Discussions about when God understood the goodness of creation aside, the goodness of it is important. And the reality of the continuing PROcreation. What is described as completed in Genesis is the beginning of a process that seems to have no natural end, and which is by it’s nature “good”. The idea of Creation and what creation would continue to bring forth (I think) was good from it’s inception, BUT the idea is not the same as the thing – even for God, even the Christian God. God isn’t recorded as having declared the idea good and satisfying enough in itself. God declared each new living process good as He saw them fulfilling his command to “Bring forth! Bring forth!”*
*(See James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation,” God’s Trombones.)
Neither “procedural” nor “procedural generation” means design. Procedural generation means the use of automation and if “randomness” is used, it is derived from the position in a fixed way so that the same place always gives the same result (usually according to some overall seed, so it is not the same when you play a new game). For computer programs and games this is important because you don’t want to occupy computer memory by generating anything ahead of time but only as needed. In the case of the God’s creation of the universe this is not a factor and everything is generated according to the timeline of natural laws.
But what I suppose you are trying to say is that there is design in the procedure used to generate things. Or as you put it earlier, there is the design of the system (i.e. natural laws) by which it all works. As a theist, I certainly believe God designed the space-time mathematical laws of nature to promote the development of life… and you could also say it is to promote sufficient complexity for development of beauty (and fascination) in other things. For example the endless variations in the different kinds of stars their are. Perhaps that is not a necessity for life, but it is fascinating. On the other hand, maybe it is a necessity for life because life needs variation that comes from the fluctuations which contribute to diversity in all things including stars.
I’m glad you posted this; somehow I’d gone right on by the following:
That only works if you think God is an individual Who is talking to Himself. Presumably all the angels were watching to see where He was going with this, and at the end of each bit of work He told them, “See? That’s working like it’s supposed to!”‡
‡ with thanks to a Korean/black inner city pastor/priest and his “street version” of the scriptures.
not really; there are one or two passages in all of the Old Testament where that can be gotten away with, but if you apply a test more than one of my grad school professors expounded, putting that rendition into other verses at random, it turns out to be a crappy translation. “Functional” is far better. “Beautiful” is something of a subset of “functional”, along with “pleasant” and “prosperous”, but all these translations have at root that the item described as ט֚וֹב works properly.
God is, was, and always will be, and is outside of time (which, we can say, He created). If that wasn’t the case, it wouldn’t be God. It’s also way beyond our imagination. (I use the word “it” because God isn’t specifically male, in fact the Holy Spirit is often thought of as female).
He’s a philosopher, educator, author, speaker, and retired President of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and is founder and currently active as president of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing educational materials on the complementarity of science, philosophy, and faith. He is also president of the Spitzer Center of Ethical Leadership, dedicated to helping Catholic and for-profit organizations develop leadership, constructive cultures, and virtue ethics.
And he is blind!!! Fr. Spitzer is big on the Big Bang, Near-death-experiences, and (I suspect) much to the dismay of skeptics, a believer in the authenticity of The Shroud of Turin, and obviously the crucifixion, entombment, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.
I may need to seek a second opinion on this one. @Christy if you have a frivolous minute available do you think the word in question can also be rendered as “beautiful”?
I’m guessing the difficulty involves the way we understand “beauty”. If it is seen only as adornment then probably not a good exchange for goodness as a rationale for approval. But I personally reject utility as adequate substitute for either goodness or beauty.
Here is the fuller quote:
In the account of the creation contained in the opening of the Book of Genesis, after each act of creation, it records that God looked and ‘saw that it was good’.122 To me this speaks of an encounter with something new, of something free and hitherto undetermined – of veritable creation; not just, as Bergson put it, the unfolding of a fan. What it suggests is that God did not know already that it was good (the Hebrew word can also be translated ‘beautiful’) without having to see it. It speaks of something free, and Other.
I consulted the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, as one does in these cases.
The word in question is a stative verb, qal, and its sense in the context of the creation narrative is defined as “state in which objects are of a high quality and/or a pleasure to look at.”
So, seems like beautiful could capture that.
Another use of the same word occurs in Numbers 24:5 and is translated beautiful.
“How beautiful are your tents, Jacob,
your dwelling places, Israel!" (NIV)
Other translations render the word fair or lovely in that context. The idea relates to being a pleasure to behold.
Similarly in Genesis 49:15, beautiful would probably work too:
"When he sees how good the countryside is
and how pleasant the land,
he will bend his shoulder to the load
and submit himself to hard labor. (NLT)
Other senses of the same verb include describing just or right behavior or character (being morally good), being in high spirits, merry, rejoicing (feeling emotionally good) and being in a state of safety, health, and prosperity (“doing well”).
In regard to the sacred, the I/Thou distinction always applies regardless whether or not one regards God as humanoid or familial. I think of “God” as a placeholder name for what we will never completely understand so long as we are as we are now. I don’t think it hurts anything to think of God in more specific ways than we have direct evidence for if it helps one form a better relationship. But for my money being human-like is faint praise and being familial is far too distant to describe the relationship of oneself to God,
My personal emphasis on the ‘God being the creator’ is not in the past, it is here and now. It is awesome to think that we can communicate and walk with the One who has the wisdom and power to start and create everything we can see.
Even if I can do next to nothing to matters that affect our life, everything is possible for Him. He created and owns what we can see and nothing can happen if He says ‘No, stop’. For some reason, He has allowed much bad to happen but even among all the evil happening, He has the dominion. It is just a matter of staying close to Him, listening what He tells (through scriptures & the Holy Spirit) and act based on it, live it. Then we can say that the Creator is here and in Him, impossible can turn to possible and invisible can become visible - if He decides so.
I don’t sense this is true. Whether or not He has such power I think He first of all creates from love and so bestows freedom to all He brings forth. Would He rescind that freedom or start over if the result displeased Him enough? I have no idea but it doesn’t seem to necessarily be so and doubt it.
I believe the Creator has given some amount of free will to us creatures and much of the destructive behaviors we see are caused by us creatures using our free will. In that sense, the stage is relatively free for our play.
I do not believe we have totally free will. Our free will is restricted to making a choice between a very limited set of options at any given moment. God denying something to happen is compatible with this kind of restricted free will. The underlying assumption is that the Creator is still active in this world and sometimes intervenes to what might happen.
He can even create something novel or mold something existing to something else - that is ongoing creation. How this happens is a technical question. If we believe that evolution is one of the processes the Creator uses, then we can view the ongoing evolution as a part of the ongoing creation.
No. But He might (and I think He did) change strategies in His dealings with us – changing the conditions under which free will is not producing the best results. I think the Bible tells of such a change of strategy in Genesis 11 dividing humanity up into competing cultures and nations. This limits our choices if we want to survive because other nations doing things in a better way are always ready willing and able to take advantage if we become too depraved.
Consider the cold war. Depriving its population of economic freedom under communism only ended up depriving everyone of the fruits of human enterprise and ingenuity. It was a lesson learned over and over in communists regimes around the world as communist policies only achieved greater starvation and poverty, and it was non-communists countries who came to the rescue with food and other products which they had in plenty.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and I know there are biblical stories in which God is portrayed as washing His hands of us - even literally with a flood. But while I’ve come to think I need the placeholder name “God” to make sense of existence and the ‘something greater’ I’ve always intuited, I don’t think of God as a mighty human being with our emotional proclivities and reactions. Fine in a mythos of course and I am gaining appreciation for some ways in which the mythos of Christianity is most excellent.
I think the idea that God creates like either an engineer or a magician, the way we see ourselves creating things, is overly anthropomorphic. I see God as acting primarily through nature to create the universe. I would say that nature is God’s technology and he uses it to create the way we might use a hammer. Sometimes he manipulates nature in ways that we do not understand and call miracles. In practice though, I don’t see God’s relationship with his creation being as impersonal as our relationship with a hammer. Instead, he is partnering with his creation to continue to create and he gives it freedom to go its own direction, which is also my explanation for why things happen that don’t seem like they are in God’s will. At the end of the day though, he is always gently nudging nature in the direction he wants. The emergence of humanity, Israel, and the incarnation of Jesus Christ are examples of this nudging in my opinion. In this way, I would say that God is more like a cosmic lion tamer than he is a cosmic engineer. He is constantly working in and with the universe, “training” it to behave the way in which he ultimately intends it to behave. I do not not think of God as being an explanation for what science cannot explain. I would not be troubled if science was able to explain everything. God is not the answer to the question of how, but for what purpose and who it was all for. This of course is just the way I think about it. God is at least the mystery we all feel is at the heart of the universe. Even nontheists get a numinous feeling when considering the mysteries of the cosmos, though they don’t attribute it to God. God will always be a mystery but I believe that he has revealed enough of himself to us in order for us to participate in his being in an intentional way rather than just by virtue of existing in his creation.
