Post Edited (Alan Rhoda) : 7/24/2009 11:50:05 AM (GMT-5)

maybe...

http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/god-and-the-universe/

 

Hi Alan-

Jeff will be happy to have a partner on his side of this issue. He’s been lonely over there and I’ve been worrying about him. ;o)

I view things more in line with the infusion model (IM)

Re: your (1)

“God rested” can’t mean God got tired from creating and needed a break. I’m sure you agree. But that does seem to be part of the “face value” meaning of “rested after all his work.” But whatever “rest” here means, surely you want to affirm the kind of continued, unbroken engagement of creation that would be entailed in God’s pursuing his purposes (speaking, calling, healing, judging, convicting, and all the other things God constantly does in relationship to the world and especially humanity); the providential stuff. But doesn't the face value meaning of that sort of engagement picture God as much busier after the seventh day than he was in days 1 through 6 put together? My feeling is that the divine rest of the seventh days is paradigmatic and theological. It’s intended to be an example for us (and that gets developed in Hebrews).

Having said that, there is a finality to the events that constitute the initial conditions of the universe. I personally don’t like the phrase creatio continua because that seems to drag the events of creation onward indefinitely without ANY sense of having finished some ‘thing’ that now gets related ‘to’ and maintained.

Lastly, doesn’t CM essentially mean creation is given self-existence? And is that really a communicable attribute? If only necessary beings are ‘self-existent’, then what’s it really mean to say there’s no sustaining movement of divine will holding things in existence? A body in motion stays in motion unless acted upon, yes, but a non-self-existent entity continues to exist unless God revokes its existence? Dunno, somehow they don’t line up. One wonders how it exists at all? By what means? Is it really generating its own life? If not, then are we just positing some form of IM?

Re: your (2)

Doesn’t your (2) just assume that ‘to sustain’ means ‘to determine’? But I don’t see the problem with imagining God sustaining someone’s continued existence ‘under certain conditions’ and those conditions being that God continue to sustain me ‘in my freedom’. He just agrees to not pull the plug on sustaining my existence when I choose to do what displeases him. But that doesn’t seem all that different from CM which claims God agrees ‘not to do something’ (as opposed to IM’s ‘to do something’). In either model you have creation dependent upon the will of God.

But IM does put God at the scene of every crime, so to speak. But neither of us can escape that really, since you at least posit the ‘presence’ of God (i.e., the apprehending sentience of God) at every collapse of a wavefunction for example. That’s ‘how’ God knows what’s going on in the world. So we both have God ‘intimately’ at the scene of every collapsing wavefunction (and on up from there). It’s just that you think God was ‘active’ in bring about an initial state which he (in comparison to IM) now ‘passively’ observes (though fully present), while I think God continues to be ‘active’ in sustaining creation’s becoming (but under conditions of freedom, etc., so that God commits to sustain even states of affairs that are less than optimal).

And if asked why God didn’t intervene to stop some evil, say, a proponent of CM might asnwer, “God’s purposes preclude his bringing his power to bear on a body already in motion.” A proponent of IM says, “God’s purposes preclude his pulling the plug. God’s committed to breathing life into the world even when it goes wrong.”

But I agree that if IM undermines LFW, you gotta go with CM. I’d do the same. I just have a hard time understanding just what it is that God gives created entities that fuels them, self-sustains them, absolutely apart from God (all God essentially does is ‘observe’).

My interest in creatio continua is less ontological and more relational/providential. I need God’s PRESENCE at the scene of every ‘event’ (mirco and macro). If I have that, I can say everything else I want to say pretty much. I just line up on the IM side because CMers are more likely (as my experience confirms) to exclude God from the definition of a thing, and that is the mistake I want to avoid. A relational ‘ontology’ basically says that you can’t say what a thing is without saying what its relations are. So where Aristotle made relations “accidents” (that’s a whole conversation), a relational ‘ontology’ say a thing’s relations constitutes the being and identity of the thing. Relations aren’t accidents.

Whether IM or CM is true (but I tend to IM), the creator-creature relationship is the one relationship that all created entities and events within the created order share. I’m interested in this relationship because I make use of it in arguing for universal reconciliation—namely, that the creator-creature relationship is defined (among other things) by who God is and what God wishes and offers to the creature. This ‘offer’ defines the relationship and the very being of the creature. So no created entity can even fail to have within the scope of its possibilities God-ward becoming.

Lastly, IM arguably fits better with several passages:

Heb. 1.3: Christ “sustains all things in/by his powerful word.”

One could argue that this clinches it. What else would an explicit affirmation of IM look like?

Col. 1.17: “In him all things consist/have their being.”
All things are not the eons (for Jeff). Paul’s not offering a philosophy of historical progress.

Acts 17.28 “In him we live, and move, and have our being.”

Tom

********************

Bruce quoting Fr. Stephen: 

 It is the Orthodox understanding that God is not a watchmaker (as the Deists imagined back in the Enlightenment). He did not create the world simply according to a plan and then let it unfold. Creation is more than the original event. It is the clear teaching of the Church that everything exists because God sustains it in its existence: only God is self-existent. It is a very important understanding for everything in our relationship with God.

Part of two-storey thought (itself largely a product of the Enlightenment) is the notion of a God who is distant – somewhere else – whose connection to the universe is, at best, philosophical. For Enlightenment thought, God as Creator, stands at a remove of billions of years. The universe is understood to have self-existence and thus God is reduced to interference if He is to have anything at all to do with the world He has made.

This is nothing like the teaching of Orthodox faith. God is not only “everywhere present and filling all things,” but also the One “in whom we live and move and have our being.” He not only gives the world existence in the sense of bringing it into existence – but gives the world existence by sustaining it in existence. Thus whether we believe in God or not – we existence in Him and through Him.

Amen, Brother...

Post Edited (One Love) : 7/24/2009 2:00:25 AM (GMT-5)

From here...

Between the uncreated and the created the predominant relationship is one of analogy, a relationship involving as well the disjunction of the two terms. Insofar as Eckhart in 1305 again takes up the theme of absolute being in its identity with God (esse est deus), he likewise gives expression to relationships of analogical causality, teaching that being as such, or absolute being (esse absolute), is what becomes restricted to determinate being (esse hoc et hoc), while determinate being is what brings it about that a this or a that (hoc et hoc) actually exists. Eckhart says ever again that the created is of itself pure nothing, indeed, even nothingness or nullity (nihileitas, nulleitas). The created is only because absolute being communicates itself to it—through determinate being—whereby determinate being, of course, is not in any position to communicate being as such, but only determinacy. That all of this is so, of course, is something that can be easily stated. Indeed, the metaphysics of being has always thrived on describing such structures, whether this being be absolute or determinate in nature.

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/24/2009 8:39:42 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Alan Rhoda) : 7/24/2009 11:47:59 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 7/24/2009 4:50:16 PM (GMT-5)

Jeff: I'm not lonely as long as people will at least DEBATE!! I'm used to being in a small minority.   

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/24/2009 9:25:22 PM (GMT-5)

D, I’ve noticed that what’s generally intended by both phrases creatio continua and creation ex nihilo is a description of a kind of relationship that obtains between God and creation. That seems to be Ward's point; continua was intended to say the world ‘depends’ upon God, has its existence in the creative word of God, it 'originates' in God. And ex nihilo the same, though it was intended to deny the eternal, self-sustaining nature of the cosmos. So dependency and origination express the real point.

But I do think that Scripture does distinguish between ‘creation’ and ‘sustainment’, so that it's difficult to say God is continually doing what he did to bring creation about in the first place. In the beginning God “created” (bara’) the heavens and the earth, but now all things “hold together” in him, and all things are “sustained” by his powerful word (Heb. 1.3). The verbs suggest a change in posture that marks a movement from ‘creation’ to ‘sustaining’. And theologically too, hasn’t the EO emphasized this 'movement from' creation to redemption to consummation? That’s what I mean. But if God is literally creating and re-creating the entire universe then creation is never “complete” (though Genesis does give me a sense of 'completion of something') and redemption and consummation become phases within creation. That does sound a bit strange.

Just notice the verbs. In Genesis God ‘creates’. But in Heb. 1.3, Christ “sustains” (phonero, “to carry”) all things by his powerful word. And even in both Col. 1 and Acts 17, there’s a change of posture from what we might call “active and determining” (Genesis) to “passive and permissive” (Col. 1 and Acts 17). The cosmos is “in him” where it has its being, as if God is "the medium in which" things acted and self-determined; that's what I mean by "passive" (not that God isn't doing anything in the world, or that "carrying', Heb. 1.3, isn't an "act," which of course it is).

I don’t think any of us really KNOWS what’s going on with either case (‘creating’ or ‘sustaining’). Wow! I just wanted to note that the distinction in moments or movement between BARA’ ("create") and PHONERO (sustain/maintain or "carry") does seem to be there. But one thing I definitely want to guard against is the Neo-platonic tendency to create a hierarchy of being, with demiurge and other levels in a causal chain to account for the world’s being and God’s transcendence of it. So analogies of “plugging things in” place “things” between creator and creature. But that’s just the point—there is no-thing between the two. Creatio continua may be faulted on some accounts, but it does a far better job of expressing the sort of intimacy and immediacy I value. And the more we move in the direction of “conservation” the less ‘connected’ and ‘intimate’ we seem to be.

Part of the problem with all our analogies is that they're al taken from within the realm of created being (which I know is unavoidable), which means everything is going to evidence the very thing we want to explain—the distinction between created being and uncreated being and the former’s ‘origin’ and ‘dependency’ upon God. We’re condemned to abstract out even from our best analogies. But again what we CAN say is what we NEED to say, and that is that created being cannot bring itself about (there’s our ‘origin’) nor can it “carry” or “sustain” itself (there’s our ‘dependency’). God HAS to be figured into the equation to account for the world's origin and continued existence. That's the point.

But I’m a bit uncomfortable with the idea that were we to remove God absolutely, creation would still continue to exist for a time. That at least courts a denial of ‘dependency’ and suggests a kind of heirarchy of being that manages to sustain itself for a while until lower levels find out the high levels ceased to exist. So the conservation model just seems like 'delayed continua'. If not, then the conservation model really has a built in assumption that creation CAN be eternal and self-sustaining. Of course, positing a necessary self-existent entity isn't problematic 'logically'. We do this with God. But whether the changing world evidences the kind of attributes needed to assert that it exists "necessarily" is another issue. Thus, if the world depends upon God for its existence, it depends upon God immediately and continually because there's no middle ground between "uncreated/divine being" and "created being" where God can go to get "stuff" or "things" to insert between himself and created being that would be needed to account for the continued existence of the latter (for however long) in the event God were absolutely withdrawn from the picture. I noticed Alan accounts for this by saying creation "obeys a convervation principle." But how that work given that there's no middle ground between divine being and created being? If the "principle" is set of software commands embedded within the created order, part of created being's DNA (and not God), then it requires the same accounting for its being that creation does.

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So in the end we have the all-pervasive divine “carry” (Heb. 1.3’s “sustains all things”) of the created order. And that at least posits God throughout creation apprehending all events. And wherever God is, all that God is and possibly can be is present. So we still have the gracious offer of Godward becoming constituting the scope of future possibilities for every created entity. That's what I'm interested in, and that gets me pretty much everything I want in terms of omniscience and UR.

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For Alan, I noticed a curious “fundamentalism” (ha!) to your definitions:

“Continuous creation: There is no fundamental difference between God's work in creating and sustaining.”

“Infusion: There is a fundamental different between God's work in creating and sustaining.”

“Conservation: There is a fundamental different between God's work in creating and sustaining.”

Just thinking out loud here, but just how fundamental is this “fundamental” difference that’s either affirmed or denied? Why must these aspects of God’s activity with respect to creation be “fundamentally” different or the same? Can’t they be “relatively” different or the same? What I’m saying is that our ‘origin’ (that God created us with his ‘word’) and our ongoing ‘dependency’ (that Christ “carries/sustains” us by the same powerful ‘word’, Heb. 1.3) are linked though relatively different—so we get an original and ongoing dependency relation. But I agree, there has to be some relative difference in ‘divine act’ to ground the larger distinction in the ‘movement’ we see from creation to sustainment to consummation, etc. Perhaps I’d keep “fundamental difference” in both your ‘continuous creation’ and ‘conservation’ (the former denying any such difference and the latter affirm such difference) but then with the Infusion Model I’d say “there’s a relative difference between God’s work in….” That’s what the REAL distinction is between the Infusion Model and the other two anyhow, right? It’s a mediating path. But what it’s supposed to mediate just IS the difference between God’s ‘creating’ and God’s ‘carrying’ the cosmos.

JEFF: God has no time between a volitional choice and the CONDITIONAL creating of the newly CHOSEN state of affairs. Thus, His actions and knowing regarding our volitional choices would have to be instantaneous, involving 0 duration.

TOM: Right. I get your point. But I a proponent of creatio continua wouldn’t have to deny any of this. Their point is, whatever actual state exists, though it’s immediately KNOWN or apprehended, it is not itself the effect of a creative work immediately spoken. That wouldn’t be possible for the reasons you offer. Instead, what actually exists would be the effect of a command ‘immediately preceding’ it’s coming to be. God’s continual creative ‘words’ would be ‘immediately spoken’ but only subsequently efficacious. So each word would be a response to the actual world and aimed at bring the next world into being given all the conditions of freedom God set up for this relationship. In other words if at t1 I choose to sin, God says, “OK, that’s what you want?” and his creative word then calls into existence at t2 a world that has me sinning. God would always be calling the next world into being, but on conditions that he call it into being given the covenants and constraints of freedom, etc. Hey…it might not work. But if it fails, it doesn’t fail for the reason you propose here.

One objection to this kind of continued calling into existence of the next moment might be that it makes God a DIRECT cause of evil. God actually chooses to DO evil, he causes evil to be. The objection might succeed. I don’t know. We have other options if the objection succeeds. But I gotta tell ya, is this REALLY any different than other models? I mean, we’re talking 'God' here. The objection assumes that God would act to prevent an undesired event by just refusing to call it into existence. But the same objection attaches to the other models. Surely a God who “carries/sustains all things” would just refuse to carry any evil thing. And surely a God who could unplug a universe going awry would do so. All three models grant God SOME means to stop evil and suppose that he doesn’t because the whole project has an integrity to it that’s grounded in God’s unfailing commitment to see it through to the end. And all three models connect God (by origin and sustainment) to a world that's gone awry. Once we say THAT, a proponent of CC would suggest, it makes little difference whether God is directly efficacious or indirectly efficacious in being the cause of the world’s existence. We all posit CONDITIONS (namely, the freedom to say what the next moment will be) under which God relates (directly or indirectly) to creation. What the proponent of CC means by creaturely freedom is that the creatures gets to determine what worlds God speaks into existence next, or that God's calling of the world's next moment into existence is a RESPONSE TO the actual word. But like I said, if this criticism of CC succeeds, then we have the infusion model, which gets me what I need. The conservation model seems too deistic for my tastes.

Blessings!

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 7/25/2009 2:24:41 AM (GMT-5)

And I agree that the "evil" problem you mention is not a problem for the continua creatio view. It has no different theodicy issues than the other views.

Post Edited (Similtude) : 7/25/2009 9:01:40 AM (GMT-5)