Scott Tucker wrote:
> on 8/27/01 12:17 PM, george murphy wrote:
>
>
> > It is a remarkable thing that no canonical writer ever
> used nature as a proof of God's existence. All set out to >
> convince us of it. But David, Solomon, and the rest never
> said: 'There is no void; therefore there is a God.'
>
>
> Would you not consider the apostle Paul's statement in Rom. 1:19-20 a
> "nature proof?"
First, note that I was responding here to a request for Pascal's
ideas & was not simply supplying my own.
However, I think Pascal is about 99.9% right here here. In
Romans 1 Paul is not making an appeal to his readers to believe in the
existence of God because of the evidence of nature. What he is saying
is that people should recognize God's deity and power from creation but
that in fact they don't - not that they don't believe in any God at all
but that they misrepresent God and worship things other than the true
God. I.e., the problem is bad natural theology.
This fundamental problem of sin affects all people. Paul deals
with it from 1:18 through 3:20. At that point one might expect him to
say, "OK, now let's see how to know and worship God correctly from
nature." But he does no such thing. Instead, he immediately turns to
what God has done in Christ. & Christ, not nature, is where God reveals
himself.
Theologia naturalis delenda est!
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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