Posted on 01/23/2004 5:41:11 PM PST by xzins
Paul says If I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it....who will rescue me from this body of death?...in the sinful nature a slave to sin. (Romans 7: 20-25)
I think this shows that spiritual life can be beset by the old body of death.
For me that means that the rules of spiritual life and spiritual death are different than the laws of physicial life and physical death.
If "life" can have "elements" of "death," then it makes sense that "death" can have elements of "life." The conscience is one of those elements. God's goodness can also prod the image of God within us. Likewise, Jesus enlightens and the Holy Spirit convicts.
In the same way as the "sin nature" is retained in the newly born Christian, so it makes sense that the "image of God/conscience" is retained in the non-Christian.
In the case of Paul, I would say that the Damascus road incident was the literal equivalent of "irresistible grace." But not everyone has a Damascus road incident. Many will kick against the goads until the Lord stops goading them.
Gen 6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man...
That tells me that God does somehow strive with man, but it also tells me that God has his limits. And eventually that still small voice just quits speaking. That is a tragic day in the life of that individual.
I hate to get into the time discussion so soon, but I believe it is relevant to the excellent issues you have raised. The points I wish to “bring to the table” have to do with science and how I personally believe it relates to these Scriptures with regard to ”time”.
When applied to discussions of the mind and consciousness, strong determinism means that the mind and therefore, the soul, in their view is an epiphenomenon of the physical brain and nothing more. This view is held by virtually all atheists, some well-meaning but short-sighted scientists and some scientists who have an extreme left-wing agenda, such as Lewontin and Pinker.
In their worldview, everything is determined, there is no such thing as free will, and thus people like Hitler were only doing what they were predestined to do, i.e. there is no personal responsibility since there can be no free will if everything is determined. To avoid these social implications, scientists like Pinker offer convoluted reasoning, which in effect suggests that a Hitler should be punished for doing what he had no choice in doing, because that is what we must also do, we have no other choice as we are unfolded over time.
Obviously, all of these materialist views crash and burn in the face of Judeo-Christian theology, but you may find it curious that they also crash and burn in the face of mathematical physics.
The bottom line is that, according to mathematicians and physicists (and of course, Genesis 1:1) there was a beginning. That pulls the rug completely out from under the materialist worldview, though most of them haven’t figured it out just yet.
In other words, even if all the physical realm were strongly determined there must nevertheless be a non-physical aspect to “all that there is” that transcends space and time in order for there to be a beginning. This is true regardless of multi-verse theories, imaginary time theories and ekpyrotic cosmology – because they all require that there must be a beginning.
We Christians of course recognize the non-spatial, non-temporal existence as the spiritual realm. Many mathematicians however, trying to stay out of the domain of theologians, appeal to Platonism. Under radical Platonism, the mathematical structures themselves exist. For example, pi is the same here as it is anywhere in the cosmos, geometry exists and the mathematician only comes along and discovers it, etc. In reading the works of Platonist mathematicians and physicists, the word “God” can be substituted for the word “math” – and the relevance is clear.
So what does all of this have to do with Judas, Pharaoh and the discussion of free will?
It has to do with the mechanism of free will. If the physical realm were “all that there is” there could be no such thing as free will. From the physical mortal perspective, we experience life like a movie, one frame at a time. But God is beyond spatial and temporal dimensionality, so he sees the movie (the physical realm) all at once. He speaks of the future as if it were already past, because from His viewpoint outside space/time, it is. (Jesus, Revelation, Daniel, the prophets) Being God, outside of space/time, when He says a thing, it is already done. Therefore, His judgments are irreversible (Romans 3:25, Revelation 13:8) and He cannot lie. (Titus 1:2)
A Lurker may be thinking “Whoa, so it sounds like the materialists are right – that we are just unfolding irresistibly – all is predestined.” Indeed, I am saying that would be true except for one very important thing. God breathed into Adam (neshama) and he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). So even though we, the descendants of Adam, are “in” the physical realm, we are also living souls originally built for the spiritual realm. I’m asserting that future events in the physical realm cannot be altered by the devices of the physical man, within the physical realm – but that it can be changed from without, in the spiritual realm.
We are all on a grave (pun intended) irreversible path living as carnal men. It is only when we hear His voice that our future changes and God already knows (Romans 8:29) which of us can and will hear Him (John 10:26-29) Further, once we have received the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we are no longer carnal and live after the Spirit (Romans 8) growing aware that we are already alive beyond the boundary of this physical realm. (John 3:1-17) That is when our prayers, our free will, has the greatest effect, both in the spiritual realm and the physical realm. (John 15:7)
betty boop, I pinged you because this is similar to our recent email discussion and I hope you may have a comment to share.
Well, that’s my two cents … for what it’s worth.
Wow, that was pretty well thought out. That's more than 2 cents. Its gotta be worth at least a couple of bucks.
xzins and I have been tossing out some ideas on this subject as well. The post he gave you for Chuck Missler is quite interesting. Indeed, Chuck Missler is a very interesting Bible expositor.
I think we are prety much on the same page on this. In essense every event is predestined inasmuch as whatever God knows will happen will happen exactly as he knows it will happen. Thus whether he causes events to happen or whether he allows events to happen they will happen exactly as he knows they will. But God does not exist in any specific dimension of time. He exists outside of time and thus is fully capable of existing in the past, the present and the future simultaneously.
To me this explains a lot. Such as the effectiveness of prayer. God can truly answer our petitions, not because he puts the petitions in our mouths, but because he knew our petition before we ever prayed it and he made provision for that petition from the foundation of the earth. It also solves for me the issue of election. God chose those whom he dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom (like Saul of Tarsus) and he also chooses those who, in response to the general calling of the Holy Spirit to all to repentance and belief... repent and believe. No surprises, and it is all within the sovereign will of God.
Indeed. We are very much on the same page - of course, your words are much clearer and well said!
I also agree that it solves the issues you mentioned concerning the effectiveness of prayer and election.
In thus representing the knowledge of God as "independent of the objects known;" in order to the establishing of such an immutability of knowledge, as is not only not inconsistent with the perfection of that attribute, but without which it could not be perfect; and in denying that knowledge in God has any respect to the past, present, and future of things, a very important distinction between the knowledge of things possible, and the knowledge of things actual, both of which must be attributed to God, is strangely overlooked.In respect of possible beings, the Divine knowledge has no relation to time, and there is in it no past, no future; he knows his own wisdom and omnipotence, and that is knowing every thing respecting them. But to the possible existence of things, we must now add actual existence; that commenced with time, or time with that. Here then is another branch of the Divine knowledge, the knowledge of things actually existing, a distinction with which the operations of our own minds make us familiar; and from the actual existence of things arise order and succession, past, present, and future, not only in the things themselves, but in the Divine knowledge of them also; for as there could be no knowledge of things in the Divine mind as actually existing, which did not actually exist, for that would be falsehood, not truth, so if things have been brought into actual existence in succession, the knowledge of their actual existence must have been successive also: for as actual existences they could not be known as existing before they were." (Watson's Theological Institutes, I.ii.IV.)
In their worldview, everything is determined, there is no such thing as free will, and thus people like Hitler were only doing what they were predestined to do, i.e. there is no personal responsibility since there can be no free will if everything is determined. To avoid these social implications, scientists like Pinker offer convoluted reasoning, which in effect suggests that a Hitler should be punished for doing what he had no choice in doing, because that is what we must also do, we have no other choice as we are unfolded over time.
What a wonderful essay, Alamo-Girl! You sure do know how to home in on essential problems.…
One wonders what possible gratification Lewontin and Pinker manage to derive from such a world view. To postulate free will as an illusion is simultaneously to render as illusionary the substance of human experience as it has actually, historically been lived and manifested (as we know, e.g., from cultural artifacts of all ages available to historical research) since Day One. Talk about denizens of a “Second Reality!” To me, this represents a total estrangement from life in the way real people actually live it, and manifests the symptomology of radical estrangement sited in the self, which betokens isolation not only from the Spiritual community, but from the secular community and the Self also. My two cents, FWIW.
God is not in time. He is not in space. He is not in what humans call space-time at all. Space-time is a four-dimensional construct premised on the way human beings typically perceive and process information about the external world. For all we know, there may be a virtually infinite number of spatial and/or temporal dimensions. But from the human perspective, this really doesn’t matter, since we can only “see” four of them anyway.
The major point is, no matter how many dimensions there are, God is not in any of them. God is entirely “beyond” the physical Universe; or as Plato put it, he is the God of the Beyond, beyond the Cosmos, beyond the Olympian gods who are his creatures, and utterly beyond man.
Yet Plato also seems to suggest the Cosmos is somehow an eikon or “image, reflection” of this unimaginable, eternal, inaccessible God.
For Plato, this God of the Beyond is so remote that, when it came time to creating the Cosmos, he didn’t even do it himself. He sent an agent: the Demiurge, a divine being endued by the God with perfect beauty and goodness, bearing all the marks of the Logos, or what we might call the divine plan of the God; and in his perfect goodness and beauty he wishes to create creatures just as good and beautiful as himself, according to the standard of divine truth.
Similarly to the Christian account, the Demiurge in a certain way creates ex nihilo -- that is, out of Nothing. At first glance, Plato is seen specifying a pre-existing “material” – note that word’s Latin root, mater, “mother,” and its cognate “matter” -- called Chora, which is usually translated either as “Space,” or (paradoxically) “Necessity.”
Chora further seems to indicate the idea of an eternal, universal field of pure potentiality that needs to become “activated” in order to bring actual beings into existence. In itself, it is No-thing, i.e., “nothing.” This “activation” the Demiurge – some kind of “male principle?” -- may not do by fiat: He does not, for instance, “command” to “Let Light Be!” The only tool at his disposal is Peitho, “persuasion.”
And Chora is not exactly anxious to be persuaded: It likes being “nothingness.” [I.e., Chora likes being “lazy”; i.e., entropy is its basic nature, its heart’s desire self-maintenance in the condition of perfect “equilibrium” that expresses non-existence.] It is always free to just “refuse to be persuaded,” thus ever to remain unformed, “Nothing.”
And thus the Demiurge endeavors to persuade potentiality into actual existence, and gives existents their fundamental laws according to the Logos, the “word” of divine Nous, the Mind of the God of the Beyond, and His Will for His creation. <.p> [Methinks Plato was a “closet monotheist,” seemingly the first to arise since the Egyptian pharaoh Amonhotep; but Amonhotep’s monotheist idea seems to have come ’way before its time, and so didn’t survive…. In any case, it seems certain it was Plato who coined the term, “theology,” and in his formulation of the One God Beyond, of monotheism -- at least as prototype. That insight definitely took root in human imagination from thence unto all time, apparently.]
But the Demiurge does more than just get things started: As bearer of the Logos (i.e., universal laws plus a kind of cosmic “information set”), and as pure love and beauty and goodness, he continues thereafter always to work in the creation, to continue to persuade it into ever-new beginnings of creatures, from the Cosmos’ beginning in Eternity, throughtout all Eternity.
Thus Plato’s “creation myth.” The main points to note are:
(1) the universe is eternal (timeless) but it (paradoxically) had a beginning in time. Both Plato and Aristotle were keenly aware that there had to be a beginning in time, a First (Uncaused) Cause, in order for the universe and its contents not only to be in the first place, but also to be the way they are and not some other way. (Leibnitz’s two great questions.)
(2) Thus the universe is governed by divine laws, but not in a deterministic fashion, rather through the power of persuasion. Free will is entirely real on this view.
(3) Through the ongoing activity of the Demiurge, men and the world are constantly being newly “impressed” with and renewed by the divine Logos; and thus a unified, Cosmic whole, a “One Cosmos,” a universal order comes into being and continues to be maintained according to the “specifications” (i.e., our hypothetical “cosmic information set”) of the Logos on an on-going basis.
(4) There is an on-going “erotic tension” between the divine and the creaturely realms of being, a constant outreach (as it were) from the divine side to the human, of a mutual collaboration of spiritual and material aspects of natural existence; together with the response of the latter to the former, in potentially creative collaboration – in which man participates in the divine “as far as that is humanly possible.” In a certain quite mysterious way, this is the “glue” that holds the Universe “together.”
Well, that would be my takeaway from Plato’s great myth, having contemplated it for some time now. The parallels to the Christian exegesis, to Genesis, are (to my mind) quite striking.
The parallels to “Big Bang” cosmology are also quite striking, in my view. And they appear to closely correspond to both the classical and the Christian “myths.”
“Renormalizing” Plato, we could say that the One God of the Beyond is St. Thomas’ Tetragrammatical God, God the Father, unseen by man, and not directly accessible by/to man. The Logos is “Emmanuel,” the “god with us,” that is the Son of God, the Logos of the beginning, who St. John says was God, and was with God, the Word God spoke to invoke Creation. The Demiurge is an “agent” or messenger of God, the Holy Spirit.
We can hypothetically further renormalize the Christian Exegesis into the language of physics, and say the Singularity of the “Big Bang” is God’s spoken Word, the Logos of the Beginning of creation, which specified the nature of the creation to be as a vast “superposition” of all possible initial conditions (i.e., all potential vector states that can possibly arise under the given laws specifed by the Logos). Thus the universe as it “unfolds” may look like a random process, but is in fact constrained to what is possible under the initial (and ever-abiding) structuring laws.
This is to say that the God of Creation created for a foreknown (by Him) purpose. It is in this sense that we can say God is omnisicent and all-powerful, as well as eternally exempt from any kind of constraint that a human being could imagine. For infinite and eternal Divine mind and will and power guarantee the effectiveness of the divine paradigm (i.e., the Logos) in Time. And this Divine mind expresses a God of love, truth, beauty, and justice.
And yet none of the foregoing constitutes an argument favoring determinism: Because man has been left free, all along the way, to reject the Logos. He is free to reject participation in loving relationship with the divine, free to reject spiritual community with man and the other existents of this world; that is, with human community and the biosystem itself, free to refuse to serve as a creative co-collaborator in the revelation of divine purpose. He is free to construct “Second Realities” which, in essence, pose a freely-chosen alternative order as worthy to supplant the divinely-imagined and willed Logos, which finally constitutes the order of the Universe, Second Realities or no.
For as Aristotle pointed out, there is also a Final Cause, toward which everything is proceeding in time, which does not serve or seek to benefit any particular element or constituent of the “collective everything,” but finally seeks realization of itself for its own sake – that is to say, for God’s sake.
Well, it’s time to stop now, since I’ve consumed so much time and bandwidth already. Except for just one last concluding thought.
I am impressed by the close correspondence between the classical and Christian traditions on the questions of the origin, governance, and sustenance of the Universe. These two traditions are the foundational pillars of Western culture, the “matrix” (a word etymologically deriving, yet again, from mater, “mother”) in which you and I are now living.
This tradition is presently hotly contested, embattled and contended against in the world of contemporary human existence and public opinion, largely because people like Lewontin and Pinker have “a serious problem with it,” and have the cultural eclat to dispute the judgment from the Beginning, to render it “socially ineffective,” by means of their respective stations in life and professional prestige, and their own “bright ideas” designed to perfect the Perfect (from the divine point of view, so to speak).
I just don’t know how to begin to understand these guys. First, they grind man into dirt. Then they suggest man might just be as divine as God himself (at least it seems they reserve this distinction for themselves). So just go and try to figure out, untangle, reconcile their totally absurd proposition….
And as I have tried to show, the ancients got a whole lot “right” in their understanding of the essentials constituting living being in an ordered Universe. We, their descendents, would be fools to squander their legacy to us who are now living.
I guess unless a person is just dying to go live in a Second Reality, it would be wise to resist its “siren song.” Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
Thanks so much, A-G, for pinging me to this. Hugs, girl!!!
I think the flaw in the argument is in the humanistic definition of "good." In fact, rarely does a skeptic define what they mean by this term. God's goodness is more than just kindness. It is also just.
Also, the author's argument regarding skeptic's not having a basis for speaking about evil, though a good argument, only applies to moral evil. Physical evil--natural disasters, accidents, pain, disease, deformity, etc.--isn't addressed by it.
I hope to post more when I have more time.
FreeWhale
Hi, betty. Lot's of reflection. My question is, if the incarnation is a real space-time event--an event that was the event that made Christianity anything at all--then isn't the assertion that "God is not in time" somewhat brittle and in need of a little spackling? Heck, even if the incarnation is a myth (a true story excluding historicity) then the word in doesn't direct us well enough, I think.
In traditional Christianity they have said that God transcends the categories of space and time. No doubt you also concur with the Christian way of putting it. Does transcendence exclude existence in? Entirely, as you say? Something might be done to prevent your sentence from an equivocation such as this: "God is not incarnate" which of course is not Christianity.
Basically, this was gist of Wilhelmsen's (a catholic) criticism of Voegelin (a platonist). Also, Aristotle's criticism of Plato in the first book of the Metaphysics couldn't stomach his extreme seperatism. I bet you don't either but are just talking that way ;)
OK, back to the other extremes of determinism and free will.
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