you \re correct that logic is not a material part of reality. but where does the logos, e.g. the coherent order or thought making up the universe belong if not to God. If you rely on a God that is not supposed to be logic you will get a random reality, thus a breakdown of cause and effect.
That you read my comment
as
indeed hints at a difficulty in obtaining a meaningful discussion but I can only try.
To me the kingdom of God is the epiphany of logic and Jesus only makes sense in the light of logic. In fact to consider God to be outside his creation would deny his omnipresence. He reaches beyond his creation but is well bang in the midst of it. If you have children you have become one flesh, so do you describe yourself outside your childrens affairs or are you part of it?
So perhaps let us try in steps to identify were we differ in our understanding of an omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient God which might clarify your and my position for a more meaningful discourse.
Is Good omniscient because he sees everything or because he knows everything or because he feel everything as all is part of him?
Is God omnipotent because everything has to follow his will or can he defy his own logic e.g.makea square circle or deny himself?
Now logic fulfills both criteria, so if God impersonates the logic he is would be omniscient as every action logically follows its reason, so in the ultimate reason all conesquences have to follow logically from that reason. Thus the cause contains everything that possibly can be, for reasons of constraint of what is logically possible, e.g.omnipotent and everything that can happen is predictable from the primary cause thus known in it, e.g. omniscient.
Logic is clearly supernatural as it is not a material thing, thus metaphysical, a term I prefer to supernatural which is sometimes confused with things contrary to nature. the metaphysical is perfectly natural, just not physical/material any more.
If you do want to make Christianity understandable to materialists you have to first convince them that the basis of science relies on the metaphysical truth of reasonability and that if they do not believe that everything has a reason they better don’t do science as it would be hypocrisy. And you better don’t claim that Jesus was a magician, e.g. someone who pretends things to be real to surprise or please us, but a logician, someone who makes us accept reality and understand it better.
actually if you do not tell them how things came to be it sounds to me like indoctrination. It is the same like people claiming Christians ought to deny the God described in the OT and ignore him altogether.
If you do not know were you coming from how could you know where you are going.
Looks like we are gone far away from discussing God’s interventions
Your statement makes no sense - “the basis of science relies on the metaphysical truth of reasonability” What is the metaphysical truth of reasonability?
Okay. Terms like “the Kingdom of God” and “omnipresent” and “Logos” have associated concepts that have been developed over a history of Christian thought. I study linguistics so I will not argue about the fact that a term can have totally different associations from one person to another. But, if you want people to understand you, it’s kind of important to figure out where your concepts overlap and where they don’t. And if you are going to use words that have well-defined concepts attached to them within the historical Christian tradition (“Kingdom of God,” “Logos,” “ominpresence”) and mathematics/rhetoric (“logic”) but use them with entirely different and idiosyncratic senses, it makes it difficult. The idea of omnipresence means God is not confined by spatial limitations. It is not mutually exclusive with the idea of being separate from creation which are included in the ideas of eternity (existing without a beginning or end) and self-sufficiency (existing without contingency on anything else). To say God is not confined by creation is not the same as saying he is not present in the created world. Yes, I am intimately involved in my children’s lives, but my children are not me, nor are they an extension of me.
Omniscience is God’s knowledge of all things, actual and possible. I don’t think everything is a part of God. I think God is the source of all existence. So as the source he is sovereign over it. I won’t pretend to be able to explain how that works, because I don’t know.
God is omnipotent because ultimately, it is his will that prevails. I think God remains true to his identity.
You lost me on the last paragraph and I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t see how you can just redefine “logic” and “metaphysics” and “supernatural” and then draw conclusions from there.
God has his own reality. His own Kingdom. I don’t think God’s reality is at all constrained or congruent with our physical/natural reality. At the places where God’s Kingdom breaks into our world (I think of it as parallel dimensions), God’s reality can subsume our reality. The blind can see, the deaf can hear, the dead are raised to life. This is not a logical problem to me, because I don’t believe that our natural reality and the rules that it normally operates is the only true reality. But logic, science, empirical observations, human experience and deduction won’t get you to truth about God’s reality, which is only revealed and explained in divine revelation. It is that other reality that Jesus was sent to make real to us.
But Christianity already is something. I’m not interested in destroying it’s integrity and pretending it teaches something it doesn’t to make it “understandable” to people who unequivocally reject its basic truth claims. A scientist can be perfectly capable of “doing science” and being logical without any reference to absolute truth or divine purpose.
As in the matter PoS your approach avoids the reality of what science is and does.
It is history of science that tells us, for example, how current science has neglected important discoveries because of historical accidents - like the eclipse of German Science after Hitler and Soviet Science after the Cold War. When that’s forgotten science becomes even more parochial. Einstein’s work, for example, had to be fought to be heard in the West by Arthur Eddington because he was German and there had just been a war. Nowadays, the inability of US scientists to read research in foreign languages puts a particular slant on their science… which is invisible to them if history and sociology of science are “beneath them”.
Lack of historical perspective also commonly leads to mythic reconstructions of science’s past, as complex and muddled as any history. And that leads to the dangerous lie that science is a matter of invariable progress towrads truth and that, therefore, science NOW is the truest it’s ever been and is bound to arrive at Final Truth any day. It’s palpably false - but you’ll never find out if you stick to the belief that history and philosophy aren’t worthy of notice.
Sy - a point arising from your post and from the “History of Science” discussion further down.
Kuhn has an interesting discussion on how, in actual fact, quantum theory and relativity falsify Newton rather than supplementing him. He gives examples of how problems are re-expressed to “paper over” the differences, and suggests that it’s because of the desire to maintain the meta-narrative of science’s uninterrupted progress towards truth.
But Newton, in turn, advanced science by re-introducing occult forces that had been outlawed in science as superstition a century before - only now that’s usually forgotten, and he’s pictured as the progressive “new ideas” man helping science up its endless ladder to perfection…
Another example of that is the reverence given now to the corpuscularists like Boyle, not as great scientists in their time, but as forward-looking discoverers of what we now know to exist, ie atoms. However, the conception of matter that they invented has proven to be wrong at most levels (even though useful as a stepping stone on a zig-zag path to better insights).
Their insistence on matter as inert particles (which was largely intended to dis-enchant it from Aristotelian ideas of “Mind” apparently dishonouring to God, in the same way as occult forces acting at a distance) has been overturned by quantum theory, which links mind and matter inextricably AND brings back “spooky action at a distance”.
That actually means it’s all about two steps forward and one step back, or sometimes several steps back from a wrong turning. Teleology, for example, was outlawed 300 years ago and is only now beginning to seem essential in biology - that’s a move that significantly held back progress, and for a long time.
So new science can build on today’s consensus, but historically often overturns it. How one is alert to which one is necessary is another matter - but being historically aware certainly must help to avoid the scientific myth of perpetual progress.
Thanks for that Jon, I did not know about Kuhn’s POV on Newton and Einstein. I did know about Newton’s interest in the occult, as that has been widely discussed, but usually not in any depth or detail. Worth looking into a bit deeper.
This is an aside. Over two decades ago, I found myself in London with some free time. I went to the British Library, and somehow got admitted to the Reader Room. With a purely American sense of astonishment, I soon found myself “handling” (without using my hands) and reading an original manuscript of Newton’s (in Latin of course).
When I came to my senses, and realized where I was, I asked the attendant if they had anything by Darwin. I was able to peruse a large volume of correspondence between Darwin and Wallace, and actually made a discovery there, that scholars had missed. I communicated this to Richard Dawkins (remember this was 1992) who later published it (giving me full credit for the discovery) in the Devil’s Chaplain.
Just to make clear - the “occult force” in question was gravity. But the opposition to accepting the concept was every bit as materialistic and scientific as the opposition to accepting teleology in biology. In the end, they had no choice but to say, “Well, I suppose occult forces are scientific, then.”
Nice anecdote. It reminds me of meeting, in Cambridge, an American PhD who’d written a book on the 17th century theologian, John Owen. I offered to drive him round to Coggeshall, where he’d been pastor. We ended up bumping into the vicar, who showed us a church plate that dated from Owen’s time. My academic friend was reduced to saying “Wow!” repeatedly (all the way home!).
It never got into any of Dawkins’ books, though. Wonder why.
If a scientist does not make reference to the claim of everything having a cause he has no leg to stand on. It is perhaps better described by John Lennox when he explains how science if based on the theological philosophy of causality and comprehension, so if I come across it again I will put in the link.
If you look for example at the miracle of the birth of Jesus, so beautifully described as the word turning flesh you might consider that in the context of it being irrational of an act of extraordinary love. Take your pick how you would want to think about how Jesus came about and why you think this had to be done without involving biology. Again consider what the law is on which hangs all reality, the law and the prophets unless you think it is magic. Would it diminish God in your eyes if the birth of Jesus would have involved two humans in conceiving him and why?
Wrong. Truths about the universe, QM, GR, physic, chemistry, biology, geology are truths regardless of whether you know about them or not, nor whether you accept them as truths or not.
explain to me how biology is a truth. I thought it was a body of knowledge / collection of fact about about a certain part of our physical world systematically interrogated by scientific methodology.
Truth to me is the judgement of coherence between thought and external reality, e.g. a rational process, not the material facts. So “Lion” is not a truth. that a lion commits infanticide is a truth, but that is not biology but observational fact about biology. It is not a physical or material element, you can not sell it, divide it or destroy it. Biology as a body of information is not material, it is an abstract entity.
No. But it would diminish my view of the trustworthiness of the revelation of the apostolic tradition. I don’t believe what I believe about God because it is consistent with my preconceived view of God or reality, or because it fits with how I already think things are or should be. I believe what I believe about God because that is how his revelation describes him. I build my conception of reality around that revelation.
If you just sit around fitting bits and pieces of Christian thought into some framework that you invent yourself and have decided ahead of time makes the most sense, then you have made yourself and your own judgment more authoritative than God’s revelation of himself, and what you end up with isn’t Christianity. It’s just your ideas. If someone wants to reject the authority of revelation, fine. But then in my view, that person has moved away from Christianity into a Christianity-inspired belief system of their own creation, which I’m personally not really interested in. I’m interested in orthodox Christianity and how science fits into that worldview, not how Christianity can be stripped down to something else so it can fit into a purely materialistic, anti-supernatural worldview.
it is interresting that I would look at someone who believes in miracles to confuse the supernatural with magic as to me the supernatural is highly natural but just not material. Love for example is the ultimate element of reality, it is very natural but not material. If I understand Jesus logically, why would you thing this could not be a revelation.
If you believe Jesus was put into the womb of Mary by a magic spell you might as well believe in Dumbledoor, Harry Potter and Hermione as Mary giving birth to Jesus would not be an act of extraordanary love but a testimonial to a belief in the irrational. Would you think that a worldview based on an irrational God is anything to wish for? After all, he is the ultimate reason but you think he wants us to belief in the unreasonable? I can only think of atheists who believe God to be unreasonable. Anti magic does not mean anti metaphysical but it treats the supernatural as very natural, like superglue as a very good glue. If you can approach God with logic to understand him, why does it strip him down. It sounds a bit like logic would not be good enough. But without logic you could not love but would be subject to extraordinary cruelty as you could not have any idea of the outcome of your actions.
So to me the person who believes that Jesus fiddled the OH groups in the glasses of the wedding guest is the materialist as he can not free himself from the materialistic truth of the story. Once you apply logic you see that the revealed spiritual truth of the story is far more valuable then the idea of materialistic magic.
Perhaps you should look up truth which is the correlation between your thinking and your perceived reality
"adaequatio rei et intellectus" so the lion is the thing, not the truth, e.g. truth is a cognitive concept, not a material object.
Life is not a truth but a word.
That a cell is alive can be a truth statement about a particular cell if it is alive but not if it is dead. The same would be for the term that this is a red cherry because you have learned that your visual perception you have in response to that optical stimulus is called red. That does not mean that you see red in the same way as I do, but we use the same terminology for the same stimulus, thus it is a matter of agreed perception.