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To: count-your-change
But if the rules of a designer produced everything in the world by natural processes then either the processes are directed according to those established rules and hence are not natural and only have the appearance of naturalness or an appeal to a designer is superfluous.

Like Ha Ha, I find this sentence puzzling. It seems like you're saying that if natural processes follow natural law ("establish rules") then, if there is a Creator of the universe, they're not actually natural. So God, although He can do anything, can't create a complex and orderly universe with natural law, but can only "appear" to do so.

If your sentence is serious, rather than confused or incoherent, it sounds quite a bit like the doctrine of occasionalism, which has been almost universally rejected by Christian theologians, but is accepted, and even insisted upon, by many fundamentalist Islamists. (And often taken as one of the reasons Islam has often been inconducive or hostile to science.)

From the wiki entry linked above:

Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God Himself. ... The theory states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God's habitual causing of one event after another. However, there is no necessary connection between the two: it is not that the first event causes God to cause the second event: rather, God first causes one and then causes the other.

Islamic theological schools
The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no secondary causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God...


84 posted on 07/05/2009 9:37:21 PM PDT by Stultis (Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia; Democrats always opposed waterboarding as torture)
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To: Stultis

I’m sorry you didn’t understand.

“Like Ha Ha, I find this sentence puzzling. It seems like you’re saying that if natural processes follow natural law (”establish rules”) then, if there is a Creator of the universe, they’re not actually natural. So God, although He can do anything, can’t create a complex and orderly universe with natural law, but can only “appear” to do so.”

If natural processes (natural law is something else) can produce all the world, why appeal to a designer with rules?

If we have a designer with rules then how is it natural and undirected anymore than the creation of a dam is “natural and undirected”?

Either creation has an intelligent designer or it doesn’t, if creation does have an intelligent designer then we can either discover that intelligent design or we can’t, if we can discover that intelligent design, the question is still, How?

Anyone?


86 posted on 07/05/2009 10:50:14 PM PDT by count-your-change (You don't have be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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