>Surely when we see a supervised process, it becomes personal? Making
>a cup of tea for a guest is a personal process. Dressing a baby is a
>personal process.
Thank you, David. My harping on the "processes aren't personal" theme has
been partly a personal pet peeve: we get into these debates with our terms
poorly defined, then lambaste one another over issues that might not have
much priority if we understood one another's definitions. I'll have to
admit here that the idea of making a cup of tea for a guest never came into
my mind as an example of a process. My mental image was strictly the kind
of process we generally call a natural process, in which the personal
element is a matter of debate among humans, depending on whether they are
theists or not. I'll grant that a process can be -- in the sense of being
an action performed by a person for a person -- personal. When the subject
is natural processes, though, the naturalists we debate with tend to
conclude that because there is no provable personality involved, that they
are impersonal. The fact that many natural processes produce the same time
behavior given the same initial conditions and inputs also tends to make
them seem impersonal too -- machinelike. I'm going to continue not to want
to attribute personality to processes that are repeatible, although by so
doing I'm not meaning to imply that God is not involved. He's just
involved in a different way, so far as our human sensibilities are
concerned, and I think it's useful to make a distinction. Now an example
of something very personal that God did for me was bringing about my
meeting with Linda, my wife, and arranging for me to meet Jesus Christ at
about the same time. Now that was a very personal process.
I see the use of the word "impersonal" in the
>STATEMENT as a polemic against theistic science, in which processes
>are expressions of God's providential government of the cosmos.
I still believe the key is "unsupervised". The reason making a cup of tea
for a guest is a personal process is that it's done by a person,
specifically for meeting the needs or providing for the comfort of another
person. The tea maker supervises processes like heating water and steeping
tea because he wants to make his guest comfortable. The process is part of
an ongoing interpersonal relationship. An unsupervised process -- say a
vending machine pouring out a cup of coffee for your coins -- just isn't
the same, because there is no direct interpersonal relationship involved.
Incidently, if I were an atheist, I suspect I would be very disturbed by
the need to take the regularity of nature as a given. What if everything
changes tomorrow? Why shouldn't it. As Christians we can point to God's
faithfulness. Perhaps that's a point of attack for persuading some
atheists and agnostics that they ought to reconsider whether they can even
do science without trusting in God.
Thanks, David
Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
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