Sigh. Since you insist…
You declare that I have no desire to read and to understand.
That is clearly an insult. It beggars belief that you need to have that pointed out even more clearly than I did in my previous post.
Godspeed,
Chris Falter
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Compared with catastrophism, for starters, as I said. I’m afraid I didn’t see any biological arguments.
I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. I don’t think anyone has the time and patience it would take to not just point out, but demonstrate to your satisfaction the errors of thought in each one of your arguments. Conversations like this go a lot easier when each party is willing to do their own research and do their best to disprove their own arguments before presenting them to other people for review. I think you’ve put a lot of time and thought into writing your arguments, but I don’t think you’ve taken basic steps to learn other people’s positions, like looking up a dictionary definition of ‘natural,’ and I think you’re only looking at one side of the issue without trying to understand the other side at all.
Good luck. I think you’ll need it.
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Looks like Chris would have taken your comment as an insult. And third parties liked both his and your comment. Nice.
I think you are right, Lynn overstepped the bounds there.
I think it would be basic to most Christians that creation should not be confused with the Creator, or that immanent presence should not be confused with equivalence. So I’m interested in how you unpack this toward the exact opposite tendency. I mean --yeah I know you personally go that way as a non-Christian, and probably consider yourself in pretty good company --Einstein and all, but why would you think that Bible-reading Christians should tend to wind up there?
Thanks for asking! It’s not that I think it’s a biblically necessary view, so much as I think people throw around some pretty powerful absolute terminology without necessarily thinking through all the implications, and there’s an overall trend in religion generally to take literally the hyperbole or overstatements of previous generations, when they are about things held to be sacred.
For example, specifically, take “omniscient” or all-knowing. What would it literally mean to know everything, no exceptions? God knows the shape of each grain of sand, and its constitution, and its history, and its exact position relative to every other grain of sand. Is this data compressible? Not without loss, and if you lose any data you’re no longer all-knowing.
Is there anything God does not know? Does he know what a frog feels like when it snaps its tongue out to eat a bug? We must conclude yes. Does he know what the bug feels like?
Does he know what we think and feel, down to every last minute detail? How is God’s omnipresence divisible from reality? Is he just an observer woven into reality?
No, because now we come to the all-powerful part. Everything that happens happens because God makes it happen. That means God cannot be just a bystander to the world as the frog flicks its tongue out, but is directly responsible and involved in every process and action, even the tiniest and most mundane.
You say there’s a distinction between immanence and equivalence. How would you describe the difference, exactly?
Now, some believe God is both immanent and transcendent rather than one or the other. This may or may not be referred to as panentheism, and I can’t speak much for the presence or absence of transcendence on the part of God. But I do think a lot of people don’t really consider the full ramifications of everything they say, and therefore fall into error when they fail to recognize overstatement or hyperbole on the part of others, because it’s almost impossible within the context of religion to back away from anything said in praise of God.
I hope that goes some way towards explaining my thoughts more fully? Thanks again for asking! 
Actually, in real science we seek to disprove our hypotheses and theories. You don’t appear to do that.
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Thanks for your good questions in turn. In general I would say that doctrines are our “contact” right up necessarily against mystery. So we can take as an article of faith or understanding from revelation that God is immanent (everywhere present) in creation knowing full well that we will be at loss to explain the “nuts-and-bolts” of that because if there were nuts and bolts that we clearly understood, then the faith-claim (on that point at least) would not be necessary and we would advance further in then to the mystery behind those nuts and bolts. I think our main difficulty is that our only way to relate to God is as if he is somehow a personable creature like us (hence God’s prerogative on the incarnation, the Christian says). But our flesh-and-blood imagining of “Him” (our oft gender-captured pronouns say it all, don’t they, about our inability to really comprehend what God’s Spirit would really be like) --these imaginings must fall infinitely short of their target. If they didn’t then that, so targeted, could not be God. We know we could never simultaneously pay good attention to a bajillion things at once, so we imagine that to be a kind of difficulty or challenge for God. All this tells us though is that God is not some sort of demiurge “super-engineer” that we could imagine. It tells us nothing about what the real God does or does not do.
I will answer one of the few questions of yours that can be easily answered: “Is God just another observer woven into reality?” No. Not “just another”, though “observer” may apply somewhat, if we can imagine that a violinist is “observing” the music as she plays it. Taking delight in the unfolding creation might be closer to the mark. Just as we delight to re-watch some movie or re-live some experience with a friend who hasn’t yet seen it, been there, or done that --just for the vicarious enjoyment … it really isn’t hard to imagine that God wanted creatures with whom he could really share the great bits. And the phrase “woven into …” implies that someone or something else is doing the weaving. There is no room in any Christian analogy or theology for any other weaver or potter. There is only one. All things whether we approve of them or not, find them awesome or disgusting, morally honorable or morally repugnant – all of it, warts and all comes back to God. Others here may do back-flips trying to exonerate God from all the horrible evil in the world, but there is no out. We are not in a position to adjudicate on God’s responsibility or culpability, though we are free to shake our fists at the sky as much as we please. We are still 100% responsible for ourselves even as God knows and allows what we will choose.
I think here is another doctrine up against mystery. We are only assured in the Bible that there must be no confusion that people (apart from Jesus) and stuff – anything you could put on a scale or look at through a microscope or telescope is not in any way or form God, and must not be worshiped as such. And yet … Jesus tells us that he is to be found in the faces of and in our care for the most afflicted refugees, outcasts, prisoners, etc. That doesn’t mean we worship them as God, but we are called to realize that God is present in a special way in those moments feeling loved – or feeling abandoned as the case may be. I would call that a profound form of immanent presence. I think as we care for non-human creation --animal, plant, even mineral, that God takes delight in that and is immanent there too, though perhaps not so intimately as He is in the human creatures he has fashioned.
One significant difference I think between immanence and equivalence is that if we really seriously thought every rock and tree was God, we would be more like mystical animists seeing literal Spirit(s) in everything. Science would probably not have easily flourished in such a culture since people don’t generally go around poking, probing, and studying their gods. They worship them. In Judeo-Christianity, though, a sharp distinction was made in that even though we can flee to the highest heights and deepest depths only to find that thou, O God, art also there (there’s the ‘immanence’) – that nevertheless none of those objects, or places are themselves God (that would be the verboten ‘equivalence’). Now that mentality [that this is God’s precious creation] proved to be a lively incubator for inquiring minds wanting to probe into it all to discover all God’s faithful regularities and habits.
That is my ramble on immanence. Thanks for your questions.
[with lots of little edits and additions thrown in since you may have first seen this in your email.]
@Mervin_Bitikofer Thanks for the lengthy and thoughtful response! I love these kinds of discussions, although this week is hectic, or I would probably be replying at even more length!
I agree that ‘woven into’ was carelessly phrased. I wanted to get the sense of ‘pervading reality while remaining distinct from it.’ Maybe ‘God weaves into/around everything’ comes closer?
I will also cheerfully admit to a personal shortcoming: I have little inclination for mysteries. This makes me difficult to satisfy. 
You make a good point that of course we can’t really conceptualize God sufficiently, from a limited human perspective.
I would not so much call every rock and tree God as I would say each is a very small part of God. I don’t know if that distinction helps! At any rate, thank you for returning food for thought to me! 
Are you? That’s so funny. Oh wait, in real science…
He means the kind of scientists who do research and publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Of course. Only it’s not true. Most people try to disprove opposing hypotheses, not theirs. Theirs become precious babies and religion. It’s human nature.
I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about scientists. What people are you talking about? For a good example of seeing how scientists work to disprove their own hypotheses take “Dog Emotion and Cognition.”
Or you can ask @benkirk to give you more examples, since you are really interested!. There are “classic” examples as well, such as the experiments about spontaneous generation.
That’s not what real scientists do.
Look at Stan Prusiner, for example. Did he relentlessly try to disprove his prion hypothesis, or did he try to disprove other hypotheses?
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That’s virtually the exact words I was about to post in response to NonlinOrg’s statements.
NonlinOrg wrote this about “real scientists”:
If I’m understanding properly, and NonlinOrg truly thinks that scientists routinely do this, could he please post some specific examples? At the very least, please name names and provide citations.
I’ve gotten to know a lot of scientists over the course of my academic career. I can’t think of EVEN ONE OF THEM who wasn’t quite rigorous in terms of falsification testing in terms of their own research. So I’m curious why I haven’t met any of these scientists whose hypotheses become “precious babies” and “religion.” However, I’m very skeptical of the term “religion” in these contexts. It has become a term of derision, usually by religious people! (I always thought it strange that people who adamantly insist on particular religious positions complain that “evolution is a religion”, even though the insult makes no sense by any definition I know other than some generic “a religion is a strong belief in some idea.” Of course, that is not how we define religion in the academy. We define religion as requiring some belief in a TRANSCENDENCE.)
Anyway, rather than pursue those interesting tangents, I’d just like to know the names of some scientists who are guilty of what NonlinOrg describes. And where did he/she observe those particular scientists doing this “precious babies and religion” behaviors.
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Great minds think alike!
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“Science advances one funeral at a time”
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Max Planck
Hi Ben - I agree with you that the scientific community has an outstanding record of probing for weaknesses in the prevailing models, and thus attaining a deeper understanding of the creation. However, scientists are not immune to fashion and other foibles, so the journey of scientific discovery is sometimes a little bumpy.
That the process is imperfect is no reason to reject it entirely, however, as some are inclined to do.
Hi Nonlin-
You seem to agree with Ben that the scientific community winds up with the most useful and accurate models.
The only disagreement I see between what Ben wrote and what Planck wrote is that Planck adds the nuance that it can sometimes take an extra decade or two for a more useful model to be fully accepted.
That can be disproved with a wealth of examples, including heliocentrism.
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