Try Google.
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Good idea. I am especially reminded of that long lecture series we watched defending natural theology. …by N. T. Wright I think.
natural theology: theology or knowledge of God based on observable facts and experience apart from divine revelation (Google AI)
Natural theology is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics, such as the existence of a deity, based on human reason. (Wikipedia)
Natural theology is a program of inquiry into the existence and attributes of God without referring or appealing to any divine revelation. In natural theology, one asks what the word “God” means, whether and how names can be applied to God, whether God exists, whether God knows the future free choices of creatures, and so forth. The aim is to answer those questions without using any claims drawn from any sacred texts or divine revelation, even though one may hold such claims. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
I don’t believe much in the arguments for the existence of God but I am all for the rest of it.
Amen. Though I think the really poor view is that He has to constantly support it or it will simply cease to exist. It is not only like a dreamer god but an Indian giver god who creates with one hand ready to snatch it away with the other, because I certainly don’t believe God is incapable of actual creation of things which have their own independent existence. Frankly I think this is all the invention of religiologs who seek to vicariously exaggerate their own importance. Though Vinnie sheds a new light on this as a way of trashing science and turning God into something which can be manipulated and controlled. So as with most things like this, all it really accomplishes is to make their god look small, weak, incompetent, self-centered, etc… hardly a God worth believing in.
I’m tempted to make that a hot-key string.
Or to employ the sense of the Greek present tense, God-is-doing-it.
Which would be consistent with the Name of God in the Greek OT, “I am the being-One” or “I am the One Who has being”.
Either that or you are consistently doing so every moment anyway.
A quibble: I think instead of the first period there should be a colon or dash since the second statement is a description of the first.
A question that could be asked is: if God is Creator, is there a time when He is not creating? In different words, is “Creator” a description of God in the past but not now?
Hear, hear!
(And “There, there!” ?)
That would seem to explain the quantum nature of things.
The question would be whether God can or does share any of His eternal attributes. My view would be that anything which is its own basis of existence, i.e. which “don’t require anyone to sustain them” is itself deity and that thus a self-sustaining universe is itself a deity.
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… a god who shares… or a god who doesn’t share… Hmmm…
sounds like a rather low bar… LOL
…so if God created something with an independent existence, then you would worship it.
No wonder God had so much trouble with people worshipping what He created. They all had a low bar on that…
Some of us demand a bit more than that.
Frankly it all sounds like the artificial categories of language blown all out of proportion again.
It reminds me of all that talk of a jealous God in the OT. I suspect the real jealousy is not God’s jealousy but the jealousy of the clergy clinging to the power and money they get from their religion. They are the ones who don’t want to share.
I think you fail to make a distinction between magic and divine action.
A child can imagine and sustain a universe that runs on deep mathematical principles that others can experience and find consistent in its properties?
And music is just vibration propagated through air – that doesn’t mean there’s no orchestra.
Aristotle was right given his data set.
How is it magic when the Creator of the universe has its elements obey Him?
The interaction between Creator is universe is not static but relational. I don’t think that “the winds and waves obey Him” is a metaphor, I think it’s really the case – that in His presence the elements of the universe gain a level of awareness such that they “kneel” in obedience at His word.
Interesting point – I think I’ll second that motion.
To go a bit Lewis-ian, I’d say it’s a matter of physics “we wot not of”, perhaps something we could call The Divine Observer Effect. It would thus be a case of
how Mercury violates Newtonian physics – not one of violating natural law but of a failure to catch a deeper natural law of which our current understanding is just a set of special cases.
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Actually both can be found in the Fathers. Indeed one made a distinction, that the feeding of the 5k, happening in lands of the Jews, was a matter of triggering others to share while the feeding of the 4k was a supernatural multiplication of resources (the idea being that Jews would be more inclined to share, a proposal I’m skeptical of). Then there’s the one that combines them, saying that Jesus’ action prompted others to share but it wouldn’t have been enough without the divine provision.
I just got a mental image of duplication of code, as though normally a given code sequence sustains the existence of X amount of bread and another sustains Y amount of fish, but then the code gets duplicated so that X’ amount of bread occurs instead along with Y’ amount of fish. So if the universe is conceived of as a set of code, the multiplication of loaves and fishes is just a “duplication anomaly”, an induced “glitch” in the system.
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LOL So anything created with an existence of its own must be a machine? Really? So your choice for human beings is that we are either puppets or robots. It reminds me of Greek philosophy which had no appreciation for living organisms.
BUT frankly the real issue is the alternative. Because creation as machine is VASTLY better than what you propose! When we make nuclear weapons and bomb cities to kill a hundred thousand people or more, in your characterization of my view it is just manipulating that machine to do such things for us, but in what you are proposing we are manipulating God Himself to do such things.
No. I do not think yours is a sensible theology at all.
There’s a failure to comprehend that leads to a false accusation of argument from authority: others are often cited not as an authority but as someone who explained some point more succinctly.
You preach, but you don’t know what Natural Theology is?!?
You have a very shallow understanding of you think that applies to what has been said.
One of my professors would say that these define two different things, that Google AI here is correct in that NT rests on nature, but that theology that rests on human reason includes speculative theology, not merely NT.
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Thanks
As such I would have nothing to do with it. Sounds like human vanity and construct. The whole point of Christianity is it defies human construct or expectation
The whole point of faith is not to mix it up with proofs or sensory perception. We believe what is written rather than look for other signs and explanations.
Richard
No – you fail to see the distinction; all you’re doing is inserting a step to remove responsibility: whether God is causing things at each moment to run by His rules or has set up those rules to run on their own, He is still responsible for the result of detonation of a nuclear weapon.
You’re arguing for the equivalent of code that runs without a computer as oppose to code that runs in a computer, as though if there is no computer then the code is not responsible.
Either way, God is not manipulated. To think He is shows a very shallow view of God.
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Really? If you study a painting, can it not reveal things about the painter? if you study a building, can it not reveal things about the architect?
That turns faith into a delusion.
That isn’t the faith that scripture speaks of, which is something tied to – even grounded in – “proofs and sensory perception”. The faith the NT declares is, as John Lennox explains nicely, evidence-based.
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I do not agree this is the whole point of Christianity.
Seems to me natural theology is just following the lead of Romans 1:20.
R I G H T . . . .
And those who make matches are responsible for what arsonists do, and those who make medicines are responsible for what drug dealers do, and the list goes on and on
I definitely do not agree.
We certainly manipulate the laws of nature to do things like nuclear weapons. God is not manipulated because these laws of nature are not God but something God created. And no God is not responsible for what we do with them.
Yes, really.
That is why you and I do not see eve to eye.
(Well, one of many)
Richard
No, because match manufacturers didn’t invent the chemistry that makes arson possible, and drug dealers didn’t design the biology that makes drugs have effects on humans.
It’s the difference between being a player in the game and being the author of the game.
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Yes, because once again you ignore scripture (and common sense) in order to pursue your own agenda: scripture gives reasons why natural theology is useful, but you throw it out.
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Robert Koons seems to be working on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum mechanics.I honestly can’t wait for it to finish and come out. I’ve seen him briefly describe QM in the Word on Fire book: The New Apologetics. Here is a snippet on the double slit experiment in terms potency and actuality.
Quantum mechanics has given rise to a dizzying variety of “interpretations,” each offering its own solution to the measurement problem. Some involve monstrously exotic hypotheses. The many-worlds interpretation posits the existence of an unimaginably large number of parallel universes, each splitting off from a common history at every moment. David Bohm’s model supposes that the entire cosmos is instantaneously involved in guiding the movement of each particle, making it impossible to isolate any interaction from remote and uncontrollable factors. Objective collapse theory postulates new and so-far undetected mechanisms for producing mostly determinate results at the macroscopic scale. The transactional interpretation supposes that the future can influence the past, and the Copenhagen interpretation supposes that phenomena are real only when we observe them.
But only the Aristotelian interpretation preserves our common-sense knowledge without speculative add-ons. And the very existence of multiple interpretations reflects the fact that quantum mechanics, unlike “classical” mechanics, no longer provides unambiguous support to materialism.
2.1 Violations of the Law of Noncontradiction or Excluded Middle
In the classic two-slit experiment, individual electrons seem to take multiple, incompatible paths between the source and the screen, going simultaneously through both the right and left slit of the barrier. It is only when the electron is detected at the screen that the wave-function “collapses” into one definite path. The theorem of John S. Bell (commonly referred to as “Bell’s theorem”) demonstrated that, if quantum theory is correct, we cannot suppose that individual particles take definite paths before detection—that is, we cannot assume that quantum probabilities merely reflect our ignorance of which path is already actual. Some take quantum theory to require a revision of classical logic: either supposing that the electron both is and is not passing through the left slit (violating the law of noncontradiction), or that the electron neither is nor is not passing through that slit (violating the law of excluded middle).
However, from the perennial philosophy, these erroneous conclusions result from failing to distinguish between actuality and potentiality (or act and potency, to use the traditional terms). The electron is not a substance—it is rather a potential action of the substantial source that generates the electrons. This source has the potential of affecting either the left or right slit. However, when actualized, the electron will always be detected in exactly one place.
**Werner Heisenberg first noted that quantum mechanics had simply revived Aristotle’s notion of potentiality.**9 In prequantum physics, we did not need to refer to potentialities at all. We could simply describe and predict the actual trajectories of particles using deterministic laws of motion. In quantum theory, as in Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, a complete description of nature requires us to include also the merely potential states and locations of things.
I find Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics fascinating. I’ve only read a few chapters of the book but that one is my favorite thus far.
Yes, it is quite apparent neither one has read any metaphysical arguments for God’s existence from competent philosophers. Instead they say things like:
They say these things not knowing that it is the actual arguments themselves which require God to be upholding existence at all times since hierarchal series require a “first” member. Not to mention this is what is found repeatedly in scripture. I think Feser’s statement in The New Apologetics applies here:
Now, an intellectual culture in which all ideas are evaluated in terms of political utility or the suspect motives their critics impute to their defenders, and in which canons of reason and objectivity are rejected, is one in which the project of natural theology (and indeed any other rational enterprise) is impossible. It is also bound to degenerate into one in which disputes are settled not by argumentation but through intimidation or worse. . . . Apologists may soon find themselves in a situation where much of the culture lacks even the bare minimum of common ground necessary for rational engagement—namely, respect for rational engagement itself.
This response fits that perfectly:
The irony here is if I quote all the scripture that strongly suggests all things are sustained by God, it will be dismissed. So the claim to believe what is written is certainly not true. We pretend to believe what is written when in actuality we just believe whatever we want. TI’ll be at a cabin on a river fishing the next two days. Good luck continuing this discussion @St.Roymond as it is basically trapped between camouflaged scientism on one end and utterly blind faith on the other.
Vinnie
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Sounds like an atheist citing the expertise of Dawkins to support the non-existence of God. Will he quote Fester also to fend off your objections? LOL Oh brother!
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Thanks, your answer is much better than the one I discarded.
Richard
When it is just a game or a dream then it can be anything the author chooses without restriction. It doesn’t have to make any sense. That is the difference between dream and reality. It is the logical coherence which makes it real and then the result is not independent of the means. What you want to accomplish strongly restricts how things must be accomplished. When love is your aim then freedom is required, and thus you limit you control over things, and participate in a temporal order without knowing what is going to happen while you do so.
This is the basic flaw in the problem of evil. It assumes God will use whatever power He has to prevent evil from happening. But when God wants love and freedom as the result then that is not the case. And the fact that God set everything up doesn’t mean He is responsible for everything that happens.