The Gospel and Creationism

shernren said:

We know that God is independent from nature; but how and why should we take it to mean that nature can be independent from God?

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Wish I had said that. Good point.

Nature =/= without God.


It is basically the same point I am making in regard to history. Nothing distinguishes an act of God in history from a simple historical event. Should we conclude that God does not act in history (or in nature)? Or should we conclude that God acts in all of history (and nature), not just those events named as God's actions?

I prefer the seamless approach of the latter position.

We know that God is independent from nature; but how and why should we take it to mean that nature can be independent from God?

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When I was making this point it applied in my mind to science (although yes, it is a very valid point to make about history as well). I came to this because I just wasn't very comfortable with that God-of-the-gaps approach to nature that seems to be cropping up more and more on these forums nowadays. I was sick and tired of hearing people say "gee, evolution helps man explain God out of the picture of origins" and yet there was a nagging feeling: what if they're right? After all, it seems that every scientific law is a step closer to Laplace's (? can't remember) "Great Machine" universe, which ironically is a good argument both for design ... and for deism.

After reading Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God (found online here: http://brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?Id=1838 ) and ruminating a bit on what he says and what my experience has been as a Christian, this is my synthesis of what science means to me. It is critical to my understanding of faith because I've set my sights on becoming a Christian scientist (perk being I'll finally find out firsthand whether or not all those creationists are scientifically right). If knowledge of the universe takes away God's glory then logically of all people Christians should know the universe the least, right?

Well, it really depends on one's understanding of science. To me science is about finding patterns in nature. Patterns of cause-effect separated by a given amount of time lead to hypotheses about physical causes that can be proved or disproved. Given enough constraints one can make mathematical predictions of future behaviour that are actually quite impressive - they're the reason why buildings still stand and airplanes stay in the air, among other feats of technology. Science basically exposes an order in nature. The question is where does this order come from?

A God-of-the-gaps understanding arises when the Christian decides to believe that this order is intrinsic in nature. In his/her mind, this order is something natural and appropriate to the created cosmos, and once God created the cosmos with this order it would continue having this order even without Him. This order seems to be something independent from God. Crucially, this view means that nature in a way has "triumphed" over God: nature has become the rock that is too heavy for God to lift, in the sense that nature constrains God to act in supernatural ways. Now when God wants to act He has to act independently of the created order (since only its creation, and not its maintenance, is His responsibility) and so in a sense the created order generates a "domain of non-interference" where God is not effecting anything that happens naturally. It is plain to see how this gives rise to anti-evolutionism: any "naturalistic" origin of life brings it within created order's "domain of non-interference" and thus disallows God from claiming glory for it. This is the crucial (lol) flaw that I see in the theology (whatever there is) coming out of today's creationism movement.

For me, on the other hand, created order is not just something inherent to nature. It is something sustained by the active redemptive work of God. Created order is God's dramatic way of demonstrating that God is a consistent, faithful God. When God makes promises He often refers to created order - "As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud", a natural occurence, "so the song of the ruthless is stilled", a God-ordained occurence. How can God draw analogy between the two unless both events have their certainty in the fact that God has ordained them? Nature is only consistent because God has willed, does will, and continues to will it to be consistent.

I am not saying that this relegates God to being a micromanager. There is nothing shameful about having enough wisdom to manage a universe as large and beautiful as ours. Besides, God is regent of a far greater kingdom in the Trinity Himself. And God is not bound by obligation to maintain the universe (the aseity of God means that God continues to exist and to have meaning even without the universe) but He does as an expression of His character and love for us.

This is an analogy that occurred to me yesterday in explaining this. When a five-year-old starts processing the surroundings about him and starts learning to tell time, he may notice that at seven sharp, in the dining room, on the table, food will suddenly appear. Without fail. Furthermore, there is always rice, soup, one dish of vegetables, and one dish of fish or meat. There are always six place mats nicely arranged around the edge of the table with forks and spoons to the right of each plate. Now I don't know about you, but I'd be glad if that child started thinking up a science for all this. Somewhere among the laws of "apples fall downwards" and "fire is hot and it hurts!" and "TV is colourful when it is turned on", "food appears at seven in the evening" becomes a "scientific" rule in his mind. And, it is pretty constant too! If the youngster is analytical enough he might even start experimenting. If he eats less rice today, guess what? The next day he gets less rice on his plate! If he shows a silly face when his vegetables are being forced down, on the other hand, that doesn't stop vegetables from appearing tomorrow. The space in that child's mind where he tries to make the world make sense might contain rules such as "the law of vegetable conservation" and "rice I'm served today is proportional to rice I ate yesterday".

And yet we who are grown-up know that there is no science and no property of reality that demands that food be on the table at seven every day. It happens as a consistent, demonstrable cause-effect relationship (to a five-year-old) not because it is written into reality ... but because the child's parents are responsible and consistent caretakers. I think the structure in our universe serves the same purpose - not to enable the universe to function independently of God, but to allow God to demonstrate His love for us both in consistent, "natural" ways and in occasional "supernatural" ways. And whether the origins of life were "natural" or "supernatural" they are still an expression of God and His creative power.

shernren said:

When I was making this point it applied in my mind to science (although yes, it is a very valid point to make about history as well). I came to this because I just wasn't very comfortable with that God-of-the-gaps approach to nature that seems to be cropping up more and more on these forums nowadays. I was sick and tired of hearing people say "gee, evolution helps man explain God out of the picture of origins" and yet there was a nagging feeling: what if they're right? After all, it seems that every scientific law is a step closer to Laplace's (? can't remember) "Great Machine" universe, which ironically is a good argument both for design ... and for deism.

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You are blowing me away.

On the matter of deism, here is a nugget from a 19th century Christian commentator.



This was dug up by a Christian biologist who used to be a frequent poster here under the name lucaspa. One thing he insisted on is that nothing has ever shown that even the simplest scientific process happens without the continual support of God.

We know that the chemicals sodium and chloride will combine to make salt. Do we know that they will do so without God participating in the reaction in some way?

We can't know that, because we cannot design a control experiment from which we know God is excluded.

Now when God wants to act He has to act independently of the created order (since only its creation, and not its maintenance, is His responsibility) and so in a sense the created order generates a "domain of non-interference" where God is not effecting anything that happens naturally.

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Exactly. I think this shows up in the overwhelming focus on creation and redemption combined with the silence on providence. My schooling in Christian doctrine accorded just as much importance to providence (which was often associated with the normal workings of nature) as to the other two.

For me, on the other hand, created order is not just something inherent to nature. It is something sustained by the active redemptive work of God. Created order is God's dramatic way of demonstrating that God is a consistent, faithful God. When God makes promises He often refers to created order - "As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud", a natural occurence, "so the song of the ruthless is stilled", a God-ordained occurence. How can God draw analogy between the two unless both events have their certainty in the fact that God has ordained them? Nature is only consistent because God has willed, does will, and continues to will it to be consistent.

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Amen! To me this is what Paul is alluding to when he tells the Colossians that "..in [Christ] all things hold together."

I am not saying that this relegates God to being a micromanager.

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I don't see it as micro-managing so much as a constant supportive presence of God in and through the created universe--not as a part of creation, but as one who accompanies his creation and sustains it in existence.

And God is not bound by obligation to maintain the universe (the aseity of God means that God continues to exist and to have meaning even without the universe) but He does as an expression of His character and love for us.

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Love indeed makes the world go round. God's love. As Dante says at the conclusion of his Divine Comedy as he contemplates the mystical vision of God himself:


Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

-- GK Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to shernren again."
-- ChristianForums.com

mark kennedy said:

Surely the amount of rice on our plate at 7 o'clock sharp or the mixing of chemicals to produce salt have naturalistic explanations.

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Of course they do.

In your opinion, does that mean God is absent from the growth of the grain or the chemical fusion that produces salt?

What is infinitly more important is that this does not reduce itself to naturalistic explanation.

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Why do you identify a naturalistic explanation as reductive?

One thing he insisted on is that nothing has ever shown that even the simplest scientific process happens without the continual support of God.

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I agree with this statement, but the corollary of this is that the opposite is also true. The nature of science is such that it can only reveal the natural processes by which the universe runs, it can't reveal anything about the Person who runs it.

Science can't teach us theology and theology can't teach us science.

Why do you identify a naturalistic explanation as reductive?

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That's a fine question. I'm personally very uncomfortable with "supernatural miracles" not because I think they're "impossible" but because it just makes God into a kind of Incredible Marvo the Magician figure, producing rabbits out of a hat to wow his audience. The wonder of God is not in his Abracadabra moments, but in the everyday sustaining over billions of years of a universe that led to us.

Surely the amount of rice on our plate at 7 o'clock sharp or the mixing of chemicals to produce salt have naturalistic explanations.

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Yes. And?

I think this "natural / supernatural" dichotomy is primarily an artifact of a flawed, Western, "Enlightened" worldview rather than anything built into the fabric of the universe. In fact I think that with enough consideration and research (of a philosophical bent) this will probably be shown to have some connection to the inherent "myth = lie" connection some people here also display. Perhaps there is some sort of correlation (I'd use the word "isomorphism" - math geek thing) between the way the Western world sees "science" and the way it sees "truth"; between the way it sees "miracle" and the way it sees "myth". Perhaps by tying "truth" down to "science", and then making "science" separate from the numinous and the mythical / religious, we find that "myth" is automatically tied to "lie". Ironically this is precisely the sort of thing which fuels both fanatical atheistic evolutionism ("since the Bible isn't provable scientifically, it isn't true") and scientific creationism ("since the Bible is true, it is provable scientifically"). Flip sides of the same dualistic coin.

[speculative mode out]

Back to the question. Yes, these phenomena have "naturalistic" explanations. But what is meant by a "naturalistic" explanation? The whole reason why we have that dichotomy up there and why this even arises is because we have let the Enlightenment define our terms unfairly.

Science and "naturalistic" explanations exist because the world has objectively observable orders. Objects falling downwards have constant accelerations, disregarding air friction; heat always goes from hot to cold and temperature always varies according to heat, mass and specific heat capacity; blood flows from the heart out. All these are basically quantifiable relationships between variables. For the first one, for example, it boils down to an equation connecting the time from an object's drop and its displacement at that time (s = .5gt^2) which basically says "at time 1, you have displacement x1; at time 2, you have displacement x2; at time 3, you have displacement x3; ... "

Science is basically just that. Connections between variables. A "naturalistic explanation" is a way of explaining a connection by means of a model about reality. eg, Gravity is an attractive "force", because when objects travel in a curved space-time, the "shortest" path (path of least action, if I'm not mistaken) is a path which brings one mass to another mass due to the curved space-time. Note that this "physical/naturalistic explanation" is really yet another relationship: a relationship between the curvature of spacetime and acceleration, that connects the phenomenon to the theory; and a relationship between the curvature of spacetime and the presence / absence of mass, which allows the theory itself to be proven or disproven. (Which is, by the way, what a "theory" really is in scientific context. You can't say "evolution is 'just' a theory" just the same way you don't say "relativity is 'just' a theory".)

So, a "naturalistic explanation" is really just a dependable relationship between two observed quantities. From this alone: just because there is a dependable relationship between two observed quantities doesn't tell us why that relationship is there. In some cases, we get yet another relationship between quantities (like in above), and in some cases we have a "fundamental fact" of nature (like the fact that the speed of light in vacuum is invariable). We're like children who observe that the quantity of vegetables at dinner is constant. Really, the reason why it isn't "science" is because we grow up and realise that we can't make a deeper inference about the nature of reality from it. But I believe that to a five-year-old it is just as "science" as "apples fall down" because there is a relationship between two observables.

Given this dependable relationship in nature created by God (which is where theology finally appears), we can draw two possible conclusions:

1. Nature is consistent, in and of itself.
2. God is consistent and causes nature to be consistent.

Why is it that a naturalistic explanation is always interpreted in terms of no. 1? Because we have allowed our minds to be colonised by Enlightenment ideas. The Enlightenment was the age of reason, the time when the human mind was considered the ultimate way to understand the universe. For the Enlightenment, God posed a problem. God is subjective; God raises paradoxes everywhere (predestination or free will? OSAS? grace or works? Three or One?); and crucially the experience of God is subjective and personal. The fundamental way to experience God is through personal encounter with Jesus; and personal encounters are not replicable, even for the same person.

So of course, the Enlightenment thinkers had a problem with God. And then they discovered / synthesised (to some extent) that there was an unwritten order to the universe. Everywhere you went things behaved consistently. Magnets always pointed (somewhat) north; current was always proportional to e.m.f.; etc. And so the Enlightenment thinkers seized on this and took this order to be something intrinsic in nature. A little as if a 5-year-old child had decided that his parents do not exist; and therefore the fact that there is always food on the table at 7 means that every 24 hours the table spontaneously generates food, as if the food is consistent because of the table and not because of his parents. The fact that you didn't need to believe in God to observe all these things (although a belief in the afterlife must have helped pull some dangerous experiments through!) made a concrete argument for a difference between God and science. God, they said, was something in your head since it couldn't be observed outside it; science on the other hand was real since everybody could check and verify it just the way it should be if it was "real".

And somewhere in the midst of it all people decided to forget that just because physical relationships existed didn't mean God wasn't behind them. This deliberate humanistic amnesia was what caused the fake line between "naturalistic" and "supernaturalistic" to emerge. And if I'm right, it also caused the fake line between "truth" and "myth" to emerge, which then led to creationism trying to put the Bible on the "truth" side in naturalistic ways. Which, if it is true, is highly ironic: that this whole approach to defending truth is based on an atheist lie.

We know that the chemicals sodium and chloride will combine to make salt. Do we know that they will do so without God participating in the reaction in some way?

We can't know that, because we cannot design a control experiment from which we know God is excluded.

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I was just re-reading the thread when the full force of this hit me. Blur I am. Thanks for a powerful statement of what I've been groping towards. Rep duly given.

I think this "natural / supernatural" dichotomy is primarily an artifact of a flawed, Western, "Enlightened" worldview rather than anything built into the fabric of the universe.

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let me start with just this one piece of your posting.

God created the universe out of nothing, not out of Himself. He created contingently not necessarily. He created it separately from Himself, He is neither part of it, nor like the first point is the universe part of God. He created it voluntarily, not out of any compulsion, especially anything compelling Himself from outside of Himself.

all of these qualities of the universe have been well discussed in the history of Christian theology and all have groups that deny them. However, putting all the pieces together gives us a universe where it appears possible to explain a great deal without direct reference to God, in terms of secondary causes. Howard Van Til labels this "a fully gifted Creation", this does not mean that God is superfulous to Creation but rather the explanations for God are not found within Creation but in God.
These things do support a supernatural-natural distinction, a useful and historically significant one.

....

let me start with just this one piece of your posting.

God created the universe out of nothing, not out of Himself. He created contingently not necessarily. He created it separately from Himself, He is neither part of it, nor like the first point is the universe part of God. He created it voluntarily, not out of any compulsion, especially anything compelling Himself from outside of Himself.

all of these qualities of the universe have been well discussed in the history of Christian theology and all have groups that deny them. However, putting all the pieces together gives us a universe where it appears possible to explain a great deal without direct reference to God, in terms of secondary causes. Howard Van Til labels this "a fully gifted Creation", this does not mean that God is superfulous to Creation but rather the explanations for God are not found within Creation but in God.
These things do support a supernatural-natural distinction, a useful and historically significant one.

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Yes, I do see what you're saying. I would just say that yes, it appears possible to explain a great deal without direct reference to God, but it does not appear necessary to explain a great deal without any reference to God. I was talking more about the dichotomy between the "magical / miraculous" (depending on your religion) and the "scientific" phenomena observable in the world, rather than God Himself. There is a very clear line between the Creator and the created, but I don't think that was the "natural / supernatural" I was talking about; rather the difference between "natural" phenomena and "supernatural" phenomena and the unspoken assumption that since it is a "natural" phenomenon God need not and does not have anything to do with it.

Thanks for your clarification. I never thought of that.

rmwilliamsll said:

God created the universe out of nothing, not out of Himself.

*snip*

He created it separately from Himself.

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How do you know?

Tinker Grey said:

How do you know?

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I don't think we do know.

It is a theological assertion, not a scientific statement.

gluadys said:

I don't think we do know.

It is a theological assertion, not a scientific statement.

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agreed, it looks like a reasonable presumption derived from Gen1. and confirmed by the history of theological interpretation since(justification).
it is not beyond challenge(always reforming), it may be wrong(sin is real), however it fits (consistent with) and helps explain (coherent and useful) within an orthodox Christian philosophic framework (which is sufficient reason for me to accept it).

creation ex nihilo.

Tinker Grey said:

How do you know?

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If it was created out of Himself it would have all the same properties as God and would therefore be incapable of suffering from frustration of decay:

Rom 8:20 because the creation was subjected to frustration, though not by its own choice. The one who subjected it did so in the hope
Rom 8:21 that the creation itself would also be set free from slavery to decay in order to share the glorious freedom of God's children.

gluadys said:

I don't think we do know.

It is a theological assertion, not a scientific statement.

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Agreed.

Lion of God said:

If it was created out of Himself it would have all the same properties as God and would therefore be incapable of suffering from frustration of decay:

Rom 8:20 because the creation was subjected to frustration, though not by its own choice. The one who subjected it did so in the hope
Rom 8:21 that the creation itself would also be set free from slavery to decay in order to share the glorious freedom of God's children.

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This does not necessarily follow. It seems to me that an all powerful God could fashion the universe from himself limiting creation to certain properties.

But, perhaps this is fodder for another thread another day.

If it was created out of Himself it would have all the same properties as God and would therefore be incapable of suffering from frustration of decay:

Rom 8:20 because the creation was subjected to frustration, though not by its own choice. The one who subjected it did so in the hope
Rom 8:21 that the creation itself would also be set free from slavery to decay in order to share the glorious freedom of God's children.

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I may be shooting off here, but by the same logic Jesus who was/is God should not be capable of suffering from the various frustrations recorded for us in the Gospels. Clearly God is able to suffer. It is no surprise that His creation is able to suffer too.