Hi glaudys,
Oh, I absolutely give God the glory that He is, by His limitless power and wisdom, the Creator of all these things and the one who set everything in it's place. Yes, it is by this same power and wisdom the reason that I even live this life. He created this atmosphere of the earth which contains something that we call oxygen that enables me to breathe every 3 seconds. He created all the plants and animals that sustain the needs of my body for food. He created Adam and Eve that through generations of procreation have allowed me to be a man of flesh born in this world today.
But is "God created" all we can say about these things? Can we also say that God daily and providentially supplies these things on a continuing basis?
But, once God created Adam and Eve, it was through the procreation of the species that I now live.
Is procreation simply an impersonal and mechanical process? If so, in what sense did God create YOU? After all, do we not hold that God created not only our first parents, but all of their children and grandchildren and great-great-. . . . . great grandchildren down to you and I. If we are right about that, must we not consider that procreation is God's mode of creating new human beings (and everything else that procreates)? Can we say God has no role in the process of procreation without implying that what originates in this way is no longer God's creation?
God made things to be self-sustaining with the various properties that He created them with to endure for the ages.
I am not sure we can say that. To me it seems we should say rather that things are sustained by God and endure because God continually sustains them for the ages.
However, I don't see Him standing at the sun splitting the hydrogen atoms one by one. He made the sun to have the power within it's own makeup to do that. He doesn't stoop and tell each seed to grow. He created the processes of procreation that these plants would then endure on their own. These processes that God created and established and set in place in this physical realm in which we live are what we call the 'natural processes'.
Now, some will say, "So you mean God just started everything rolling and then just walked away." Yes and no. God did start the ball rolling, but He has never walked away. He is the overseer of all that He has created. Just as a gardener oversees the garden and trims and plants and fertilizes and waters, he is maintaining the garden constantly. The Scriptures use a similar explanation for what God has done and is doing. It equates the earth and the people on it to a vineyard. It says that He planted a vineyard and is overseeing that vineyard expecting a good crop.
I like the analogy of the gardener; it is much better than the clockmaker. The clockmaker only needs to tend the clock when it runs down or something goes wrong with it. That is why this image led to Deism--the theology of the absentee Deity. But a gardener can't walk away. The garden needs to be tended. The plants need to be nurtured. The soil needs to be nurtured.
But I also think this analogy conflicts with your earlier statement that "He doesn't stoop and tell each seed to grow." A gardener does just that, for each seed is planted by the gardener, watered and fertilized by the gardener. Jesus tells us that God's eye is on each sparrow and that he knows the number of hairs on our heads. In another place, scripture tells us he calls the stars by their names. So why would God not also take an interest in each seed? Even in each atom bonding in the sun to provide us with light?
I used to keep a book of quotes, which sadly I lost in my last move. So I can't remember the whole of this one or where it came from, but the gist of it was that perhaps God takes such delight in his creation that he never tires of asking for daisies again and again and again. So daisies don't grow by the hundreds because God produces them en masse, but because he says to the earth, to the seeds "Do it again!" and each and every daisy exists because God keeps saying "Do it again!" Just an anecdote, but I like this image of God, whose pleasure it is to bring each thing into being for the sheer joy of seeing it again.
Yes, God set the sun in its place and established its course. He set each and every star in its place and established its course. But, He does not draw them through their course as with a ball on a string.
Are you sure? Is not gravity God's string? Did God just one time create gravity? Or does he continually sustain this force?
You answered your own question. 'Through the hydrologic cycle' God has given these things the power within themselves to repeat and continue.
But what sustains the hydrological cycle itself, if not God's loving providence?
I do affirm both the miracle of creation and the perfect wisdom and plan of God that the miraculous is what sustains my life each and every day. God created the oxygen and also made the restorative process by which plants exude oxygen to replenish the supply. His creation is perfect and for most things self-sustainable by the natural properties with which He imbued the various parts of what He has created.
I would still change "self-sustainable" to "providentially-sustained". That, it seems to me, is the message of the Psalms. "You make the clouds your chariot" not just once upon a time, but over and over again. "You make springs gush forth in the valleys" . We could go into the geological processes that lead to springs gushing, but the message is that by whatever process, God is doing this, and doing it now. It is a daily providential blessing, not an automatic consequence of a one-time creative act. "You cause grass to grow for the cattle" Again, we can speak of seeds and soil, sun and rain and all that goes into this, but in the Psalmist's eyes, this is a present on-going action of God; God makes this happen every year as the seasons cycle. "You make darkness and it is night" not just on the first day of creation, but each and every evening. "The young lions . . . [seek] their food from God." And God provides it via natural means. (All lines from Psalm 104)
I say, no, these natural properties do work in the here and now, but they, just like man himself had a starting point of the miraculous creation event of God.
And I would go a little further. I would say that God not only gave them a start, but that God continues to empower them. At the end of his great poem, The Divine Comedy, the poet Dante Alighieri contemplates the throne of God and the encircling throng of angels and saints around it and is caught up in adoration of "the love that moves the sun and stars". It is one of my favourite lines of poetry. God creates out of sheer love, for God needs nothing from creation. God's love and wisdom sustains the creation in being through all time, and the creation responds in love by being the reliable, predictable order on which we all rely. Creator and creation share a daily intimate relation of love which we perceive as "nature" "the natural world" "properties of nature" "natural processes" etc.
But we have a tendency to depersonalize and mechanize this relationship describing it mainly in terms of numbers, and forces, and forgetting what lies behind these.
God made the first tree. He made it to be a living organism that would take in carbon dioxide and let out oxygen as it's waste by-product, but that process only began when the first tree was created.
Actually, the production of atmospheric oxygen began with cyanobacteria. And still today, 50% of oxygen is produced by photosynthetic plankton floating in seas and lakes, not by trees. (And, of course, don't forget herbs and grasses too.)
I don't believe that born again believers lose sight of God by these things because they understand that God is the first cause.
They certainly shouldn't. But an overemphasis on miracles accompanied by near silence on God vis-a-vis the ordinary aspects of nature, gives that impression. And I have definitely seen some near Deist expressions of how God and nature relate to each other, coming mostly from creationists. So I wonder how well the young people are learning about the non-miraculous side of God's works. Maybe there should be more about that in the Sunday School and home-schooling curricula.
That it is by the power and wisdom of God that these things exist and endure today. Those who believe that the natural properties are all that there are and fail to understand that they have only existed since God's act of perfect creation are the ones who lose sight of God.
Agreed, if one takes "natural" to mean "without God" of course one loses sight of God. We expect this of those inclined to atheism. Once they feel they can explain something in nature with a scientific description of it, they tell themselves "See, no god needed."
But how well are we fortifying Christian youth and new Christians against this response? You have only to read the threads here to see that many Christians, defenders of creation, also define "natural" as "without God" and so react to natural explanations as "taking God out of the equation".
We need, I think, to reclaim the positive attitude to nature exhibited in the scriptures and held by Christians (including scientists) until fairly recent times. We need to see natural explanations not as "taking God out of the equation" but as "illuminating how God does things in nature". Viewed that way, scientific knowledge is no threat to faith, for the more we learn about the natural world, its properties, functions and processes, the more we stand in awe of the wisdom of God.
Well, I believe that depends on whether we trust the Scriptures as the only sure witness of things before man's records. The Scriptures tell us that God made the first man, Adam, from the dust of the ground. That He created this first man from dirt and breathed into his form the breath of life. Are you saying that we can only believe that if we have some other proof beyond God's testimony to us?
Oh, I agree with trusting scripture and I am not asking for some other proof. But there is still a large discrepancy between various ways humans have of understanding and interpreting the scripture. And these ways are not given by God, but derived from the fallible reasoning of human beings. Do we understand "dust" literally, suggesting God made a man just like a potter makes a clay jar? Or do we take it symbolically to reflect the close relationship between the stuff earth is made of and the stuff we human earthlings are made of? Either interpretation shows trust in God's scriptural revelation, but which is the better interpretation is not something the words of scripture in themselves can tell us. Nor, in many cases, can anything other than scripture either. All we can do is try our best to understand the reasoning of a person who prefers one interpretation to another and make our best judgment.
Friend, God did not make any fictitious history. Man has weighed and measured what God has done and made up a fictitious history. God has told us the when of His creating.
Now, I would say that it was Bishop Ussher who told us the when of God's creating. I don't think scripture really tells us when. So I think one needs to justify why one chooses to subscribe to the reasoning of Bishop Ussher about the when of creation.
He hasn't told us that there was anything that existed in this realm prior to the days of His creating this realm. You won't find anywhere in God's account that anything in this realm existed before God commanded it to exist. So, where is it that you find that God has given us some fictitious history?
I didn't say I was finding that in scripture. But when we read the rocks, the stars, the genomes of animals and many other signs, we see not just an appearance of maturity, but a history. Take tree rings. One can count them to get a good idea of how old a tree is. And if that was all they told us, I suppose God could create a tree with rings already in it to suggest its apparent age. But tree rings tell us more than age. They also tell us about the conditions in which the tree was growing at different times. The size and spacing of rings indicate whether the winter was long or whether there was a drought, or an infestation of insects, or numerous other events in the life of the tree. So, tree rings don't just tell age, they tell of historic events of the past. If that past was non-existent, then that history is fictitious. Dendrochronology goes back far more than 6,000 years, so did God create a fictitious history for those trees?