God is omnipresent and immanent and therefore exists all through the universe as well. Inside and outside have dimension implications in most uses of the words, and God, as spirit (John 4:24), is free and exempt from dimensions.
I remember a wonderful argument over whether artificial gravity control sufficed to deal with rapid changes in acceleration or whether inertial dampers were necessary . . . and what would be the difference.
I’m going to see if I can convey my older brother’s mathematical answer to this conundrum . . . .
Posit that
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- God is an entire universe.
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- This universe is in one-to-one correspondence with every point in our universe, and thus is everywhere at all times.
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- This universe consists of just one point, so there are no divisions or distances within God.
See how simple that is? Jerry’s assertion works just fine, and remains true even with God acting within our universe.
And no, apparently mathematically there is no contradiction between #2 and #3.
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Doesn’t work: Paul informs us that
For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.
“All things” doesn’t refer to just at the beginning, it refers to, well, all things, including everything that has come into existence since, whether anvils or airplanes or astronomical telescopes.
Creation is always present tense.
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God is the eternal Now, not that we can get our heads around that, comprehending, only touching, apprehending.
The God who has everything and is everything needs nothing. His only motivation is to give of His abundance to another. Thus God creates for a relationship with others than Himself.
Tools serve a purpose. They are created for an end. But there is another possibility. Creating things which are an end in themselves. Kant observed that this is the ultimate basis for morality that we do not treat people as a means to an end but as an end in themselves. Thus I believe the ultimate ideal for creating children (those created in our own image) is creating them as an end in themselves – an object of love rather than as tools which serve our own ends.
Since God has no needs, I do not believe He has any reason to create tools for an end. Seeking a relationship with others who have a life of their own is why God created life – entities which choose their own purpose. It is human beings who have needs and are thus motivated to treat people as a means to an end, thus it is human beings who twist religion into making people a means to an end, teaching that their religion (speaking for God) gives people their purpose in life.
The universe is a necessity for life, which consists of self-organizing dynamic structures – things made with the capacity to make their own choices and become what they make of themselves through growth and learning. In this way, we have a life and being of our own and can thus be truly other than God with whom God can have an authentic relationship rather than the sham relationships between author and the characters in the author’s books. It is also why evil is possible. Because being free to choose includes the perverse choice of choosing against the life we are given, refusing the love we are offered.
It is the difference between a reality based on logical coherence between cause and effect and the unreality of a dream in which the dreamer can do anything by any means He chooses no matter how inconsistent. But the omnipotence of a dreamer is nothing special for every child has the same in their own dreams.
Thus God has not created tools with a purpose or the clockwork mechanism as you describe, but He does see the truth and reality of what everyone has chosen. He understands the logical coherence of reality better than we do – i.e. He understands the consequences of our choices better. The point of what He does is not to glory in the superiority of His ability to design machines so He can predict everything, that is the fabrication of a human obsession with power and control. Instead God seeks authentic relationships and thus He is the good shepherd and parent seeking to influence the choices of His children and guide his sheep to better pastures.
I don’t believe in it for the reasons already stated. God seeks to be a participant in our lives writing the story with us side by side. It is human beings who have sought the power and control you have attributed to God in order to wield this power over other people and thus they have twisted religion in this direction remaking God into the tool of their obsession. You can only read a book which is already written, and the future is not already written because God chooses to be a participant writing the story with us rather than simply the author of a book with characters who have no life of their own. Being outside of the space-time structure of the universe doesn’t change this in the slightest.
That is a dream world which ignores the constraints of logical coherence. It is the made up “God” who does whatever you say by whatever means you care to dictate and is thus reduced to the lame omnipotence of a dreamer like any child lording it over their dreams which have no reality because of that lack of logical consistency. It is also not the story told in the Bible where God does not get what He wants all the time. To be sure this God still has more power, knowledge, and control than we do, but He limits Himself to logical consistency to make it real and limits Himself to natural law to give us a life of our own. It is those using religion for power who discard these things because they are children seeking to have their cake and eat it too, caring nothing for the necessities for either reality or life.
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Woah…hang on, if one is God fearing and given the historical certainty of the man Jesus, is not the Christian Messiah exactly that…direct evidence of divine intervention?
It would be more difficult to refute the apostles and their first hand account than Socrates and who is going to attempt to agree with my claim that Socrates was a figure of the platonian imagination?
Interesting that you immediately jump to the Incarnation as an example of “the recent past”! I think that in context the “recent past” indicates the time since the start of the scientific revolution.
Before I begin explaining that you have not understood where I am coming from, I would like to make a formal disclaimer, based on my understanding of what infinity means from a mathematical perspective, and a brief statement about what I mean when I say that God is infinite. First, I believe that God is unlimited, in love, power, knowledge, and a whole lot of other ways. That does not mean that God does everything; it just really means that I (and neither does any other human) do not know for sure what God has done, and none of us get to tell God what God can do. Next absolutely true point is that all human knowledge is finite, including my own. That makes all human knowledge, being finite, mathematically equivalent to 0% of the total infinite knowledge about God. Since my knowledge is human, this does most definitely apply to what I understand.
I do not mean that my limited (and, as I am also sure, distorted, because of my human limitations) is not important; I can have no real relationship with God without having some knowledge about God.
However, the fact that I, and every other human also, have such a small fraction of the totality that is God makes it very possible (virtually certain mathematically) that another partial subset of the total knowledge of God can be different, and still both be true. The real size of our infinite God is such that the differences that appear incompatible in two finite descriptions might still both be essentially true. And this is not even recognizing the fact that all of our human finite understandings of God are also at least in some respect distorted; the incompatibilities that we see may also be due to distortion.
That said, my formal disclaimer is this: I absolutely guarantee that my understanding of who God is, my knowledge about God, is not the only correct, or essentially correct, description of God. (I do also believe, based on the real mathematics of infinity, and the oft-stated belief by many that God is infinite, that no other human has the only correct description of God.) That is, I believe that my understanding of God is a good, partial, but probably somewhat distorted description, that has been very useful to me in helping me form a meaningful and correct relationship with God. I also believe that your understanding of God is a good, partial, but probably somewhat distorted description that has been useful to you in helping you form a meaningful and correct relationship with God. With this perspective, my intent in engaging in this discussion is twofold: I expect that I will gain some improvement in my understanding, and I hope that you will gain some improvement in your understanding. I do not expect that either of us will choose to completely discard our previous position.
Now back to your objection to my belief that God doesn’t know, from before creating the universe, what He had really created, and how it would all come out, including knowing exactly when, where, and how He would intervene directly outside the laws of physics that He created, in order to get the outcomes He desired.
Your assumption that the bible says that God does not get what He wants all the time is perhaps partially true. However, God says rather clearly that even those individual things that are not what He wants do not circumvent His purposes in this world. He promises that “All things work together for good…”
In order to understand what these two apparently contradictory statements about what happens in God’s world, I look to some interesting observations about how the world God created actually functions. Think about the way the things we use every day are really constructed from tiny elementary particles that group together to form atoms, and the atoms combine to form molecules, and the molecules link together to form the objects we use, even some fairly complex machines, like cars. We now know that a car is made up of many more than trillions of atoms, each with many electrons linked, and we cannot know the exact position and state of motion of even one of those electrons. However, we do have other means of observing how objects on our human scale function, and can predict the behavior of very large numbers of atoms and molecules that are coupled together. In fact, we can predict well enough that we can actually get in the car and drive it where we want it to take us, without knowing in detail which atoms from which carbohydrate molecules will break down and change into carbon dioxide and water, and release enough energy, controlled adequately by the combustion chamber, to make the car work. The point is that the world that God created actually functions on multiple different levels of observation and levels of control. And the law of large numbers allows us to predict very accurately the behavior of a large quantity of linked particles even though we cannot possibly measure the detailed behavior of any of the individual particles.
I am quite sure that God uses a similar kind of structure in human behavior in order to let us have free will for individual actions, and yet He makes sure that the sum total of the effects of all the actions on and around us turn out in such a manner that His purposes for us are fulfilled. This does not mean that nothing bad will ever happen to me. This does mean that what I think are the good purposes for me might not be what God intends, what God’s purposes are for me.
How God ensures that things fit together as He desires is something that God has chosen to make not observable to us in this world, most of the time. For example, if it just so happened that some gamma rays hit cancer cells so that someone was cured, it would be impossible for us to tell whether God created those gamma rays just at that time, or knew that a supernova in a distant galaxy hundreds of thousands of years ago would emit a burst in just the right direction. I do believe that God is much more active in the world than He lets us observe, at least in part because our free will, our ability to make decisions in this world that have real consequences in this world, is an important part of God’s purposes for us here. A related point is that my own personal “proof” of God’s existence is subjective, and is not based on repeatable experimental observations of God.
And I do have a question for you, about the logical coherence of your worldview. Do you really believe that God doesn’t know what will happen, and yet guarantees that “All things work together for good…”?
And that He does limit Himself to natural law, and yet will make that guarantee, without knowing what choices we will make?
I don’t believe that God created a world that He didn’t understand. I also do not believe that my existence in this world is all there is, or even that my existence in this world is anywhere near as important as my promised unending existence with Him in the resurrection.
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Even this does not provide direct, objective evidence of God’s existence. The circularity of your reasoning is right there in your conditional “if one is God fearing”. Yes this is an important part of what I believe. But it is not objective, observable evidence, sufficient to show (not convince, show by observation) an atheist that God exists.
My point stands. If, as I believe, God exists, then God has chosen to keep Himself partially hidden, not visible in this world in such a manner that His existence is shown to all.
CJ Cherryh is my favorite science fiction author. She realistically portrays coming out of hyperspace in her books (with the g forces involved on the spaceship and the human body).
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The Expanse included one such very memorable deceleration.
First you have altered what scripture says. It does not say that all things work together for good. The evil people do is NOT guaranteed to accomplish good. Scripture says nothing of the sort and indeed says the opposite. Here is the unaltered passage.
Romans 8:28 We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
Wow! BIG DIFFERENCE! There is no word “guarantee” there anywhere. You have added this all on your own. And what we know for sure is that GOD works for good, not that God makes sure everything which happens always accomplishes something good. Not only is this not what it says but it is obvious that it isn’t true in our experience of the world. Quite the contrary, I believe hell exists because all you have to do is look around you to see that people create a hell around them by what they do.
He makes no such guarantee. However, in many things we are very predictable. There are people who are very good at calculating what people will do. But this is not 100%. What makes us predictable are our habits. Particular those self-destructive habits we call sin. It is not because the future is already written but because we have already traded away some of our free will in the choices we have already made.
I don’t agree that understanding the world equals making it into something which is perfectly predictable. I don’t agree that the only thing anybody understands are the books which they have written themselves. That sounds like the dogma of someone with an obsession with power and control. They cannot conceive that anyone would ever choose not to control everything they have any contact with. I would not want to be the child of such a person. I would not to work with such a person.
Neither do I. I don’t need this to be the case. Nonexistence is fine if that is what happens. But it seems a little too easy to me.
Yes, I think the same. I believe eternal life means there is no end to what God has to give and no end to what we can receive (learn, appeciate, enjoy, challenge…) from Him.
It does seem to me that we agree on the thing that seems most important to both of us!
I don’t believe that God interferes with my free will; I do believe that God allows each of us to choose what to do, and that our choices do have real consequences in this world. My comments earlier about “all things” coming from a slightly different translation does not mean that I believe that every single thing is good for me, according to what I think is good for me. Two differences: I believe that God works with us humans like He designed the molecules of air to work (and a lot of other things): The general mass is predictable on a larger scale even though each of the individual particles can be moving at some random, unknown direction and speed. So it’s not each action that impacts on me, but the way all those actions combine, that works together for good for me. And the other difference, and a bigger one: it’s not what I think is good for me, it’s what God knows is good for me, really.
I hope this clarifies what I meant.
That is what people (scientists) thought earlier in the last century. Erwin Schrodinger even wrote a book “What is life?” saying that the fluctuations of quantum physics had no impact on us.
They were wrong. We had this routine habit in science of replacing non-linear differential equations with a linear approximation. And we found this was misleading us. Small fluctuations do not just average out to no effect. Many physical processes selectively amplify fluctuations to alter the large scale behavior of systems because of the action of these non-linear differential equations in everything. This known as chaos science and the butterfly effect. Ilya Prigogine proved that in order to predict these non-linear systems you must have the initial conditions to an infinite degree of precision. But you can only do that in a computer simulation. In the real world there is no such thing as an infinite degree of precision because of quantum physics. Thus quantum indeterminacy is amplified to affect everyday events. And so the weather is not perfectly predictable, let alone living organisms.
Well… yes and no. I has been one of the principles of my guiding philosophy that everything in life is a gift from God from which we have something to gain or learn. But one can learn from terrible things and it doesn’t change them into good things.
In the end, there is only perfect justice because physical life is not all there is and God’s love and desire to comfort and reward us for our hardships makes up for the inequities in life which are many. Indeed it has been one of my arguments that the only thing which makes the creation of life (where suffering is unavoidable) a moral thing to do, is this will of the creator to love us.
I am certainly a fan. I think “Hunter of World” is one of the very best science fiction books ever written. She uses untranslatable words to get at fundamentally different ways that aliens may think and interact with the world. I met her at a science fiction conference in Salt Lake City (the only one I ever went to) along with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Larry Niven. She was quite impressive in person and it got me to read more of her books. Larry Niven was much less impressive, though I think some of His books with Jerry Pournelle are also some of the very best science fiction (like “Mote in God’s Eye”). I like and still read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books also.
Please note exactly why it is not possible to develop a precise prediction: For any created being in the created universe, we cannot measure accurately enough the initial conditions to make predictions. So we are left to make our choices based on incomplete knowledge. However, I believe that this restriction does not apply to God. It seems quite possible to me that God could know with infinite precision where every single element of energy was, and its exact state (motion, or anything else that matters) because He created each and every one of those particles (I am not sure infinite precision can be attained within a computer simulation, however). I also believe that God is alive and well and intervening regularly in this world, but at a level that allows Him to remain “hidden” (as @St.Roymond says). On the issue of God not allowing Himself to be objectively and inarguably observed, I did have an interaction a long time ago with an atheist, who said that he would grovel if God showed Himself, otherwise would not grovel. The point struck me immediately, that God does not want His children to grovel. He wants us to love Him (Jesus said something like that, too, I do believe). And if He showed Himself, some of His children would grovel instead of loving Him.
If God does not want to show Himself, for a very good reason (as that atheist taught me), then God will be very careful about the circumstances and the evidence He leaves when He does intervene in our lives. I do believe this understanding is quite consistent with all known human observations about whether God can be discovered directly through scientific observations.
And then back to the question of whether things are really predictable on a large scale, even without knowing details of the elementary particles making up the mass being predicted. We can predict with some degree of acurracy, and can even calculate the uncertainty in our prediction. But God, especially a God who exists outside of the space and time of this created universe, can know how things have come out (from His perspective) or will come out (from our perspective). (A side note here: I believe it is using some rather inappropriate anthropomorphic thinking to imagine that God’s perspective is the same as ours, whatever anyone thinks of “omnitemporality.”)
I am not saying that the bad things are turned into good things. I am saying that the sum total of everything that happens to me in this life, when combined together, does work out for good for me, according to God’s purposes for me, not according to what I think, in this world, what would be good for me in this world. I trust God, believe that God knows better why He put me into this world, in precisely this place, for this rather limited time, than I can possibly guess while I am here.
Maybe this is a bit off the original topic for this thread, but my understanding has been significantly influenced by both religious training and a somewhat more than casual understanding of 20th century science (PhD in physics) and a serious effort to understand what a study of God’s universe says about God.
Incorrect. In quantum physics those initial conditions do not exist to an infinite degree of precision. It is NOT that we just don’t know them. That is hidden variable theory which has been proven wrong. Things exist in a superposition of states. The future is a superposition of possibilities. It isn’t written yet and that is the real arrow of time – future possibilities becoming past actualities.
Yes, God can know the future. God can do anything. But that doesn’t mean God must do everything or know everything. God can participate in the writing of the future, which means it is not known, because God is neither a non-participant nor an automaton to be predicted and controlled any more than we are. Why would people invent a theology which turns God into such a thing? Again it is a human obsession with power and control and turning religion into a tool of power, enslaving God to their theology so that religion becomes a basis for entitlement. And that is what changes religion into a force of evil in the history of the world.
Οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν τὸν θεὸν πάντα συνεργεῖ εἰς ἀγαθόν, τοῖς κατὰ πρόθεσιν κλητοῖς οὖσιν.
(I quote the Greek so I don’t have to flip back and forth between tabs.)
This isn’t the easiest verse to translate; some of the difficulty is reflected in variant readings that show how some scribes were trying to make it read more easily. For starters, here it is (roughly) in the Greek clause (not precise word) order:
But we know that to the loving-God-ones all things are working together (in)to good to those according-to-His-purpose being called (ones).
Note that “God” is not the subject of “working together” – “all”, or “all things” to make better English, is the subject. We assume it means that God is causing them to work together (big variant reading is scribes sticking in “God” as the subject!), but it doesn’t come out and say that.
So “all things work together for good” is correct but it’s taken from context: this is a statement that is true for those who are loving God, which is qualified by “the ones called according to His purpose”. As it usually is quoted in English it comes across as a statement about everything working together, but that’s not really the case; it’s a statement about a reality that applies to those who are loving God.
Second, it isn’t about making things come out good, it’s about things turning out good for you, i.e. that will make you grow. The lead verse in the paragraph talks about how we don’t even know what to pray for, and that thought should govern here, i.e. we don’t even know what’s good for us! The temptation is to take this verse as a promise that everything will be rosy and then complain that God isn’t keeping His promise when things aren’t rosy, but that’s not what it means, it means that whether things seem rosy or not they are working (somehow) for our good, whether we can see that or not.
Third here I want to note that it isn’t talking about weaving events into the future; “loving” is present tense, which means that if you fall on your face and get a bloody nose this verse isn’t saying somehow that will get pulled into a scheme that will turn out good for you, it’s saying that it’s working good for you right there and then.
So Jerry’s point “that even those individual things that are not what He wants do not circumvent His purposes in this world” does fit here. There’s no guarantee that things will seem good to us, though, so you have a bit of a point.
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I was just listening to an Orthodox priest who summed up the Christian life as, “We fall down. He helps us back up”, and he said that in the West the impetus when we fall is to be miserable and grovel, but that Jesus is instead bending down asking, “What are you doing down there? Get up!”
I know that one of the Fathers made that point in connection with the instance where Jesus takes the girl’s hand and says, “Girl, get up” as an illustration for us when we feel dead and defeated by sin – so his illustration has good precedent – to remember that Jesus is right there with His hand out, waiting for us. He definitely doesn’t want us to grovel!
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