It sure seems that way to me. But then you’re not insisting on a cosmic creator role for God? Seems to me a creator role to explain our own arrival should be plenty. Tacking on the origin of atoms and galaxies is putting on airs on our part again as was imagining ourselves as the center of the cosmos around which all else turned.
If God is, then He is creator; He immanently grounds, embraces, wills, thinks, feels all autonomous being. God has nowt ter do wi’ our arrival beyond that. He doesn’t need to. He doesn’t have to intervene at all, He’s THAT smart. He incarnates to give us a reason to believe. That’s the hope.
(Glad you agree I’m dumb enough!)
This piques my curiosity. Not having read the original article yet (but I will), but I have heard this before and I frankly find it bordering on the absurd… it flies in the face of both common sense and of plain biblical narrative. When King Hezekiah was asked whether he wanted the shadow to follow its normal course, or to go backwards, he didn’t reply, “either one, they are the same to me, I make no distinction between the natural and supernatural.” He clearly recognized one as following the regular, routine, or dare I say, “natural” course of nature, and the other would be working “above”, “outside,” or “beyond” (Hence the Latin prefix “super”) the natural or expected course of events.
The parting of the Red Sea didn’t demonstrate “divine intervention”? God coming down and confusing the languages at Babel was not “God intervening” in the regular course of how nature would have proceeded? Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” He recognized that as a departure from the way nature normally operated, hence why it was “great sight”, no? God sent down fire from heaven in direct response to Elijah’s prayer. This is not “divine intervention”? Elisha prayed to God and God raised the widow’s son from the dead. And the witnesses of these events recognized them as something that demonstrated God’s direct intervention, and sure seems to fit what we mean by the term “super-natural.”
So not only is there indeed very much biblical warrant for the idea of divine intervention, there is also plenty of recognition that these citizens of the ANE recognized these events as extraordinary, and outside of the regular course of nature, thus demonstrating God’s direct action as opposed to something that would be expected to happen without God’s direct intervention.
I think C. S. Lewis nailed it…
But there is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say. We must not say ‘They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.’ This is nonsense. When St Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was ‘minded to put her away.’ He knew enough biology for that. Otherwise, of course he would not have regarded pregnancy as a proof of infidelity. When he accepted the Christian explanation, he regarded it as a miracle precisely because he knew enough of the Laws of Nature to know that this was a suspension of them. When the disciples saw Christ walking on the water they were frightened: they would not have been frightened unless they had known the laws of Nature and known that this was an exception. If a man had no conception of a regular order in Nature, then of course he could not notice departures from that order: Nothing is wonderful except the abnormal and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. Complete ignorance of the laws of Nature would preclude the perception of the miraculous just as rigidly as complete disbelief in the supernatural precludes it, perhaps even more so. For while the materialist would have at least to explain miracles away, the man wholly ignorant of Nature would simply not notice them.
[edit… the book referenced, even the kindle edition, is near $50… I won’t be reading it anytime soon, I’m afraid…]
A bacteria always stay a bacteria, to make it evolve into something with more features and new structures (not just a blocking process like resistance to something) you need an external input of information. This doesn’t happen with mutations/natural selection. It can easily be seen with computer simulation of genetic algorithms. Basically the initial “lines of codes” or DNA in the ecosystem will only produce a predetermined level of complexity.
If you want more complexity, you need to externally add lines of code. So the whole theory of evolution is built on an invalid foundation.
It isn’t Divine action (or its notability as a departure from norms) that would be disputed here (at least not by me - and I agree with what Lewis writes - I too think he ‘nails’ it.) It is more a disputation of the modern assumption that there is some demonstrably stark divide between ‘naturally caused’ events as opposed to ‘divinely caused’ events. When we say that the ancients had no notion of ‘supernatural’, we aren’t saying they weren’t capable of recognizing amazing deviations from the regular order of things. We (or I at any rate) say that for them the world (what we would call the cosmos or the universe) was of one seamless piece - not a division into “nature” and “divine”. They didn’t even have a word for “nature” like we do - because to them that was simply … everything, including God or any gods doing their stuff in it.
Regarding the red sea … don’t you find it curious that God sent a wind that blew all night creating the needed path? Why have a wind blow? Couldn’t God just do a bonafide miracle and have the water stand up like walls or “heaps” as indeed the text refers to it? Yet even the text itself tells us that miracles don’t necessarily mean God isn’t making use of other intermediate causes and effects to bring about the desired consequence. To the ancient, this is all one and the same, of course - it is God doing it obviously. Who cares if wind was blowing or not? And yet there those hints sometimes are right there in the text, like warning shots across the bow of our presumption that it must be a choice between what we now call “nature” or God, and that it can’t be both.
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This is fallacious reasoning. Just because a word doesn’t occur doesn’t mean that the concept didn’t exist.
“If we are studying words then the most important tool is [a lexicon], but if we are interested in ideas… it is not reasonable to base our study primarily on words… To take a biblical example a very important passage on the topic of hypocrisy is Isaiah 1:10-15, but the student suckled on the concordance would never find it; instead he would come to an unrefined understanding of the topic.” (Moises Silva, Biblical Words and their Meaning, p. 27).
In addition to Silva’s book I would also recommend James Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing against the gist of what you are saying only that you proposed what I think is clearly a fallacious argument in favor of it.
I do agree with you, and also with Lewis’s own take (and against Hume’s crass hard and fast distinction)… Lewis was careful to describe or define a miracle as an “interference” with nature by a supernatural or divine entity, not a “violation” of nature. An important distinction.
And thus I agree… for all I know, there may well have been some unknown, yet perfectly “natural” explanation behind the burning bush, the sun standing still, the shadow going backwards, the fire on Elijah’s offering, Jesus walking on water, calming the storm, and even Jesus resurrection. (But God interfering by using nature still seems to accomplish things that simply would not or could not happen “on their own”.
I also concur that the ancients did not make a hard and fast distinction between those two (as Hume did), and recognized more than we do (and as we probably should) that yes, God is indeed involved in all things that happen… and I’d note that Lewis, the staunch side fender of appropriate distinction between natural and supernatural, also observed the same as well… e.g., in describing the virgin birth he is careful to acknowledge “ For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument.”
But all that said, I stand by my critique of Walton and others who take these basic true principles way beyond their limits and try to use them beyond logical limits and thus end up defending what seem to me ridiculous absurdities. Everything I said above and acknowledged, It is still beyond plain and obvious that the ancients could and did recognize “divine intervention”, and were quite able to see it as something categorically different than what God “normally” does through the normal outworking of the natural, ordinary, or routine processes of his world.
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Maybe so. I’m trying to think of an example of any culture making use of a concept for which it had not come up with a reference word. Unfortunately I have no experience with translation. Can you think of a perspicuous example of this? In fact, let me also ask @Christy, if/when she has the time, if she has such an example ready to hand. What that woman knows about language is frighteningly enlightening.
Hi Mark,
Interesting you bring this up. I think what Iain McGilchrist says on pp. 106-110 in The Master and his Emissary are relevant for this. You can reread that and look up his references if you like as one possible way to think about the issue.
And by the way, if interesting, I had discussed this earlier, and wanted to point out that this claim that this perspective of a miracle as being something that is “outside” of nature is not something that originated in the modern world with David Hume…
I am not following the attribution of the concepts involved in distinguishing the natural and supernatural as originating from David Hume. I can find the same basic concepts in both Aquinas and Augustine at least…
Thomas Aquinas: Those events then are properly to be styled miracles, which happen by divine power beyond the order commonly observed in nature. Of these miracles there are several ranks and orders. Miracles of the highest rank are those in which something is done by God that nature can never do. What is entirely subject to established order cannot work beyond that order. But every creature is subject to the order which God has established in nature. No creature therefore can work beyond this order, which working beyond the order of nature is the meaning of working miracles.
Augustine: There is no impropriety in saying that God does something against nature when it is contrary to what we know of nature. For we give the name ‘nature’ to the usual and known course of nature; and whatever God does contrary to this, we call ‘prodigies’ or ‘miracles.’
Hume’s unique (and rather questionable) contribution was in styling miracles as a violation of nature. But the distinction between the normal course of nature (or what nature can do on its own), and what God can do “above” or “beyond” (or even “against”) what nature alone is capable of, certainly long predates Hume, originating from Christian theologians, no?
Hi Daniel,
Some precise references for Aquinas and Augustine would be appreciated. I would like to read those in the original Latin.
Thanks for the lead! Headed to bed and that book is always ready to hand.
Well, we understand and borrow useful concepts that other languages have words for all the time. For example, the other day my friend who lives in Japan wrote about the Japanese concept of jishuku, which she described as refraining from what you want to do for the greater good. English speakers can know exactly what that means in the era of COVID-19, but not have their own word for it. Or think of déjà vu, a concept we never came up with an English word for, but which clearly goes beyond the French words we borrowed to label it, since they just mean ‘already seen’ and déjà vu is a specific eiree feeling.
Then you have words that are in use in a culture, but not everyone has the same concept attached to them. I have a vague concept that mesothelioma is a disease, but someone who suffers from it, or a scientist who studies it, or a doctor who treats it would all have different concepts attached to that word based on their experience with it. Or think of #defundthepolice lately. If someone uses that, you have to probe to see what their concept of its meaning is.
But in the context of this discussion, I think both Merv and Shekar are right to an extent. Just because a people did not have a word for ‘nature’ or the habit of making categorical distinctions between natural and supernatural does not mean they would have been unable to describe the differences between a rock and a god. There are passages about idols in the Bible that do just that. But it is also significant that their recorded thoughts do seem to indicate that they saw what we would call “the natural world” as integrated with “the spiritual realm,” so it’s accurate to say that their concept of nature is not the same as our own. That’s not saying they wouldn’t have been unable to understand our label nature/natural if someone explained it to them. We can understand jishuku if someone explains it to us, even though our culture doesn’t have that concept built into our language. It just means we should assume our concept was foreign to their general worldview.
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Funny but I didn’t think about it that way. But of course when we realize something that realization doesn’t come wrapped in a proposition. It has always struck me that language is really for interpersonal communication. For our own ‘house keeping’ it isn’t required. When I was in high school I read something that suggested narrating our experience to ourselves was an odd and addictive thing to do as well as useless. So whenever I catch myself doing that I just notice it and move on. It almost seems as if reserving language for use with others makes it more available for that purpose, not less so.
As @Christy notes we borrow words for concepts all the time, in fact English is notorious for that. So concept/ideas are there and graspable without words. In fact one might even say that assigning a word can create distance and detachment toward the concept. Poetry frequently gets us to see things afresh by shaking us loose from our detached perspective.
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Yeah - granted the lack of a word would be an inadequate basis, by itself, to reach that conclusion; and I didn’t reach it because of that, but rather because I’ve read scholars who know more about those times (and probably know more Hebrew) than I ever will, and they had that conclusion in place. (I think I read it somewhere from C.S. Lewis, though I’m not prepared to give any citation.)
As you (and now Christy) have suggested - it shouldn’t be taken that they had no distinction between Creator and created. They most surely had that. My point was more aimed at their notion of “nature” as an entity unto itself, as distinct from a supernatural realm. We easily think in those categories today, but from what I’ve read, it sounds like they did not. Hence the notions of the perfect celestial spheres - and literally “the heavens” at the top of which would be the highest Heaven where God himself has his throne. Thus the entire cosmos would be God’s playground - all the time - and yes with allowance for others like the devil or us to foment our own little corners of chaos or evil, but only because God allows it to happen. But overall they would have had no problem with the twin assertions that “clouds bring rain” and also “God causes the rain to fall.” Only today with our attempted “either/or” separations do we begin to run into problems accepting “both/and” thinking … not so much for rain or meteorology, curiously - but with evolution; we really drank the modernist “either/or” Kool-Aid - Creationists uncritically guzzled it all the way down!
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I find it strange that someone would suggest that God would not need to have patience with me because God experiences time differently from the way humans do. While is true that God existed before time and God existed long before we did, God still understands time because God is the Source of time and the Creator of time.
Why does God need patience? Because God like us often sees things that are wrong and is tempted to step in and intervene, when it is not appropriate. I expect that most informed people today see a serious disaster coming as the result of climate change. Certainly God must see it also.
The question is, Will God lose patience with us and intervene to save us from ourselves, or will he have patience with us until we finally respond to God warning or allow ourselves to go the way of the dinosaurs? Ther only reason God would no0t need to have patience with us is, God does not care what we do to ourselves and the future is already determined so there is nothing we can do to alter our fate.
God does not know the future because the future does not exist yet. God does not know facts that are not yet true. Yes, God knows what the future will most likely be like qall things being equal, but since some of those things God and the God’s People are trying to change, we still do not KNOW the results.
God created us in God’s Image. This lifts us up and not pull God down. We are not God or gods, but on the other hand God is not Totally Other as many philosophers seem to think. God love humans and humans can love God.
Who says apart from you? Which geneticist? And what does it mean?
Your straw man doesn’t happen. No. And what is complexity? And how is it predetermined by DNA? Have you come across Goedel’s second theorem of incompleteness?
Mutation always changes complexity.
I loved what you wrote until the very end… in fairness, I don’t think us creationists (I’m guessing I’d fall into that category in this context) embrace so uncritically that either/or. For what it is worth, it is just that there are simply some things that I still recognize happen according to God’s very natural means of working (rain falling), and some things that work entirely above, against, contrary to, or beyond what we can expect nature to accomplish given the regular processes he has set in place. Walking in water, turning water into wine immediately, multiplying loaves of bread.
I will endorse wholeheartedly that the same a God is at work who allows water to fall to the earth, be absorbed into grapevines, fill grapes, ferment, and thus be turned into wine… is the same God who did so Instantly and “immediately” at a certain wedding feast. But there still remains a categorical difference between the two. One is expected and unsurprising to happen given the regular, routine course of nature… one is so extraordinary it demands we recognize that it needed some kind of ”direct” assistance that God doesn’t normally do.
So for what it is worth, the fact that I, as an ID sympathizing creationist, look at certain features of biology and classify them into the second rather than the first category should not be evidence that I am embracing some kind of hard “either/or” dualism that something is either raw naturalistically natural or miraculously “assisted.” Just that some of those things we recognize.
Back to my favorite comparison… If you came over to my house to play poker, and you noticed that every time I dealt, 10 times in a row, I just happened to deal myself a royal flush…
If you claimed that there was some kind of intelligent agency at work that was covertly arranging the cards to come up in such a manner, I would not accuse you of embracing an either/or dualism… suggesting that you are failing to recognize that God is just as much at work in the dealing of cards as in meteorology! I would simply acknowledge that you (rightly) noticed that something was happening so extraordinarily counter to what we would expect the normal course of God’s work in routine nature to produce, that you (rightly) recognized that this event was in the category of “intelligently purposed” rather than the category of “naturally occurring.”
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Are you saying that God is behind your cheating at cards?
The problem is that evolution is not extraordinary. All species are evolved in order to populate the earth with life. Evolution is both naturally occurring and intelligently proposed , because it does come from the purposes of God. The miracles of Jesus are signs from God the Father that Jesus is the Christ/Logos. They are in co way natural.
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Points taken, and appreciated. I number myself among creationists too, and so recognize that we come in all shapes and sizes (and drink preferences!)
I think we’ve discussed your excellent royal flush analogy in other times and places, and so I won’t push to revisit that or the attendant ID themes here unless called for. All I will say is this … that a recognition of the extraordinary circumstances that make your run of luck more than suspicious does not imply a denial of the ordinary expectations and outcomes that come out of most card game dealings - which I know you agree with. It’s very Lewisian (I think as you pointed out somewhere above) to realize that miracles can’t be appreciated unless one already has some notion of ‘ordinary’. But what is interesting to me, if we take this into indisputably recognized ‘natural territory’, is that even there we find a continuum of ‘ordinary’ to ‘extraordinary’. I.e. Each breath of air we take is so ordinary we think nothing at all of that. Sunrises we only get every 24 hours, but still … a thoroughly regular part of expected experience. Seasons also. Birth and death - not so ordinary any more for an individual, but ordinary enough for us on a ‘culture-wide’ level. Ice ages or planet-changing meteor impacts? No longer ordinary at all on a span of civilizations, much less human lifetimes. But on geological timescales of things, even these extraordinary events would betray some statistical regularity. All this to say, if we can find a continuum of ordinary to extraordinary on the physical side of the ledger - perhaps the same continuum is in operation for describing how God works? Some things he does commonly - like bringing the rain down. On the other extreme we might find something like resurrection. And a whole mess of divine activity to populate the ‘in-between’ lands as well.
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