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Ronald A. Newcomb
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 45
| Posted 11/29/2010 6:49 PM (GMT -6) |   | Listening to Chesterton and Lewis something quite extraordinary occurred to me. Lewis used the concept of Jesus being either lunatic on the level of a person who claims he is a poached egg, or the devil of hell, but let’s do away with the idea that he is simply a good moral teacher. He has not left that option open to us.
Something occurred to me. Jesus turned water into wine. This is a dramatic change in the water, but it is still a fluid, it likely had a very similar mass, perhaps it lost some energy in the transaction, but it likely was within a very few ounces from the original weight. On the molecular level, this is merely the rearrangement of molecules, though we can describe it, we cannot perform the same change.
Then I heard the analogy one of them used of the ant farm. You have an ant farm, and love the ants so much that you become an ant to warn them of some impending danger. This would make for an interesting change in the person. We see it in modern stories such as “Honey, I shrunk the Kids” or in the comics with The Incredible Hulk who changes from a normal man to a larger more muscular man. A new movie is about to be released based on the old movie “Tron” where a person, the programmer, was sucked into the computer and became part of the program itself. There are many stories of transformation but most of them deal with transforming one kind of matter, or one amount of matter into another, and that would be a shocking transformation so much so that no one, unless they are insane, would believe them to be true. We have TV and movie transformations where people become paintings or paintings become people, sometimes as part of the story, sometimes merely an artistic manner of changing scenes.
Something else hit me. We do have an irrational idea in the Christian religion that sometimes children believe, occasionally a mistaken person believes, that when a person dies, they are transformed into an angel. The reality is, of course, we simply lose our body and soul (according to how you define that) but maintain the spirit/mind (again, according to how you define that) but you remain a human person. An angel is a different type of being, they are not dead persons as we assume a ghost is or would be. The later would be a change in category of being.
To change the type or category of being, say, from a human person to a chicken would be a huge change. To change from a person into a rock is less of a change because this could actually occur, we could petrify dead humans if we wanted to but we could not change a human into a different kind of being. Changing a human person into an angel is even a larger change, and, of course, this kind of change never happens despite “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
What would be the largest change possible in the universe? (Here, the term “universe” means everything that exists, not only physical things, but the spiritual world as well.)
The largest possible change in the universe would be for an uncreated, necessary self-existent being to create something physical, contingent on his own activity, and then take on a part of that newly created thing as part of himself, to become partly contingent.
That is exactly what the second person of the trinity did. The largest possible change happened to God, by his own will and action becoming (in part) what he created.
Classical theisms deny that God can even learn something new, not so much as a new fact can happen to God because that would mean he changes. Yet the largest possible change happened to God by his own hand. This doesn’t quite fit into either classical theisms.
Professor Newcomb
San Diego State University
College of Sciences
Adjunct Faculty Member
P.I. ICATS
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