I do want to consider anything that may correct or rectify any poor or false understandings of my own. So I thank you for your patience in that regard, and I’ll try not to be unnecessarily condescending in my own word choices, though where I think I see clearly and truly, unless my error can be demonstrated from Scriptures, I should defend that, and help other brothers and sisters also understand the same if that helps them out of some error as well. You are right that there may be [hopefully gentle] condescension involved, but what else are we to do with strongly held opinions? Here I stand; in good conscience, I can do no other.
So you ask if I would accept that God is at the very least a “causal component” in the creation of the universe. My objection to this way of thinking is not over the word “causal”, but over the word “component” (and I realize that was my own original choice of words, and you were just quoting … but it was what you brought back here.)
Let me try at an example here. Would you think it sound understanding if someone argued that “Creation” is the cause that evaporates a puddle of water? It’s the sort of thing that is hard to disagree with, because without creation after all, there would be no puddle much less anything like evaporation. But if our imaginary interlocutor pressed his point and insisted: “no – really; creation is what makes that puddle slowly go away.” We might rightly wonder if our friend harbors some unnecessary objections to the more ordinary sorts of explanations involving the kinetic theory of matter with its kinetic energies and phase transitions. And it wouldn’t be that our friend was technically wrong, but “creation” is more of an entire concept within which all our understandings are formed instead of some particular explanatory principle within it. In the same way God should not be thought of as a potential or real gap-filler in some otherwise regular chain of events --not on a regular basis anyway. But note that this is not an objection that this can never happen. Speaking of the theme of our exchange here: God has “condescended” to be a special cause in many different events --especially two thousand years ago.
While walking the earth in flesh, He was indeed a causal agent in the very human sense that we usually use that word. And even apart from this special and significant incarnation, God does and had done miracles as special signs to and for people.
For us to now insist that we need to find God in empirically evidential terms (in other words as an unmistakably, and otherwise inexplicable divine component in some otherwise causal chain) is in essence as if we are declaring that His incarnation – his life, death, and resurrection, and his ongoing gift of life to such a cloud of witnesses around us today in their transformed lives – that all of that is not enough for us. We are pandering for a second incarnation to complete the first --this time a scientifically irrefutable demonstration that no reasonable mind is able to reject.
Now – I know that is a caricature; I’m not attributing that last thought to you at all, as you [I hope] would rightly reject any suggestion that Jesus’ life and work were in any way deficient or incomplete. But my suggestion is that while you reject that on the surface, it is still the effective position you are settling for when you want to “find God” in creation or science. He is there to be found, to be sure. But he is everywhere. If you can’t see him in gravity, evaporating puddles, or crafting a baby in a mother’s womb, or even in pestilence and calamity, then you won’t find him in geological strata, irreducible complexities, stones, or stars either. But if you follow the Biblical witness of praising his work as evident in all those places, then no deep time or origins-of-life realities (whatever those may be) can prevent you from seeing God everywhere.
So on one side we have the atheists and the many creationists who have become their unwitting disciples in this particular assertion: that god is a potential causal component to be ruled on according to narrowly empirical evidence. And on the other side we have the biblical witness that informs us of God’s hand in everything whether we understand it or not – whether ordinary or extraordinary. Please bring me to better understanding if I err in casting my lot with the latter.