Posted on 01/23/2014 9:19:28 AM PST by Heartlander
One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).
All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.
Then, having acquired the habit, we began to conjure like sorcerer's apprentices, and with a like result: We conjured countless universes where everything and its opposite turned out to be true except, of course, philosophy and religion. Bizarre is the new normal and science no longer necessarily means reality-based thinking.
But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.
But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.
The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.
First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.
Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.
One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.
Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?
Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .
I don't understand how that "logically follows," dear sister in Christ.
Heartlanders definition immediately precludes creation by the living supernatural God then goes on to define it as the application of design theory to the natural and living world. By definition, this is one-dimensional pantheism.
“Youre limiting the properties of science.”
What on earth do you think you are saying here?
That you’re wrong to say science cannot be political and subjective.
“That youre wrong to say science cannot be political and subjective.”
Humans are both of those things. Science by itself is not. It not just a minor distinction.
I just don't see it that way, dear spirited. Rather I see "design theory" as trying to address/explicate the "invisible things" as mentioned in Romans 1:20
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made....The Creation is both "living" and "orderly." Its life and its order does not come from clever matter, given infinite time (anything can happen if time is infinite; but it's not: The world had a beginning, and that entails an end).
Just some thoughts, dear sister. Thank you so much for writing!
Either words have meaning or they do not. I happen to believe they do, which means that by excluding creation then the God of Creation is excluded as well.
With the God of Creation excluded then design exists as a result of nature in the same way that life emerged from chemicals and mind from grey matter.
On the issue of Heartlander’s definition we will have to agree to disagree.
It is not at all clear to me that design theorists "exclude" God in principle any more than Isaac Newton did, or Albert Einstein did.
The mere mention of “God” does not mean the supernatural God of creation. For example, Albert Einstein’s “god” was Spinoza’s pantheist conception of deity (divinized matter) evolving within nature. For paganized physicists, “god” is something remarkably similar to Brahmanism’s Void-—an energy field from which particles emanate similar to how waves move across the ocean. Teilhard’s “Christ” is divinized matter he calls Omega. Marx’s dialectical matter is self-powered, self-perfecting ‘thinking’ matter.
All pagan systems are anti-human as there is no source for life, being, personhood. The concept of personhood arises -—only-—from the Christian God who is One God in three Persons.
To exclude creation as Heartlander did is to exclude the One God in three Persons. If man is not the image-bearer of the God of creation ex nihilo then he is less than nothing.
I understand what Spirited is saying and people like David Berlinski may see ID as a closed system, however I do not. I am a Christian but ID is not a Christian movement it is an evidential approach that basically tries to answer the question of what is designed, not who is the Designer. For me, as a Christian, the Bible and my faith tells me who and why as Betty mentioned in Romans 1:20 or even the Nicene Creed factorem caeli et terrae = craftsman of heaven and Earth. As I quoted earlier from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howes What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1844, p. 464:
As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression the book of nature referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of Gods power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the fables of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or more commonly Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.
Jeepers, spirited then why on earth does Einstein call this "divinized matter" "the Old Man?" Doesn't sound very pantheist to me.
Your question [about God] is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.
- Einstein
“... then why on earth does Einstein call this “divinized matter” “the Old Man?”
Spirited: Einstein humanizes his nature deity for the same reason pagans have always humanized their nature deities, to wit, Venus, Mars and Saturn are planets (matter), Molech is a fire-deity, Basilides is a Gnostic cosmic deity (energy); Brahman is the Void, Sagan’s Star-Maker is similar to the Void, etc.
“..... I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things. - Einstein”
Spirited: The loss of distinction between body and soul is a dead give-away. Pantheism is called “holism” “totalism” and “oneness” because it says there is only one substance with which all things are both necessary aspects of and in continuity with. The sexual ideal is therefore androgyny—the two-in-one (i.e., gay).
In Raymond Ruyer’s “La Gnose de Princeton” (1974), a version of neo-pagan philosophy, Ruyer describes the quasi-systematic thinking formulated by a group of Princeton Gnostic pagan scientists, many of them physicists heavily represented at Princeton U. and the Institute for Advanced Studies.
Ruyer (their enthusiastic mouthpiece)connects the speculations, theories, and systems to Lucretius’s “De rerum natura” and classical Stoic pantheist treatises. The difference however, is that unlike Lucretius, Princeton Gnostics do not deny the existence of spirit and they attribute consciousness to the universe. They believe in a vague intellectual pantheism, a universal linkage (continuity) of all to everything. (The Pagan Temptation, Thomas Molnar, p. 135)
In their pantheist universe, which is of necessity self-created, everything exists by necessity; everything is part of a well-functioning, self-organizing mechanism. God is the totality of their pantheist universe.
Molnar comments:
“Princeton Gnostics lay the foundation of this steady-state paganism in the spirit of Epicurus by working out his physical postulates. As Ruyer notes, the new Gnostics are more monks than ideologues; but in this context monk means ‘sage’ (as Princeton Gnostics) are like the sages of the schools of antiquity in its decline, the Epicurean and the Stoic.”
Like pantheist Stoics and the Hindus,
“...contemporary physicists express themselves with ambiguity when the ultimate questions about matter and spirit arise.”
Though Christianity had settled this issue, the work of new gnostic-pagan physicists,
“Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, and Bohr, among others, has...prompted science to abandon its clear distinctions-—first between matter and energy, then between matter and consciousness, and finally...between matter and spirit.” (p. 136)
Here then, is Einstein’s “god.”
Because Einstein was "fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism" doesn't necessarily make Einstein a Pantheist. (Indeed, he denies this; see below).
Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview to George Sylvester Viereck, a rather notorious journalist who Einstein took for a fellow Jew. (He wasnt; Viereck proudly claimed kin with the Kaisers family, and was jailed during World War II for pro-Nazi propaganda.) In this interview, it is plain that Einstein personally resonated to spiritual things. As Walter Issacson reports (Einstein, 2007):
Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. Its possible to be both, replied Einstein. Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.Einstein claimed to deny free will but this seems inconsistent with his own understanding and practice as a scientist. (See more below.)
Should Jews try to assimilate? We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.
To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.
[Note: At Age 6, Einstein was enrolled in a large Catholic school in his neighborhood, there being no Jewish schools nearby. There he received traditional Catholic theological instruction. Family members reported that he enjoyed it immensely.]
You accept the historical existence of Jesus? Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
Do you believe in God? Im not an atheist. I dont think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesnt know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.
Is this a Jewish concept of God? I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew .
What Einstein found most attractive in Spinoza was his strict determinism. This was probably the reason Spinoza was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Sephardic Community in 1656 (Kaufmann mentions this ban was lifted when Israel became a nation, in 1948); for Jews believe in free will. Einstein claims he doesnt. But then he lands in impossible conundrums such as this one:
"I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, he said, but I prefer not to take tea with him. The murderer is not responsible for his crime, because he couldnt help himself; his act was determined by an infinitely regressive causal chain. Yet Einstein believed that the murderer should be held responsible for the evil deed nonetheless. In short, a man should be held responsible for actions he did not will, for civil society pragmatically and quite sensibly depends on holding people accountable for their actions, even when theyre not the cause of them.And then seems to flat-out contradict himself here, in speaking of human freedom in general:
While it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or made to serve as a blind tool.From what we know about Einsteins deep and lifelong commitment to classical (i.e., Newtonian) causation, Spinozas relentless determinism may have been appealing to him. But in his personal life that is, in actual experience Einstein does not appear to agree with Spinoza that free will is an illusion.
We now know that science cannot grow out of empiricism alone, that in the constructions of science we need to use free invention which only a posteriori can be confirmed with experience as to its usefulness. This fact could elude earlier generations, to whom theoretical creation seemed to grow inductively out of empiricism without the creative influence of a free construction of concepts. The more primitive the status of science is the more readily can the scientist live under the illusion that he is a pure empiricist. In the nineteenth century, many still believed that Newton's fundamental rule "hypotheses non fingo" ["I do not feign a hypothesis"] should underlie all healthy natural science. A. Einstein, in Emanuel Libman Anniversary Volumes, Vol. 1, p. 363. International, New York, 1932Just before his death, wrote I. B. Cohen (Sci. Amer., July 1955),
Einstein said he had always believed that the intervention of scientific concepts and the building of theories upon them was one of the creative properties of the human mind. His own view was thus opposed to Mach, because Mach assumed that the laws of science were only an economic way of describing a large collection of facts.The present writer does not know how to conceive of a creative power that is not in some necessary sense free. In a final autobiographical note (1956), Einstein wrote: Invention is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.
Its well-established that Einstein did not believe in a personal God; that is, a God who takes an interest in human persons and affairs. We also know that Einstein was a classical causal determinist and scientific realist. He was prepared to defend Newtons strict causality to the dying breath. For this reason he distrusted quantum mechanics on principle because its dependence on statistical methods seemed to cast God into the role of a dice-player, which Einstein refused to accept; and perhaps because he found pervasive quantum indeterminacy in the absence of an observer inconsistent with his realist position with respect to natural causation.
Thus he might have been inclined to draw comfort from Spinozas model of a completely rational God who must obey the laws of his own nature. And yet, as Walter Isaacson wrote, For some people, miracles serve as evidence of Gods existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.
Einstein himself had direct experiences of human freedom in the conduct of his work and was a life-long champion of it. He said human creative freedom is absolutely essential to the conduct of theoretical science.
And yet, for Spinoza, not only is man not free; but neither is God. Here is Spinoza's God, as detailed in his Ethics:
In Part One, Concerning God, Spinoza begins with eight definitions and eight axioms, whereby he postulates the existence of God. God simply exists that is to say, classical questions about the relations of Being and Existence are not entertained in Spinozas system; neither is God seen as the I AM THAT AM of Judeo-Christian tradition. He is simply posited as infinitely existent on grounds of logical necessity.
Spinoza was a system builder; Einstein never was. The eight definitions and eight axioms are the basic elements of which Spinozas entire construction is built. From these definitions and axioms, Spinoza commences to generate scores of logical propositions (together with proofs and notes), cross-correlated as need be, concerning God and man, each of which has been set forth piece-meal, according as I thought each Proposition could most readily be deduced from what preceded it.
Its clear that what Spinoza is attempting to do, in a thoroughly systematic way, is to recapitulate the classical and Judeo-Christian conception of God in terms of purely rational categories of thought. He manages to construct an amazing cathedral of thought on strictly "rational" grounds, and names it God.
God, or substance ... consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists . A thing necessarily exists, if no cause or reason be granted which prevents its existence. So Spinozas God is there for two reasons: (1) theres nothing to stop him from being there. (2) He is logically necessary.
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. Thus the conventional identification of Spinoza with pantheism. [N]ature has no particular goal in view, and final causes are mere human figments . [E]verything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection. To posit final causes objects, purposes, or goals as relevant to God does away with the perfection of God: for, if God acts for an object, he necessarily desires something which he lacks. But God lacks for nothing by Spinozas definition.
All things, I repeat, are in God, and all things which come to pass, come to pass solely through the laws of the infinite nature of God, and follow from the necessity of his essence. Wherefore it can in nowise be said, that God is passive in respect to anything other than himself . That is, God is passive with respect to his own nature only, meaning that God himself is ineluctably determined by his own nature, and being thus determined by it, has no freedom in himself.
In short, God is in the system of nature; for he is governed by the same rule of deterministic causation which governs all of nature. As infinitely perfect, God has no purposes; God is completely "complete" and desires nothing. There is no motive to act. Thus nature itself can have no purposes. To believe otherwise is to court illusion.
Spinoza elaborates this point. Perhaps anticipating resistance to his idea, he says that false opinion about God and the world is bound to occur when such opinions spring from the common notion, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely with an end i.e., a final cause in view. Yet man is fooled when he thinks he can cause anything:
In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.Aristotle criticizes the idea of an infinite regress, implicit in Spinozas idea of natural causation. Aristotle asserts that there would be no reason in the world, if men were incapable of acting for an end, a telos, or purpose or goal. Indeed, for Aristotle, the entire point of reason is that it always operates towards the accomplishment of a purpose. For Aristotle, reason is embedded in the very structure of the world and thus of all truthful perception of natural reality; and works from there towards securing the freely-willed goals of intelligent actors.
Yet Spinoza rejects all such considerations of natural reality. Everything is determined, even God [by Spinoza himself!]. Free will is an illusion. According to him, all final causes in nature are merely human figments.
Indeed, Spinoza categorically denies free will. He says that human beings get the false notion of free will by observing their own seemingly free actions, and then impute to God that his own actions must be similarly free. But the observation of free action is an illusion; for even God is not himself free. God does not act according to freedom of the will. Rather, will and intellect stand in the same relation to the nature of God as do motion, and rest. Motion and rest are generically observable phenomena; will and intellect are not. Yet here Spinoza effectively equates them.
Neither does Spinozas God act for ends: He simply moves and rests. [F]or if God acts for an object [i.e., an end, telos, purpose or goal], he necessarily desires something which he lacks. Which is impossible, according to Spinozas doctrine. God lacks for nothing, not even man. He is perfectly alone (and needs to stay that way?).
Thus Spinozas God does not have the freedom to create from and for love, but only from infinite divine necessity. [T]here is in the mind no absolute faculty of understanding, desiring, loving, &c. Whence it follows, that these and similar faculties are either entirely fictitious, or are merely abstract or general terms, such as we are accustomed to put together from particular things.
Spinozas conception of God entails something else: He, who loves God, cannot endeavor that God should love him in return . For if a man should so endeavor, he would desire that God, whom he loves, should not be God . Which is 'absurd,' &c."
To sum up, Spinoza explains the nature and properties of God as follows: I have shown that he necessarily exists, that he is one: that he is, and acts solely by the necessity of his own nature; that he is the free cause of all things, and how he is so; that all things are in God, and so depend on him, that without him they could neither exist nor be conceived; lastly, that all things are predetermined by God, not through his free will or absolute fiat, but from the very nature of God or infinite power.
All things that come to pass in the world of men and nature do so according to the strict determinism of Gods activity of "moving or resting"; to think that man can ever freely choose anything apart from the inexorable out-playing of this divine activity is a grotesque illusion: Man is completely determined by the unfolding of Gods nature, as is the universe at large.
I can recognize that Baruch Spinoza was a system builder; in effect, his entire "philosophy" is an exercise in radical, reductionist rationalism, whereby he makes himself both the measure of God and all that exists in nature. I'm not even sure that Spinoza could even be regarded as a pantheist in the usual definition of that term, though typically he is regarded as such nowadays.
I cannot find a scintilla of evidence that Einstein subscribed to Spinoza's definition of reality (which truly looks to me like a constructed second reality).
In fact, the only statement from Einstein regarding Spinoza that I have found so far is this one, quoted in Abraham Pais' magisterial biography of "the science and life" of Albert Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord (1982):
Although he lived three hundred years before our time, the spiritual situation with which Spinoza had to cope peculiarly resembles our own. The reason for this is that he was utterly convinced of the causal dependence of all phenomena, at a time when the success accompanying the efforts to achieve a knowledge of the causal dependence of all phenomena was still quite modest.Going back to the opening italics above: If Einstein admires Spinoza as "the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things," this does not necessarily make Einstein some kind of a gnostic monist. Einstein's idea of the "oneness" of the body and soul could be taken as a sign that he understood that the freedom of the soul or of the creative mind is seated in the physical corporeality of the body and cannot be separated from it during mortal existence.
That does not show, however, that Einstein's conception of God and man is reducible to the terms specified in Spinoza's Ethics.
In closing, let me cite Einstein's friend, colleague, and biographer, Abraham Pais, and you can draw your own conclusions:
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So Einstein once wrote to explain his personal creed: "A religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance of those super-personal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation." His was not a life of prayer and worship. Yet he lived by a deep faith a faith not capable of rational foundation that there are laws of Nature to be discovered. His lifelong pursuit was to discover them. His realism and his optimism [jeepers, Spinoza certainly was not an optimist!] are illuminated by his remark: "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not" ... When asked by a colleague what we meant by that, he replied: "Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse."And finally, there is Einstein's famous "Credo" (1930):
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.I sort of get the feeling, dear sister in Christ, that WRT Spinoza and Einstein, you are trying to compare "apples and oranges."
JMHO FWIW.
Thank you so much for your attention, patience and for caring enough about these issues to bother to write to me!
The very heart of this problem (naturalism) is revealed by J. Gresham Machen in his penetrating analysis of liberal Christianity:
"The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very center and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator.
"It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But he is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and Upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed."
"In modern liberalism, on the other hand, this sharp distinction between God and the world is broken down, and the name "God" is applied to the mighty world process itself. We find ourselves in the midst of a mighty process, which manifests itself in the indefinitely small and in the indefinitely great--in the infinitesimal life which is revealed through the microscope (i.e., physics) and in the vast movements of the heavenly spheres. To this world-process, of which we ourselves form a part, we apply the dread name of "God." God, therefore, it is said in effect, is not a person distinct from ourselves; on the contrary our life is a part of His. Thus the Gospel story of the Incarnation, according to modern liberalism, is sometimes thought of as a symbol of the general truth that man at his best is one with God.
(pp. 62-63) From the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans in the West to the Upanishads, Brahmanism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, etc. in the East on through to the physics under discussion together with Theosophy, esoteric Masonry, and occult New Age spirituality, the common denominator is naturalism.
The essence of naturalism is the idea that the substance of God is distributed throughout the cosmos giving rise to universal substance conceptions, theories of everything, natural psychology, natural religion, etc.
His substance has been variously described as the active principle of matter (i.e., fermion=physical matter, boson=active spiritual principle), as Star Trek's Force, the active/spiritual principle in Polkinghorne's system, the animated force called evolution, in Vedanta systems it is the Void and prakriti matter, in others the World Soul, Gnostic pleroma, universal substance, and Christ-consciousness.
The Greeks called it zoe. Hylozoism (Greek hyle=nature; zoe=life) is the doctrine according to which all of nature's bodies (i.e., sun, earth, moon, trees, man) possess life, mind, soul, and even divinity.
The pantheist Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the scientism dictum---ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny---imagined ether to be the primitive life-making substance which, as was the case with the primitive fire of the Stoics, changed one part of itself into inert mass while the other part became the active principle, spirit. Today, many scientists routinely resort to Haeckel's postulate without ever inquiring into its pantheist implications.
Haeckel would later write, "Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one...pantheism is...an advanced conception of nature (and) a polite form of atheism." The truth of pantheism, confessed Haeckel, "lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God..." The pagan world system being constructed, said Haeckel, "substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist." (Monism, Ernst Haeckel, www.pantheist.net/)
The purpose of my writing is not to demonize certain thinkers that you admire but to disclose the lethal flaws in their thinking not readily discernible because their taproot lies in the substratum of meaning.
Honestly, dear spirited, I wouldn't dare to claim that I can grasp the mind of an Einstein, such to say that I think the "taproot" of his thought eventuates in lethal flaws due to the paganist substratum of meaning you impute to him. Even his biographer his personal friend and colleague, Abraham Pais, who knew Einstein very well over many years is modestly, respectfully restrained in characterizing the "taproot" of Einstein's thought. Personally, I find I am unable to take the "measure" of Einstein. And I am mindful of the dictum: fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
I'm on the side of the angels here. I am not Einstein's judge: That is God's exclusive business.
Meanwhile, IMHO, Einstein is one of the greatest natural scientists who ever lived. With Planck and Bohr, he helped establish the foundations of the quantum theory; he developed relativity theory and both were revolutionary. Yet he never claimed to have the last word on either; for he had the personal modesty to realize that both theories are very likely to change over time, as new evidence comes to light. (Actually, that is what usually happens in science.)
In short, he's doing science, not building systems (unlike Spinoza) and certainly not gnostic "second realities."
Is it possible that you find the natural sciences generally disturbing in some way?
I really did like this
"It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But he is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and Upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed." [emphasis added] and believe it's true.
Thanks so very much for writing, dear sister in Christ!
We are called to be discerning. This means acquiring the ability to discern between the differing essences of presuppositions, concepts, etc.
To discern errors in thinking and flaws in theories is not the same thing as grasping and judging "the mind of an Einstein" or anyone else. That is God's business and He tends it very well.
Analysis is not the same thing as judging unto damnation. It is not the same thing as hate. It is rather discernment. One of the massive failures of our time is lack of discernment. Those who lack discernment lack vision, thus cannot perceive coming consequences. This is why it has been said that ideas have consequences.
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