I agree that there never was a time when the Father was without the Son. The Son & Spirit were generated eternally. Time is also a created feature of the cosmos; the NT says a number of times that time was created by God. I distinguish 3 senses of “created”: 1. X is seated if there ever was a time it did not exist and then a time at which it began to exist; 2. X is created if it is a distinct reality from its cause; and X is created if it depends on its cause. Only God is uncreated 3. (This stuff is all in the new ms.that hasn’t been published yet.)
The Son is also uncreated. I’d take it a step further from saying the Father was never without the Son, to saying the Father does not exist apart from the experience of the relationship to the Son and the Holy Spirit.
He is a God that would not know what it is to be alone, that is until he became sin in the person of Jesus.
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Yes, the Son is uncreated3. That’s why the scripture uses the term “begotten.” The Son is eternally begotten, not created.That’s because the Son is comprised of the same self-existent being as the Father.
Even when Christ bore the sins of the world his Divine nature was with God and was God; it was only the father’s approval that was temporarily suspended.
If you write to me I’d be happy to send you those chapters of the book that deal with this. My email is:
roy.a.cllouser@gmail.com
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- Either I am clueless and do not understand what you’re saying or I’m very skeptical. My understanding is that Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity are considered “mainstream science” and I fail to see any “religious belief” regulation going on in either theory. Moreover, personally, I’m inclined to affirm that no rational and reasonable version of God is “a relativist” as, physics would currently define a relativist.
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Maybe it stems from the fact that everyone is ‘religious’ in an academic, technical sense. The etymology of the word contains the same root as ligand, ligament, ligature, obligate, oblige, religion. (-lig-: - WordReference.com Dictionary of English). So we bind ourselves to something, to some ideas, just in the fact that everyone has a worldview.
One of the elements that is common is that we live in an orderly universe, as opposed to a completely chaotic one or one where natural laws don’t exist and sometimes we’re all subject to gravity and then in an unpredictable moment we’re all floating in the air.
So that is the sense I infer he is using religious belief, not that God could be a relativist.
(YECs, on the other hand, believe that natural laws can change willy-nilly – the speed of light, radioactive nuclide decay half-lives… 
, contrary to Jeremiah 33:25, “This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…”)
- Big deal! My now-decease atheistic acquaintance affirmed, based purely on reason, that the world, which some call the universe and I call the cosmos, is, has always been, and will always be rational. whether it is explicable or not.
- I’d prefer to read RC’s words on the matter, if he deigns to respond.
- YEC-cers believe a lot of stuff, much wrong but, IMO, essentials (in historically orthodox belief) correct. I owe my current belief to some YEC-cers, and am certain that they were faithful, Spirit-led followers of Jesus Christ.
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The book begins by establishing that the definition of “religious belief” has a primary sense and several secondary senses. Its primary sense is a belief in something as the self-existent Origin of all else. Put another way: whatever is regarded as unconditionally nondependent and the source of all else, is thereby the divine reality. Every religion begins by identifying its candidate for the divine reality and then also advocates its idea of how humans can stand in right relation to the divine.
My contention is that theories, too, either contain an idea of what is divine or presuppose one. They differ from religions in that they identify the divine in order to establish causal pathways and construct explanations, while religions are concerned with how humans may relate properly in order to achieve greater happiness.
For example, a philosophical materialist says that matter/energy was not created but is self-existent. Everything other than the purely physical self-existent entities is generated by them. Other theories have said Space has that role in reality: what we call matter is generated by space out of itself: “space is eternal and infinite, and spontaneously generates protons” (this position was held by Fred Hoyle). From that point on the theory explains reality as the materialist does.
To be more precise, my claim is: 1) Every idea of the nature of reality includes an idea of the self-existent origin of all else - either explicitly or as a tacit presupposition.
2) Every scientific theory include or assumes a view of the nature of reality. Therefore,
3) Every scientific theory includes of assumes an idea of the divine which determines how the theory conceives of the nature of its postulates.
The business of “determining the nature of its postulates” is demonstrated in the rest of the book. My sample theories are from math, physics, & psych.
I hope this makes the claim clearer.
Roy
- I would object; but won’t bore anyone with further “Public” posts on the matter. Hoever, I wouldn’t mind a Private discussion, terminable at either person’s will.
I gave these thoughts of yours a thread of its own, @RoyC , so that more readers will see them here, and you’ll likely get more responses.
This ties very well into a little disagreement I got into about whether science should be limited to methodological naturalism. In the course of the disagreement I found Plantinga’s essay on the subject and pulled some wonderful quotes from it.
The person I was having the discussion with questioned whether I could give an example of non-Duhemian science. After thinking about it a little, I found it’d be any theory stating whether space is or is not infinitely divisible.
- To clarify your personal position: Do you think “space” is infinitely divisible or not?
If it isn’t and is somehow found to be a superfluid composed of parts, then what? Those parts are going to have a spatial (maybe even non-classical) relation.
- I’m perplexed. I asked a “Yes/No/I don’t know/I don’t have an answer” question; so is one of those possible answers in your reply or not? [That is also a “Yes/No/I don’t know/I don’t have an answer” question.]
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Space is a continuum that is simultaneous in all its parts. Viewed from a mathematical perspective there is no end to the divisions of it.
Roy
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Hi Roy. That doesn’t seem to be a common definition reflecting either common or academic usage.
This does not strike me as reflecting the attitude of scientists toward actual scientific theories, nor does such an idea of the fundamental nature of reality seem necessary for a functioning theory. A theory is a model for the patterns in physical phenomena; it can be attached to any of a range of beliefs about the ultimate source of those phenomena or indeed to no belief at all.
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What makes something divine?
Could you describe how this works for the origin of a raincloud and rain? Is condensation an explanation of the divine?
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Steve,
- Pardon me for butting in here, but I think it’s relevant to point out that, although Roy Clouser’s book The Myth of Religious Neutrality was published [1st and 2nd Revised Editions] by the Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame Press, Roy is a proponent in the Reformed Calvinist tradition.
- Roy’s book “contextualized Herman Dooyeweerd’s philosophy into the general audience of American academic dialogue at the College of New Jersey” [Source: Wikipedia Page re: Roy A. Clouser].
- Herman Dooyeweerd was a Dutch Professor of Law at the University of Amsterdam and “Neo-Calvinist” [i.e. Reformed Calvinist] philosopher.
- Immediately, anyone familiar with the Reformed Calvinist view of the world would (or certainly should) expect to see just about everything presented with a distinctly presuppositional interpretion/understanding. Briefly, i.e.“Any human reasoning presupposes God”, like it or not.)
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Condensation is an observable process, and has been observed in clouds as well as on the ground. As such it is not a theory - an educated guess - that it takes place. We might make a theory about it, but it’s existence is observable and not a theory. In the book I give extensive examples of how divinity beliefs regulate the way the natures of postulated entities are conceived. The examples are drawn from major viewpoints in math, physics, and psych.
The divine is whatever is the self-existent origin all else.
Roy
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