Re: [asa] RE: Malebranche (the four basic fources in nature)

Moorad & Merv -

If I may repeat in the vernacular something I said in an earlier post, the claim that "God is indeed the only true causal agent" seems to picture God as a control freak. Nothing else - d.h., none of God's creatures really gets to make anything happen in the world.

Analogy: If you lift a weight with a pulley, both you and the pulley are causes - both do something in lifting the weight. You don't do it by yourself. You could, & that would parallel God's unmediated action (if such ever happens), but you didn't. Of course the analogy gets stretched because you or someone else had to make the pulley, but someone who makes a machine, while a prior cause of whatever the machine does, still isn't the sole cause of that happening. & the fact that ultimately all creatures exist because of God's creatio ex nihilo doesn't make God the sole cause of everything they effect.

Merv -

The last part of your post -

> But in the hands of a believer... welcome to the world of natural theology. Science can be baptized to take its place
> within the psalmist's repertoire. But science does not and cannot get there independently.

is a good statement of the matter. To nail things down you could expand the 1st sentence a bit: "But in the hands of a believer ... welcome to the world of legitimate natural theology." Unfortunately most of what passes for natural theology is illegitimate, an attempt to get to God, creation, &c from observation of the world & reason alone, apart from God's historical revelation.

Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alexanian, Moorad" <alexanian@uncw.edu>
To: <mrb22667@kansas.net>; <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 10:30 AM
Subject: RE: [asa] RE: Malebranche (the four basic fources in nature)

>I think one has to make a clear distinction between the mental
> constructs we use when we do science, or any rational thinking for that
> matter, and the actual, existing universe. In addition, science does not
> deal with the question of being, which is the realm of metaphysics and
> theology. Accordingly, it is in the fundamental ontological sense that
> one can consider that God is indeed` the only true casual agent.
>
> Moorad
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of mrb22667@kansas.net
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 10:07 AM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: RE: [asa] RE: Malebranche (the four basic fources in nature)
>
>>
>> Some take the idea of "God as sustainer" to mean that he holds
> particles
>> together (electrons and planets in orbit)- in that case I think the
>> theory of God doing this has been replaced by the strong and weak
>> nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetic force.
>>
>> ...Bernie
>
> I guess this may be true to the extent that we insist on thinking of
> Divine
> fingerprinting as within the purview of science. But if science is
> limited (the
> EC view) then this is no more valid than saying that God (by His own
> admission)
> was replaced by the wind (Exodus 14:21) or that He was replaced by
> foreign
> armies (Assyria or Babylon used by God against Israel) or that He is
> replaced by
> what we call random chance (Proverbs 16:33). The list goes on. And if
> we
> insist: "Well, God had to directly cause the pressure difference to
> make the
> wind at the right intensity, time & place", then we are just moving the
> questioned Divine action back one level, and inserting our assumption
> there
> instead. And perhaps the creator did. But ECs don't see God as
> threatened by
> the notion that it may have been explainable also by what we would have
> observed
> to be a natural chain of causality were we there to see it. And of
> course, that
> natural chain is the only thing science can look for, and sometimes find
> with
> limited success. But science will go on looking for such chains forever
> because
> that is all science can do. But in the hands of a believer... welcome
> to the
> world of natural theology. Science can be baptized to take its place
> within the
> psalmist's repertoire. But science does not and cannot get there
> independently.
>
> --Merv
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
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>
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
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Received on Fri Oct 31 11:17:49 2008