Post Edited (Similitude) : 7/28/2011 9:08:44 PM (GMT-5)

Jeff: Yep. That's the point. Creatio continu doesn't entail the notion of benevolence.

Tom: I agree. This is getting off D’s subject a bit, but…

Can we rightly conclude on the basis of anything else within our experience (without appealing to religious claims, i.e., on the basis of natural theology as opposed to revealed religion) that the necessary first cause is benevolent? Or are we dependent upon God’s act in Christ to show us that God is benevolent? Paul seems to think (Rm 1) that we can know that the first cause is sentient/rational, volitional, AND moral (that he justly holds us accountable, etc). So we can naturally know that God exists and that he is moral (which I take as roughly equivalent to God’s being benevolent since I think justice is a function of benevolence). But I’m not sure HOW to construct a syllogism from Paul’s argument. I usually turn to Hartshorne for my ‘natural theology’! I can’t think of anyone who gets to benevolent theism through philosophical reasoning better than Hartshorne.

Still, as valid as Hartshorne’s philosophical arguments for benevolent theism are, it seems to be the case that such arguments fail at communicating divine benevolence where Christ succeeds. We only really perceive that God loves us unconditionally when we see him die for us in Christ. I’m wondering what necessary role the incarnation plays in telling us that God is love if this truth can be perceived philosophically. Does the fact that God incarnates negate the validity of philosophical arguments for benevolent theism like Hartshorne’s?

Jeff: But I don't see how creatio continu, per se, makes the apparent problem of evil more intense.

Tom: I imagine someone objecting less to the problem of evil the more God is conceived in deistic terms. But if you place God smack in the middle of injustice and evil, and not just ‘present’, but committed to sustaining the perpetrators of evil while the commit their crimes, that does seem to me to intensify the problem. God can be THAT intimately involved in the progress of the world and STILL not succeed in preventing evil? I think such objections to can be answered, sure. But from the point of view of most onlookers, creatio continua is gonna intensify the problem.

Jeff: Given that natural evil seems to render the developmental "becoming" of all humans impossible in one life time (infants die from all kinds of natural evil), how is it that a competent and benevolent creator intended all humans to develop and "become" in THIS life?

Tom: That’s a doozy.

Jeff: Alternatively, how could reincarnation ever knowably succeed for all human "becoming" if natural evil of the degrees and distributions we experience reoccur in each life?

Tom: MOST humans born live through to sufficient development during their lifetime, right? If you add to this the possibility of endless reincarnations, then you’re gonna eventually get there (not the reincarnation is an option for me; I’d like to make sense of it without going that direction).

Jeff: As for omnipresence, creatio continua doesn't explain how God knows what events are freely chosen since "free" is not a spatial/temporal relation and since God can't Self-determine human voltional acts. Thus, we are stuck with some divine knowledge that is not explicable in terms of creatio continua anyway.

Tom: I don’t see any option for grounding God’s knowledge of the world is grounded apart from creatio continua. God gets his knowledge OF the world FROM the world. After all, creatio continua doesn’t include spatial/temporal relations only. God sustains all relations, including immaterial spiritual ones. But in any event, I thought you believed ‘free’ WAS a temporal relation since it describes a kind of causality and causality is inherently temporal in your view, right? God doesn’t know ‘before’ a free choice is determined what it shall be, but his knowledge of reality is coterminous with reality, right?

Jeff: Additionally, if one includes quantum indeterminism as indeterminate to God (as Alan seems to allow for), creatio continua breaks down. Because if God can't foreknow future locations of entities, He can't know how to create them WHERE they end up being. So an open theist would have to abandon true ontological indeterminism of elemental particles or creatio continua, just as Alan argued. They can't both be true.

Tom: And Alan rejects creatio continua. I don’t think he ever finished explain what his view was. But I’ve actually been thinking about this Jeff. Funny you mention it. One response might be to say God sustains a system’s capacity to sustain component parts that behave randomly. Or one could say God is able to behave randomly himself (we’re able to do so, so it’s not illogical), to commit himself to sustaining a scope of possible outcomes which he decides in a truly random manner such that the outcome is concurrent with his choice to collapse the possibilities. The outcome IS his choice. It’s probably doable.

Tom

Post Edited (One Love) : 7/29/2011 5:50:16 PM (GMT-5)

Tom: Well, the contents of our heart and our conscious thoughts aren't 'free' in the sense that they're already present (determinate) realities, right? But 'free' future events, right. I see that omnipresence can't provide God knowledge of future free choices (i.e., the free behavior of presently known realities). But we just deny that God knows such behavior.

Jeff: That's not my point of contention, though. I'm saying that the event attributes "free" and "determined" (or even "humanly-caused" vs. "Self-caused" on the creatio continua view) can not be conceivably derived from temporal and spatial attributes of events. Thus, there is knowledge of creation that God has that can not conceivably be accounted for by the "creatio continua" view of omnipresence.

I agree with the authors of "The Divine Attributes" that omnipresence just means that we can't hide anything from God by virtue of our location. And yet, if humans posit non-relativistic, human normativity (and our experience), they must posit divine knowledge of those attributes of causes we call "free" and "deterministic." Otherwise, that posited normativity is groundless/arbitrary. IOW, that kind of divine knowledge of creation is a corrollary of inferred non-relativistic human normativity.

So as I see it, it is known as a brute fact in that sense, rather than being grounded in omnipresence. IOW, if our inference unto non-relativistic, human normativity is true, then God just DOES know certain things that render that belief coherent and intelligible, whether or not we can understand it. So we must accept both or neither to remain logically consistent.

Tom: But I guess we just say that God sustains its progress 'he knows not where' We do that, so it's not obviously problematic to me that creatio continua is true and that there are genuinely free events in the natural order.

Jeff: I'm not following you. "We" don't sustain anything in existence to my knowledge. We only voluntarily act to bring about certain "states" of affairs using the regularities of the created order as means.

 
Tom: But I agree the open view isn't about that stuff primarily, though if the Coppenhagen interpretation COULD be established, THAT would immediately disprove theological determinism (OV's biggest rival). And that would be nice, hehe!

Jeff: First of all, the Cophenhagen view is inconsistent with teleology that accounts for warranted belief because it denies that any event is deterministic. IOW, it precludes the possibility of induction. The very goal of inductive thinking as applied to causality is to account for as many events as possible in terms of general laws. If there are no general laws, then we’re right back to the Matrix—an infinite set of merely logical possibilities with no inductive criteria by which to evaluate which is best or better.

There is a reason why many physicists still only use the math and ignore the Copenhagen interpretation of the math. From what I’ve read, a majority of the really prestigious physicists embrace the Copenhagen view. But a majority of prestigious scientists are atheists too. But they are a minority of all scientists. They just get the press. There are really smart people who disagree with them for purely deductive and inductive reasons.

Second of all, indeterminism can’t be demonstrated anyway. Just like Einsteinian relativity can’t be demonstrated. The math is the same for Lorentzian and Einsteinian views. There is no model of matter that explains all events. That would at least be circumstantial evidence for their view. But we know their model is false AS a model. It may be useful pragmatically, but it IS false AS a model of reality because of the LNC. Thus, there is no reason to believe yet that indeterminancy to humans equals ontological indeterminancy. So to posit something we have no compelling reason to believe and then posit another attribute to God to reconcile theism with it is to be needlessly non-parsimonious.

Tom: However, if we posit creatio continua (an active divine presence sustaining the world on a moment by moment basis), and we say that WE are free (forget quantum particles), then don't we face the same problem you note with quantum particles? How's God sustain US if the US that he sustains and that self-determines is not under his control and he knows not where he sustains it?

Jeff: That would be a problem if and only if my ability, as a non-material entity, to cause effects depended on me being at some precise location. But I can’t observably know that’s the case. After all, I seem to think in one place and feel in others. And yet it’s me consciously experiencing all of it.

On the other hand, the future regularities of material motion are precisely related to their present locations. IOW, causal specificity for material motion is seemingly (via empirical observation) precisely dependent on locations of that matter. We can’t observe that to be the case with spiritual causality. So I think Alan is right about the problem with respect to matter, at least.

Tom: That's why this seems to intensify the problem of evil a bit, because God is then 'complicit' (arguably, on a certain fundamental level) in evil in a way that LOOKS pretty bad for God (some will argue), for God is present in evil acts sustaining them, "letting" them go (which implies that he isn't trying to prevent evil at all).

Jeff: This is true of all theistic teleological views of reality, though. God is 'complicit' teleologically at some level, regardless. But apart from teleology, what sense does theism even make? If post-mortem experience does not occur, benevolent theism is not knowable by humans. It’s how things ultimately work out that can render it coherent.

Take normal physiological pain. We explain it by saying it is instructive—it tells us what NOT to do. In that sense, we say some short term suffering is consistent with benevolent theism so long as the long term good outweighs it. But Pauls tells us that suffering that even God did not originally intend can ALSO be explained that way (“… for the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared with the glory we shall receive.”) For God had risked that suffering even though He had not originally intended it. So He works out post-mortem consequences to appropriate it under the same “it’s worth it” rationale that even normal physiological pain is understood by.

Tom: Still, God DOES attempt to prevent the evil that HE sustains to its self-determined conclusion. It's complex.

Jeff: I think we have to say that God has to balance His desire to prevent evils in the short term with His long range goal(s). And that long range plan may necessitate degrees of regularity in the “order” during the short run that make us very uncomfortable in the short run.

Tom: Or one could say God is able to behave randomly himself (we’re able to do so, so it’s not illogical), to commit himself to sustaining a scope of possible outcomes which he decides in a truly random manner such that the outcome is concurrent with his choice to collapse the possibilities. The outcome IS his choice. It’s probably doable.

Jeff: That is doable, logically. But the mind yearns for a teleological explanation if in fact it is God’s own self-determination generating unpredictable (to humans, i.e.) events. But we need not get ahead of ourselves. We put forth your contention to demonstrate that it’s logically doable in terms of theism so long as we can’t prove there is NO possible teleological reason for God doing it that way.

But we don’t need to suggest that humans are even close to demonstrating a need for any such explanation. Heck, they haven’t even reconciled QT with relativity yet. What’s more amazing is that several years ago the QT gurus got together with the relativity gurus to work on a reconciliation of the two. After a couple of days of frustration, they realized they didn’t even mean the same thing by “time.” Humans have a tendency to take scientists WAY too seriously. These people are not only fallible, but they are actually more political than average folks. And we know what politics does to rational debate.

They are the ones who are defending the least parsimonious position today. When they have a logically successful model of material behavior that accurately models a purely probabilistic nature of material events, then and only then do we need to even worry about apologetics of that kind. Until then, we have no more reason to assume that indeterminancy in QT is any different in the relevant sense than the indeterminancy of lightning strikes or wave particle behavior. IOW, indeterminancy to humans doesn’t equal ontological indeterminancy. At most, circumstantial evidence could be provided for their view, and it hasn’t yet been provided.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 7/30/2011 4:10:14 PM (GMT-5)

We at least have POTENTIAL solutions. They, on the other hand, have nothing but the void. But in that void, it's hard to recognize one's own blindness. That's why we can rightly call conversion an "awakening." Keith Green sang words like these once:

Like waking up from the longest dream,

How real it seemed,

Until Your Love broke through!

I was lost in a fantasy,

That blinded me,

Until Your Love broke through!

Post Edited (Similitude) : 7/31/2011 9:35:52 AM (GMT-5)

One-storey universe simply says this is true...as fully revealed in the Incarnation of God in Christ.

Post Edited (One Love) : 7/31/2011 1:14:45 PM (GMT-5)

The guard of the mind is the practical goal of the Hesychast. It is the condition in which he remains as a matter of course throughout his day, every day until he dies. It is from the guard of the mind that he is raised to contemplation by the Grace of God.

The Hesychast usually experiences the contemplation of God as light, the Uncreated Light of the theology of St Gregory Palamas. The Hesychast, when he has by the mercy of God been granted such an experience, does not remain in that experience for a very long time (there are exceptions—see for example the Life of St Savas the Fool for Christ (14th Century), written by St Philotheos Kokkinos (14th Century)), but he returns 'to earth' and continues to practise the guard of the mind.

The Uncreated Light that the Hesychast experiences is identified with the Holy Spirit. Experiences of the Uncreated Light are allied to the 'acquisition of the Holy Spirit'. Notable accounts of encounters with the Holy Spirit in this fashion are found in St Symeon the New Theologian's account of the illumination of 'George' (considered a pseudonym of St Symeon himself); in the 'conversation with Motovilov' in the Life of St Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833); and, more recently, in the reminiscences of Elder Porphyrios