Posted on 01/23/2004 5:41:11 PM PST by xzins
That's very interesting because that's basically how Boyd (and other Open Theists) come down. I'm certain I could not summarize his arguments as well as he has, but he basically argues that, in granting free will to His creatures (both heavenly and human), God constrained Himself as to the degree to which He will 'interfere' with the flow of His creation. In essence, the argument goes, if God was to allow free will, i.e. the free choice to love Him or not, accept His Son or not, then it had to have free consequences and that, necessarily, allows Satan more room to work evil than God's original plan would have allowed.
I see the view as well explaining evil by God's giving full play to the free will He clearly covets. It happens that within the last year, my dear wife of 39 years contracted cancer and died very quickly. Now the cancer was (and is) pure evil. My wife was a Christian woman who never drank or smoked in her life. She never engaged in what the world euphemistically calls 'high risk behavior" and she was a truly wonderful Christian woman. Yet she suffered the strictures of evil unbounded.
I simply cannot find in the Bible the idea that somehow her suffering and death was 'good'; that is simply solving the problem of evil by renaming it.
It was, and is, however a source of great comfort to me to understand that God desires only good for His children but knows that the evil put in motion by those of His creatures who have freely chosen it will cause harm to His true children. I know that when God gathered her home, He was as burdened by the harm caused by the Evil One as I was.
He does not promise us a 'get out of the way of evil' card -- He could do that if He had not valued our volitional love , but He does not. He is literally at war for us -- at war with His own creation and the evil it has wrought.
I found (and find) this biblical view a consoling one.
Truly it is said that the Spirit moveth as it wilt. Human beings formulating accounts of the divine creation need always to bear this in mind.
It seems quite clear that the Lord moved in human souls long before the Incarnation entered space-time reality and human history. Clearly the patriarchs and the prophets received direct epiphanies from God. And this sort of thing goes 'way back in human history, to ancient times. Take, for instance, the example of Abraham, on whom God "fathered a nation" and incidentally created the "rock" on which Western civilization has been built.
It could be argued that we can go back much farther than the second or third millennia to find further evidences of human inspiration of the divine: We could say the symbols of the cave paintings of Lascaux in the French Pyrannees, said to date back some 40 millennia, attest to this also. Perhaps something of this nature was granted to Plato, five centuries before Christ.
The details of how this all plays out, this affecting of the material by the spiritual such that a Universe, a Cosmos can result, are way beyond my ken.
What I do know is that God is a God of love and mercy, and that Life is wholly in His gift -- and only in His gift.
Thanks so much for writing, lockeliberty!
marron, speaking of this “distributed intelligence” business, it would seem that intelligence, or information, must be necessary for living beings to exist. For the existence of Life seems not to be the least bit understandable under the conservation laws of the physical sciences, collectively summed up as “the least action principle.” Classical thermodynamics predicts that all systems will seek to arrive at a state of perfect equilibrium by the shortest (spatiotemporal) route possible. But this state is precisely the very antithesis of life: Which is probably why it is also called “heat death.”
So it seems that living beings must possess resources to counter the “deterministic” proclivities of entropy, so as to preserve and maintain their “aliveness” on a constant, on-going basis.
What seems needed for that purpose is: (1) the ability to take reliable readings of the current state of the system, which is undergoing constant, dynamic modification in its relations with its internal and external environments; (2) the ability to recognize “threats” to well-being and/or “survival prospects”; (3) a set of strategies effective to counter the “natural pull” of heat death in ways critical to the preservation and maintenance of the organism’s life – at the quantum, atomic, molecular, cellular, organic, systemic, and even personal and social levels. The living being, in other words, requires an enormous amount of information to maintain itself, as well as the ready ability to effectively process this information. It seems the living being must also be able to discriminate between information that helps it, and what doesn’t. Choice, discrimination, are everywhere in this scenario; free will is absolutely essential, indispensable for the life process “to work.”
Thus I imagine the living Universe is fundamentally constituted by three key principles: the “least action principle” of the physical sciences; the “life principle,” particularly as advanced by Ervin Bauer; and a noetic principle – governing intelligence, information, etc.
The above reverie might seem silly, marron; I have just been having a “field day” lately, synthesizing/reconciling ancient symbols and myths with modern science. I hope I didn’t get too carried away…. :^)
Anyhoot, thank you for indulging me – and for having written such a fine article in the first place.
Scientists such as H.H. Pattee, Hubert Yockey and Luis Rocha clearly understand that there can be no biological life without information, i.e. DNA. What is even more startling - as you have observed - is that there can be no physical existence, no physical realm, without information either!
This could be considered baiting.....
And didn't Jesus promise to make us all fishers of men?
Just to be fair, there are also those who think that if Arminius didn't think it, then it isn't worthy of thought.
To many people all theological thinking had been completed by 1550 AD. I believe that to date we have only uncovered a fraction of one percent of the mysteries of God's Word. While the Word of God is complete, our understanding of it is as seeing through a glass darkly.
I don't know anyone on this board that felt, or feels, that all theological thinking was completed by 1550.
I just thought that it was interesting that in one breath someone would exclaim their happiness in having an attack-free zone in which to air their ideas and in the next breath attack those who have refrained from jumping in.
With reference to Plantinga at al, Lurkers might find this link helpful for an overview.
Show me a post where I exclaimed happiness at having an attack free zone.
I have indicated that this is Jim Rob's forum and he sets the rules. I will do my best to abide by those rules. As you should too. My post was not meant as any kind of personal attack. It was a general statement about people who think that any attempt to convey some new theological idea is an attack on the citadels of Christianity.
I detect a bit of sardonic attitude in your post. It seems to me that you are claiming that I am attacking people who are refraining from posting because I know they won't respond. Who EXACTLY have I personally attacked? Name that person.
Hey, I'm not preventing anyone from responding. I'm inviting them to respond. But many have indicated an unwillingness to abide by the new posting rules. I am willing to abide by them. Are you?
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