> Is it deistic to believe that God created the laws of Gravitation and lets
> those laws now govern the movement of the planets? Or must a theist believe
> that god Himself pushes the planets in a circle? God created the pathways
> in the phase space of the genomes and this represents a considerable amount
> of control on what will happen.
I want to jump in just on this point. Whether or not a position
is labelled "desitic" or "theistic" isn't fundamental. But IMO as the
words are generally used, the answers to your questions are "Yes".
Traditional Christian views of providence would state the
matter something like this: God causes the planets to orbit the sun by
working with aspects of the world (in our current understanding,
space-time curvature) which obey rational laws (Einstein's equations)
which God has chosen. The question "does God or gravitation make the
planets orbit the sun" is like asking "Did Booth or a bullet kill
Lincoln?"
Whether or not that encompasses all views that could be called
"thesistic" is, I suppose, open to debate.
George Murphy