Well I certainly don’t believe God simply loses faith in us (like in the movie “Legion”). I don’t think that is in God’s character. But I think there are conditions where a loving parent will conclude this has simply got to stop. In other words, I don’t think God kills women and children just because He is tired or disgusted with mankind. But when He sees us making a complete hell of the lives of those women and children (where even they would prefer death) then that is a different matter entirely.
Yes, what I often call an authentic relationship… writing the story of our lives together.
Indeed! I frankly don’t see God offering explanations for much of anything. There is little point in explaining most things to a two year old. But as we grow up see a bit more explanation like in the teachings of Jesus and Paul… but not about nature. The thing about science is that this sort of knowledge basically represents power and power is only a solution for superficial things. The deeper problems of our lives is not something more power can solve.
God being the creator means that He is necessary to the existence of the creation. The Bible tells us that it is a Romantic connection rather than a Rational connection. Science can only examine rational cause and effect relationships. Science develops an epistemic translation of the empirical evidence from creation. It is valid but incomplete as it cannot examine the romantic connection between the creation and God. The Bible was written with manmade words in an ancient language with limited vocabulary. It has been translated literally meaning that it is limited to the human knowledge of the time. That is okay but it only gives us a romantic view rather than a rational explanation. The Bible must be translated epistemically in order to compare it to what science discovers. An epistemic translation of Genesis would read, “In the beginning God created space and matter, and the matter was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep.” It matches with what the creation tells us but it loses the romance. Albert Einstein solved the riddle of the time problem with his theory of relativity. Don’t lose the romance with God. God is Love.
I find it unlikely that ט֥וֹב is verbal here; that’s rare to absent in Genesis and even Exodus, and the phrase כִּי־ ט֥וֹב generally carries the implied verb of being, i.e. “that it was good”.
Though this reminded me of one of my Hebrew professors noted that the Hebrew can be read as God actually speaking, e.g. in verse 10 God would be speaking to the waters and saying, “Seas!”
In some Jewish mythology the nations were actually given different languages to make it harder for the “Watchers” who’d been set over them to collude in their rebellious schemes.
My older brother the mathematician conceived of God as an entire universe – and God only knows how universes feel!
It also removes God from things by a gap; if the universe is a machine then God is less immediate and less personal.
I think everyone here knows my treatment of the hymn of the Firstborn in Colossians and the firm commitment to the teaching that God sustains everything in existence from moment to moment. That’s the core of what God being Creator means for me, but more specifically–
When I look at the world and remember that God is Creator, I know that behind every object there is our Lord, holding together both it and all the elementary particles that make it up. It’s as though there is an energy hiding behind, under, and inside everything, just a slight shift in realm or dimension away from the world we call real – not any impersonal energy, but the energy of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. So if I could just see farther, or deeper, or higher I would see Him peering out and calling, “Learn more! Learn more! Seek Me!”
So when I pick up the bucket of ashes from the cold fireplace God is with me both in my action and in the ashes, in my muscles and in the bucket; and when I pull weeds in the flower beds He is in my hands and in the weeds; and when I plant a tree in the dunes He is with me in the hole I dig and in the tree I put in it as well as the water I give it and the stimulant fertilizer I soak into the sand.
The immediate and particular will of the Creator is that each created energy should act according to its kind. That is the meaning of saying that the Creator wills the existence of such a being, for such a being can exist only by exercising such an action; he
cannot will the existence without willing the activity. If there is any mystery here about what God wills, the mystery is natural, not theological; it is the mystery which shrouds the being or action of physical ultimates. We cannot determine the immediate divine will for atomic (or as we now somewhat absurdly say, sub-atomic) energies, because we cannot perfectly isolate or define those energies themselves. If we could know them as they are, we should know what their Creator immediately wills in them.
I will only say the ends are not independent of the means. God’s omnipotence is not the ability to accomplish things by whatever means one cares to dictate. God’s omnipotence means having the knowledge of how to accomplish things and thus to know the means which produce the desired ends.
I indicate why the existence of such a being (to quote Farrer) may be considered a mystery of nature. We cannot be above the world, in a privileged position that transcends the Universe, and analyse beginnings and ends of the totality of what can be known. The scientific method does enable us however, to examine physical reality in the Universe and dispassionately draw conclusions from our observations. If physicists conclude the wave equation may be expressed as the sum of the forces in the Universe and these are measured in some way, then in theory such an activity conforms to the scientific method. If astronomers observe galaxies that provide light that has travelled for an enormous amount of time, and from this obtain an age for the Universe, this too is reasonable.
The will of the Creator “is that each created energy ( being or object) act according to its kind.”
God is the personification of mathematics. Many Christians find comfort in the idea that “God is in control”. That may be true, but it also means that the world is the way God wants it to be. It is the personification of thinking that mathematics is in control.
Well, I looked it up in a Hebrew dictionary and it is a perfective 3rd person masculine singular verb. Lots of languages express English adjectives with stative verbs.
Yes and no. God wants a relationship. But a relationship means it is more than what you want. And that means that the other parties in the relationship can choose things which are not what you want such as things which are self-destructive.
Sounds like pantheism. But then a lot of Christians sound pantheistic to me.
For me this equates to God is a creation of man, because I don’t believe math is discovered but that it is invented. It is part of the way we impose our own structure on reality in this case with the axoms we accept and the mathematical questions we ask. I don’t think this is anywhere near a one-way enterprise and mathematics is not the universal language some people have thought.
Mathematics is discovered, not invented. The alphanumeric symbols that we use to express math are invented, but the relationships that they represent are discovered. The same is true with God. The alphanumeric symbols to create words that we use to write scripture are invented, but the relationship to God that they express is discovered. Religion is invented, but our relationship to God is discovered. While neither Mathematics nor God does anything that would not happen anyway, it is useful in life to understand the relationship that that they have with us.
Jesus said, "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there.Lift up a stone, and you will find me there."
It like saying chess was discovered, not invented. I do not agree. There was no chess before it was invented – otherwise you stretch the meanings of the terms to the breaking point where everything is discovered and nothing is invented. You can say we discover things as we play the game of chess, but these are the consequence of rules we invented. Mathematics is the same. Frankly it is like saying we discover how beautiful our painting is after we paint it. This is a different meaning of the word “discover” because it is not finding something which was already there.
The relationships only come into being after the things they connect are brought into being. To say they are discovered is like saying the God discovered the distance (as a function of time) between the Milky Way and Andromeda even though these are things He created.
The above is not true of God, because he is not contingent upon anything. He is the origin and not a consequence of things anyone invented. The most you can say is that it is true of our theology which just like mathematics is the imposition of our own mental order upon things.
That is not correct because unlike God we are contingent beings – contingent not only on God’s creation but also on our own choices.
And the same is true of any other things we claim to know about God, because that is theology and not God Himself. To speak of things which are true of God Himself is to speak of things which are unknowable. …unless by “knowing” you mean something we believe and live by rather than something which matches an external reality.
The most you can say is that our theology points to something beyond ourselves. But I wouldn’t say this of mathematics. Sure we can use math to describe things of nature and those things do exist, but I think it unwise to confuse this description with the reality any more than we should confuse the word we name it in our language with the reality to which it refers.
Earlier today I was talking with a friend about the conflict between the idealism (nothing is real but ideas) of Bohr and the realism of Einstein and Schrodinger. Mine is an intermediate position. I reject the idealism of Bohr but caution that the realities must not be confused with our description of them in science. I think there is excellent evidence of a reality out there because it defies our expectations, but this doesn’t change the fact that our perception of reality is inherently subjective. This means there is some truth to Bohr’s ideas about how to do science even if his idealism is actually wrong.
In chess, the rules were made up, invented. In math, sure, there are some arbitrary definitions, but the relationships between preexisting relationships are not made up.
π is a preexisting relationship between a circle and its diameter (π r2 described the area of a circle before that formula was discovered), e can be described many ways and i has real world and ‘nonimaginary’ applications, not just invented ones.
My older brother used to say that in Heaven, with this world gone, there will only be two fields of knowledge of any value, mathematics and theology.
Except, he would add, that since we are right there with God theology is no longer meaningful – and so we will all contemplate mathematics.
Your comment even does away with that – so what shall we spend our time on in Heaven?
It can be. But prior to Numbers and in the כִּי ט֥וֹב construction it is more likely functioning as the adjective.
Though as another Hebrew prof reminded us every now and then, all of Hebrew is verbal, i.e. verb-centered, so many adjectives started as verb forms as did many nouns – or maybe even most of both.
That was the topic of a PhD student debate at Berkeley when my brother was tutoring many math PhD students there. It’s something I’d love to have a transcript from though I’d probably be seriously lost.
Did you know there’s a proof that 2 + 2 = 4? Not specifically those numbers, but the operation of addition.
Carrying the Gospel to “strange new worlds, new life, and new civilizations, boldly going where no Christian has gone”, and some of us shall judge the nations and have dominion over people of the Cosmos, and our Lord shall reign for ever everywhere.
