Adams and Atoms: A TE foray through Scripture and Science.

In the context of this thread, I'm not going to answer that question directly (slightly off-topic), but I'll give my perspective on God and nature as an entry to this thread: (note that this view stands adamantly opposed to any notion of god-of-the-gaps)


The Creed makes use of Biblical terminology regarding that which is not God. All of contingent reality was created and persists on His Word. This reality is Creation. The Creed divides it into Seen and Unseen. Although little is said about what is Unseen, space is made for it. Occam's Razor has no edge in Christian theology and philosophy.

What is meant by Seen and Unseen? To be sure, Seen is not limited to the set of things that are visible in physical light. If there were no physical light, we would still be able to hear, smell, taste, and touch things. Seen Creation is what is experienced through the physical senses, and what can be made to be experienced through the physical senses or manipulated to yield physically identifiable results (e.g. - a magnetic field cannot be seen, but its presence can be identified experimentally with iron filings).

For the purposes of this blog entry, I am going to refer to Seen Creation as nature. Nature is the part of Creation that has been made available to all as a general revelation. Thus, its exploration is not limited to those who know God. What kind of exploration? It is exploration that holds only Seen Creation as a certainty. Not that a Christian is unaware of God's providence in upholding it. Rather, it is testament in itself. There are two ways of discussing this testament:

1. The relation of nature to its Creator and Sustainer.
2. The relations of its inner parts to each other.

The latter is the content of the former. The former is understood in the language of theology and natural philosophy. The latter is understood in the language of science. It is in this way that the more assured a Christian is of the former (his theology and philosophy), the less he is threatened by the latter. Science should, in no way, threaten the faith of a Christian. Not that a Christian is better at science than a non-Christian, or that a Christian is more assured of the findings of science, or even that a Christian knows of the results of science before scientific inquiry has been applied. Rather, we understand the role of science insofar as it is able to perform its activities, and can unabashedly defer to it as it makes discoveries and posits its theories.

What is this role of science? As science is only applicable to what is Seen in Creation, it cannot speak of the invisible Creator. Theology and natural philosophy can speak of the Creator (and Christian theology will identify Him as Our Father) but it is precisely because the Creator is invisible that we would be mistaken in considering Him as a component in His Creation. He is not a cog in the machine. He upholds Creation by His Word, but He is not subject to it. We should not expect to search through the parts of nature and discover that one of them is God. A person may find God while exploring nature, but only in the sense of the first statement, above.

Thus, the method of exploration should reflect the understanding that the first statement supplies: That which can be explored through the physical senses is limited to the general revelation of Seen Creation. To reiterate, God is not part of Creation at all, let alone what is Seen. Theology through special revelation assures us that God is uncreated. The consequence is that the object of science is nature, only. Because theology and philosophy demand that science does not expose God, science adopts "methodological naturalism."

Methodological naturalism is the basis for scientific work. If a god is found while exploring the components of nature, it is a created god, and therefore, no god at all. If an element of Unseen Creation is a necessary and reliably verifiable component of nature, it is (by definition) not part of Unseen Creation but part of Seen Creation. It is tautological to say that science relies on methodological naturalism because we have built science around the testament that is general revelation; the revelation that is available for all to see.

It must be understood, therefore, that science does not deal in theological and philosophical matters. Science is described by theology and philosophy, and it is a tool for each, but if it speaks to matters of theology and philosophy, except where theology and philosophy demand its results, an error has been made somewhere within its inquiry. That is, science can say that a thing is or is not within the realm of possibility in the context of Seen Creation, but it cannot speak of instances in which the Creator or Unseen Creation alters or suspends the inner workings of Seen Creation. That is, science doesn't possess a terminology for discussing miracles.

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Source: Willtor's Blog, 21st June 2006

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As a TE, I refrain from plugging a miracle into what is unknown. The gaps remain unknown. For me, God is the author of both natural systems and miracles. Evidence available to me indicates that He works through His natural systems the vast majority of the time, and His direct interventions are so rare that they're....well....miracles.

The idea that God created the universe 6000 years ago in a literal 6 days is no more or less amazing to me than the idea that He created it via natural process over millions. The evidence, however, indicates that He did the latter.

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Put simply, because in TE theology God's actions are not confined to the miraculous. In other words, God creates the universe using entirely natural means from beginning to end, without having to go "zap" at certain points.

YEC, on the other hand, only sees the hand of God in something that is miraculous, as if the only way that God could work is by going "zap" at certain points.

We TE's think this severely limits the action of God on the universe, and leads, therefore, to the "God-of-the-gaps" who only does those things that science hasn't found a naturalistic explanation for.

We believe in a God who creates everything but doesn't need to go "zap" in order to do it.

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"Call some place paradise/Kiss it goodbye"
The Eagles, the Last Resort
Liberal Christians do it in context

"Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep." Walter A Davis

God "did" absolutely everything in the creation process. This fact is actually reinforced much more strongly in TE than in YEC.

In YEC, God performed 8 acts of creation:
1. He created light and separated it from darkness
2. He created a firmament
3. He created dry land
4. He created vegetation
5. He created heavenly lights
6. He created sea creatures and birds
7. He created land animals
8. He created man and woman

Now, between act 3 and act 8, presumably some waves beat against rocks and beaches. Between act 4 and act 8, plants produced several thousand litres of oxygen by photosynthesis. Between act 5 and act 8, the moon travelled part of its orbit around the earth. Between act 6 and act 8, animals ingested and digested food. But none of these happenings were acts of God -- they were acts of nature. The only acts of God in creation were the 8 divine acts.

In TEism, by contrast, every single event from the Big Bang till today is an act of God.

For his glory.

Looks like I was wrong about the TEs god being god-of-the-gaps. Looks more like they're Atheists. So, now they deny the supernatural "God triggered the Big Bang" or "God guided Evolution."

If the universe exploded from nothing, God did it, 100% naturally. That's really a contradiction, or at least reduces God to a symbol without substance. The substantive difference with Atheism is?

It's not as if TEs are saying, 'Ooh, let's take abiogenesis and Big Bang and evolution and stick God on with some glue so we get to look like Christians.'

The starting premise of TEs is, 'God is Creator.' The next step is asking how God created. Creation itself, through the blessings of God-given science and reason, reveals to us how God created and continues to create and sustain the universe and all that is in it.

If anyone is looking like atheists, its the neo-creationists who demand that truth must equal fact; that Genesis must be indicative, literal fact of history and science to be true. Atheists demand this too, you know, only they use it to deny God and 'disprove' scripture.

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I wrote the OP precisely to avoid this kind of side-tracking.

One important thing to note is that I will not be answering creationist hot-button questions like "Isn't the god of evolution cruel?" and "Doesn't the Bible outright say that the earth is young?", at least not directly and specifically. Part of the problem is that we TEs often state our views in the form of answering to creationists' questions, which can hamper a proper exposition. TEism would exist even if there were no creationists bugging it and I want to show how it exists as a coherent, logical framework of thought all on its own.

Poke, the reason you're not figuring out how TEs see the world is (to be frank) because you're not respecting us enough to actually try to listen. I started out by explaining that I wanted a thread precisely to cater to the questions of people who aren't really sure about what TEism is, and your comments don't contribute anything except to tell people how some creationists view TEs (as Bible-burning atheists in disguise), which most people already know. If you had wanted to point-and-shoot you could have done it elsewhere. If you had wanted to level criticism you could have done it substantiatively, with an argument more complete than "I think these guys are contradicting themselves so they must be wrong."

And don't spout "The wisdom of the cross is folly to the world" or some other mis-applied verse about logic, as if that means Christians don't need to discuss things logically any more. I'm being deliberately slow in answering questions like yours, important as they are, because point-and-shoot answers will raise the wrong responses in people who aren't looking at the whole worldview (as evidenced in your responses). Look at Paul's sermon to the Athenians in Acts 17 (reference OTOH). Did he just shout at them "Jesus died to save your sins!" and run off? No, he had to inform them what was different between the Judeo-Christian worldview and theirs: that God was not something made with human hands and worshiped in idols, that we humans carry the image of God, that God gave good things and controlled history to bring man to Him, that God had appointed Jesus and verified this appointment by bringing Jesus back from the dead. IIRC Paul doesn't even teach them that Jesus is God, a fundamental truth of Christianity; presumably Paul wanted just to set a foundation (Jesus appointed by God) and would have taught converts in private that Jesus in fact is God. Which just goes to show how important Paul thought worldviews were so that he could make a whole sermon of just that.

Explaining TEism is a little like that. What more because of some of the words we use - indicative, mythological / legendary, etc. It takes time and effort. I am struggling with this thread partly because I endeavour to bring myself down to the level of people like you who want straightforward, quick and easy answers - figuring out therefore how to make my explanation straightforward and easy and yet complete and understandable.

So if you want to disagree, at least be sure that you understand what we are saying. And if you want to understand what we are saying please be patient, though I have little right to ask you to be (besides my humble position as a brother in Christ). But if you don't want to even try to understand what we are saying, there are many other far more entertaining places on the Internet than this.

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Christian theology has always held that Jesus is God's ultimate revelation. Does this mean that the Bible is not, and does that mean that there is something wrong with the Bible? I will try to explore this with a slight switch of language. Instead of speaking of revelation, a very abstract concept, I will think in terms of representation.

A representative stands in the place of something else. For example, a proxy is someone you nominate to vote for you when you cannot attend an AGM or such. When you look for a proxy you cannot choose just anyone: you want to make sure that whatever you would have voted for, s/he will vote for in your stead. With the proxy, it is as good as if you are actually there and voting in the meeting. Or sometimes in Bible interpretation we say that something represents something else, say "the seed represents the word of God in the Parable of the Sower". What this means is that "seed" stands in for "word of God" in the parable. Whatever Jesus says about the seed, it is as good as Him saying it about the word of God.

Perhaps we can fully express what a representative is by looking at the concept of the Turing Test, a test proposed by Alan Turing the computer scientist to assess the question of how "intelligent" a computer is. In the test, a human and a computer are put in separate rooms. A judge actively trying to determine which is which engages both of them in conversation (through text-only), and the computer tries to pretend to be a human by responding appropriately. If the judge is indeed fooled and cannot tell which is which, then the computer might be said to be "intelligent".

How do you conduct a Turing test? If you had to tell between a human and a machine, how would you do it? Here on Christian Forums we have our very own CFBot. One look, however, and you know that this conversation is most definitely with some sort of computer program and not a human (which doesn't make it any less entertaining). Why? Because you know how a human talks, and how a computer talks is completely different. A human knows how to stay on topic; a computer doesn't, especially if you put confusing key-words into your responses. If you can't tell the difference between the computer and the human, then we could effectively let the computer represent the human.

Let's say I made my own personal Turing-compliant computer. In other words, whenever you put me in one room and the computer in the other, you can never tell which room is mine and which is the computer's. That would be a pretty amazing feat and I'd be rich soon and be invited to lots of parties. But I'm an introvert and I don't like parties. What should I do? Aha! I shall send my computer out to attend the parties, instead of me. If I hook it up to a speaker and motorized wheels, it can even move around to find different people to talk to. And this works because although the computer isn't equivalent to me, it can substitute perfectly for me. Whatever I would have said, the computer will say. If people want to know what I think, they don't have to ask me, they can ask the computer. If I don't feel like going to parties, I can still let those partygoers get to know me by sending the computer, and when they first meet me in the flesh they'll recognize me because I talk the exact same way the computer has been talking.

While human analogies always fail to fully describe God, I find this picture (of the computer representative) helpful to me when I try to put this idea of God's revelation into words. Jesus is God's divine representative to mankind (as much as He is God). Why can Jesus say that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father? After all, Jesus definitely wasn't omnipresent (no matter how much you argue about whether or not He was omniscient and omnipotent on Earth before the Resurrection) and God the Father definitely isn't a 5-foot-odd Middle Eastern male (who might well have been a bit plump, too, seeing as how the Pharisees called Him a drunkard and a glutton ), so in what sense does someone who sees Jesus see the Father? It's because whatever Jesus says, you can be sure the Father would say it too. If you had Jesus in one room and God the Father in another you wouldn't be able to tell which was which just by talking to them (except if you asked the day and hour of Jesus' return, presumably ). In a deeper sense, the identity of Jesus and God the Father in the Trinity of the Godhead means that any action of Jesus says something about God the Father. So when Jesus is with us, it is as good as having God with us - Emmanuel.

You'll probably wonder what this has to do with the role of the Bible and with TEism. I'm getting to it.

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It appears that you're asking Atheist's how God created. How is your account of Creation different from an Atheist's?

Humans invented the discipline of science. Reason is the fruit of hundreds of millions of years of evolution of the brain. So, why do you say God did it?

How is it that God continues to create?

Because something appears to be a certain way to a particular individual doesn't make it so.

I'm not sure why you would think that God creating a system which generated everything that exists, living and non-living alike, would be a lesser act than God creating it any other means or reduce God to a symbol.

...atheists don't believe that God exists and therefore they don't believe that He created anything by any means whatsoever.

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