sophistry indeed!

I am hardly suggesting that the wiring was not created. But I have no interest in the pantheistic sophistry which requires divine action to make the wires work. To me it suggest incompetence – a God who is not capable of real creation. It frankly sounds more like a dreamer God which is terribly underwhelming. After all, everyone, even the smallest child, is omnipotent in their own dreams. So no, I am not buying such nonsense. I believe in a God who can really create things – a carpenter whose chairs and tables stand up by themselves without having to hold them up himself. I just don’t agree that the passages you point to mean any such thing. I think they just mean that God created everything and is actively involved in events in a universe full of dangers and accidents to make sure things go in accord with His plans to some degree. But no I don’t think it means God cannot really create anything which exists on their own.

Pantheism (which is what a dreamer God amounts to) and Deism do not interest me. I am just not that desperate to believe in a God no matter what. Atheism looks a better choice to me if it comes to that.

Not compatible with YOUR Christian faith I guess. But your pantheistic dreamer God isn’t compatible with MY Christian faith.

59

Actually he was emphasizing the unbounded randomness of what happens at an event horizon. Sure, the probability of just the rights particles popping into existence in just the right configuration to make up a kitchen sink is so low that the odds of it happening before the heat death of the universe is functionally nil, but the point was that it is not zero.
Sure, there was humor in the imagery; as I recall the question was whether “just anything” could pop out of a black hole, with the predictable reply “even a kitchen sink”, but the point was serious. One could sit and watch a black hole till the heat death of the universe and probably not observe anything more complex than a water molecule pop into existence, but the operative word is “probably”.

Physics may have changed that view, though I hope not; it really shows how weird the universe is when quantum randomness meets the event horizon of a black hole, something I never quite appreciated until I encountered that statement by Hawking.
Though it makes me wonder: given that ‘virtual’ particles pop in and out of existence in vacuum, could a kitchen sink pop into existence out between the galaxies somewhere? and if it could, would it necessarily be accompanied by an anti-sink so the two would immediately annihilate each other?

If a kitchen sink is possible due to quantum randomness, then water to wine is easy; you just have to be the guy in charge of probabilities.

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60

As one of my professors used to say, “Creation is present tense” – i.e. God created this moment with everything in it just as much as He created light back in the beginning.

If I get what you mean – as Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it to Brian Greene, how can you call it “nothing” if there are rules present?

John Lennox never tires of explaining this.

I got a chill the first time I read one of the church Fathers stating that even as a month-old child in the womb Jesus was still upholding all of Creation.

So much for “abundance theology” and the “prosperity Gospel”!

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