Category Archives: Science and Philosophy

Posts about science and philosophy, often also related to theology

Does God know the future? Does prayer make a difference?

Posted on by
Reply

California pastor TC Robinson burst on to the blogging scene a few months ago with his blog New Leaven. (I assume he is male, and not a woman using initials rather than a first name to disguise her gender, because he admits to a wife and two kids, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much these days in California!) This is one of the most prolific blogs I read with an average of more than four posts a day. It is also one of the most consistently interesting and thought-provoking, as TC consistently finds subjects which are both serious and entertaining and very often lead to long comment thread discussions. I disagree with TC on a number of issues, but it is always good to discuss them with him and others on his blog.

When I call him TC I can’t help remembering the Top Cat cartoons of my childhood, in which the hero was known as TC. But I don’t recognise Pastor Robinson as the leader of the bloggers’ gang!

Among TC’s posts recently have been several on Open Theism, which is basically the idea that God does not predetermine the future or even know it in advance. So far he has written ten posts in this category. It was partly in response to one of these posts that I wrote my post God the Blogger, to which TC responded.

Meanwhile Jeremy Pierce has reactivated his extremely long running Theories of Knowledge and Reality series, which touches on the same kinds of question. He has also posted an interesting essay on Prophecy in Harry Potter (see also the comments on this one); now I am not much interested in Harry Potter, but in this post issues also come up of whether even God can prophesy reliably about the future.

Open Theism has been rejected by many evangelical Christians, such as Wayne Grudem, because of its apparent implication that not even God knows the future. If not, they argue, how can God fulfil his purposes, and inspire accurate prophecies about what will happen? Surely, these people argue, the future is predetermined by God. This is in effect the position of Calvinists, who believe that God has predetermined who will be saved, if not necessarily every detail of the future. Yet it is difficult to see how this kind of determinism allows for any kind of human free will. But the Bible seems to affirm that humans do have free will, as for example in Psalm 32:9, and as such are responsible for their actions.

A related question is whether Christian prayer can make a real difference to the future. Some may hold that the real function of prayer is to bring us closer to God – and that people should not ask for anything specific, even for God to provide for others’ genuine needs. However, Jesus, especially in Matthew 7:7-11, seems to present prayer as a real process of making specific requests and seeing them fulfilled. But how can this be if God has already fixed the future before we pray?

Now there are very many complex arguments here, into which Jeremy goes in depth, and this is not the place to repeat them. One possible answer is provided by “compatibilism”, which is basically the idea that there are two separate but compatible descriptions of the world, one from our viewpoint in which human decisions are free, and another divine one according to which God has predetermined everything. I can also recommend here a rather heavy book which I have only skimmed but would like to read in more detail: Providence and Prayer by Terrance Tiessen.

I will simply state here where I think I stand at the moment. I’m not sure it is where I will always stand – at least that part of the future is open, or in God’s hands. But this is my present position:

I believe that God is sovereign over everything and quite capable of determining everything that will ever happen within the universe he created. He is eternal and outside this universe, and not subject to anything within it.

I believe that God has freely chosen to allow a real openness about the future of the universe. This is because he has delegated many of the decisions about its future to intelligent created beings, both spiritual ones, i.e. angels, and humans. This delegation of authority was intended to be for his own glory. But for reasons which I do not presume to understand in detail some of these created beings chose to reject God’s good purposes and use their delegated rights to make decisions against God. God could have simply taken away their right to decide, but for reasons hinted at in Psalm 32:9 he chose not to.

Nevertheless God is not bound by the universe or by time and therefore he can see into the future. He knows what will happen. He generally chooses not to intervene to overturn the consequences of human bad decisions, that is, human sin. However, he knows his own long term purposes for his creation as a whole and for particular individuals and groups in it. So he works in generally subtle ways within his creation to bring about his purposes. This may include calling particular people to particular works; but if they refuse to take up their calling, or mess it up, God finds other ways to fulfil his purposes.

Among the privileges which God has granted to those people who are committed to living according to his will is that he has promised to answer their prayers, to give to them whatever they ask for (Matthew 7:7-8, John 14:14). He will indeed do this, in ways which do not conflict with the free will of others, although not always in quite the way his people expect. But if what they ask goes against his general purposes, he will not be pleased with the person asking and may choose to work through other people in future. However, those whose prayers are closely aligned with God’s will, because they know that will and truly want to see it done, will find that God is more than pleased to answer not just the basics of their prayers but to give them abundantly more than they ask. As they live and pray according to God’s purposes they will be able to do great things with him and for his glory.

This post has already turned into quite a long essay. So I will leave it there. I await comments!

God the Blogger

Posted on by
Reply

While commenting on TC Robinson’s Open Letter to an Open Theist, I realised that I had found an interesting analogy which might help to explain some of the complex issues of free will and predestination. Or maybe the whole thing is just far too simplistic.

It is an old analogy to compare the relationship between God and the created world with that between an author and the fictional world of his or her novel. On this analogy God is in full control of the whole storyline, of everything which happens. The characters in the novel may have free will within that fictional world, but in the real world they have no freedom, indeed no independent existence. As I understand it this kind of model corresponds quite well with Calvinism. It is consistent with the compatibilism which Jeremy Pierce finds in Calvinism in that the characters have real free will within their own world. It is hard to argue against such a model. Yet somehow it is not a compelling one because it reduces the dignity of humanity to a set of pawns in the mind of God.

I would like to put forward a rather different model in which God is a blogger! He can post what he likes on his blog, including stories of a world he has created and the people who inhabit it. But my model differs from the one of God as novelist in that human beings, spiritual beings like God, are not just characters described on the blog but also in the same world as God, perhaps “seated in the heavenly places”, and with real free will not controlled by God. As such they are able to read the blog, and, crucially, also have some input into it.

God as a blogger could of course make his blog entirely read-only, as for example Adrian Warnock has done. By doing so he would on my understanding make it not a blog at all. In my model this would correspond with a Calvinist position in which God decides everything, at least in the real world, with human freedom restricted to the world inside the non-blog. This is equivalent to the model of God as novelist. It is perhaps not accidental that non-blogs like this are popular among Calvinists.

But on my preferred version of the model God has chosen, voluntarily, to open up the blog so that others, humans, can interact with him on it. On a real blog that interaction is typically limited to commenting. But on my model the humans can also write the main text, within limits set by God which might include that they can only write or edit posts about themselves. Indeed God might let the humans do most of the posting at least about matters which concern them, getting involved himself only when the humans ask him to or to put things right when they go seriously wrong. Thus what happens in the stories on the blog depends largely on the genuinely free decisions of the humans in God’s world, and not just on what God determines. Actually perhaps a wiki is a better analogy here than a blog.

Nevertheless, God retains complete control of the blog. He can moderate and reverse any edits. He can withdraw access privileges from those who abuse them. He can also write people in and out of the story as and when he wishes. In the blog world he is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.

Crucially for the open theism debate, if he decides to do something on the blog, nothing can stop him doing it. This does not mean that he controls everything that happens on the blog. But it does mean that if he announces a plan to do something at a certain time and in a certain way we can be sure that he actually can and will do it, even if in order to do so he has to undo some things which others have done.

I’m not sure how good a model this is of the interaction between God, his creation and humanity. It is certainly not a perfect one. But it may be closer to the truth than the model of God as novelist. And it may address some of the issues which have led to Open Theism, the idea that God doesn’t exhaustively know the future, without following that path to its false conclusion of that God is not omnipotent.

The earth is not at risk …

Posted on by
Reply

The earth is not at risk from a new particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, according to scientists as reported by the BBC. There had been suggestions, even by theoretical physicists, that the Large Hadron Collider could generate new “strangelet” particles which might destroy ordinary matter, or miniature black holes which could grow and swallow up the earth. But the scientists have now reported that there is “no conceivable danger”. This is not because the accelerator cannot generate black holes – it can. But it is because the earth throughout its history has been bombarded, if only rather occasionally, by cosmic ray particles which are just as energetic as those produced by the collider, but even over billions of years these have failed to produce killer particles or black holes of mass destruction.

So are we safe? The scientists seem to think so. But they also seem to accept that there is a small but not completely vanishing chance of a collision between particles, whether cosmic ray particles or ones generated in an accelerator, having effects which spread out to destroy or damage the whole earth. The assurance that they can offer is simply that it hasn’t happened yet, for billions of years, and so isn’t likely to happen any time soon. And the new collider increases the danger by apparently producing as many high energy collisions in one experiment as occur naturally on the earth in thousands of years.

What is God’s perspective on this? This is what the apostle Peter had to say:

Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” …10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. [footnote: Some manuscripts be burned up]

11 Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives 12 as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. [footnote: Or as you wait eagerly for the day of God to come] That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. 13 But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

14 So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.

2 Peter 3:3-4,10-14 (TNIV)

The scoffers claim that the earth is safe, it will continue as it is for ever, or at least for billions of years more, and God will never bring judgment or destruction. However, now even scientists are saying that there is a possibility, however remote, of the earth suddenly being destroyed. One possible scenario,

the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter – transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump

sounds remarkably like what Peter prophesied nearly 2000 years ago. I don’t claim that this is how the prophecy will be fulfilled, but even scientists are not ruling out the possibility.

As Peter writes, the consequence of this for us Christians is simple: “You ought to live holy and godly lives … make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

The devil, bad pizza, and Todd Bentley's healings

Posted on by
Reply

Brian Fulthorp writes an interesting post on spiritual warfare, a follow-up to an earlier post.

What he says is mostly very sensible and important. But there is one issue that I would like to take up. He writes:

We don’t want to confuse coincidence with causation – sometimes it really was the bad pizza from last night and not always a Spiritual attack.

He goes on to talk about Paul Hiebert’s “flaw of the excluded middle.” But it seems to me that his own thinking is characterised by a version of this flaw. For he seems to believe that a bad stomach, like the one his wife suffered on Sunday night, has one of two causes: either it is a spiritual attack from “the devil and his cohorts”, or it has a physical explanation such as a bad pizza.

But this is a false dualism. The problem seems to be that in Hiebert’s worldview, at least as I see it summarised in this short article which Brian linked to, the two separate tiers of a typical western worldview have been replaced by three separate tiers. And by implication any one action must originate in just one of these tiers. So, to the physical explanations and the transcendent divine explanations accepted by typical western theists, Hiebert seems to add a third separate explanation related to spirit beings in this world.

Now I believe Hiebert, and Brian, are right about the reality of this intermediate spiritual world. But it seems that they separate it from the other worlds, and if so they go wrong here. A better picture would be of this intermediate world as the filling which links together the otherwise separate world into a united whole.

An implication of this for me is that it is wrong to say that any event has a cause just in one of the three domains. So, I would say, Brian’s wife’s bad stomach had a physical cause, perhaps a bad pizza, but it also had a cause in the spiritual world, the devil or one of his minions attacking her. And it also had a cause in the divine realm in that God only allows such things for a good purpose.

So I don’t accept Brian’s apparent dualism. I would say that every bad stomach has a physical cause. I don’t think I believe that the devil can affect stomachs directly apart some physical means. I would also say that every bad stomach has a spiritual cause in that such bad things are always indicative of the activity of personalised evil. Also everything is subject to God’s sovereignty and only happens because he wills it. In other words, every event has causes in all three realms.

I would apply this principle also to good things that happen, like healings. Here we come back to the discussion of what Todd Bentley is doing. I would hold that healings like those reported at Lakeland, Florida are ultimately caused by God. I would suggest that in them there is some kind of agency of good spiritual forces such as angels – and this would partly justify Todd’s interest in angels. And I would also say that there is some kind of physical cause of each healing.

So, I would expect that when someone who has been healed at Lakeland presents themselves to a doctor, the doctor will generally find some medical explanation of the unexpected cure, some unusual coincidence of factors which has allowed a complete recovery. This may be one reason for the scarcity of medical attestations of healing. Even the girl who was raised from the dead on the third day was probably, according to the doctors, wrongly declared dead and in fact just in a deep coma. But does this invalidate these things as miracles? No, because God who is in control of all things is able to bring together the medical factors to bring about the healing at just the time he wants to. If he chooses to do so at just the time that Todd declares someone healed, then he is being faithful to his promise to do anything his faithful people ask (John 16:23-24).

Now I don’t claim that absolutely everything that happens has a physical explanation according to the ordinary laws of physics. The resurrection of Jesus, which was not just the healing of someone who looked dead but was not, is a clear example of an event with no normal physical explanation. And the final resurrection of our bodies will also be such events. I suspect that this happens rather rarely. Maybe it happens in some unusual healings, what Todd Bentley and others call creative miracles such as regrowing of limbs – but see this story about how even this can have a physical explanation. I really don’t know how common such miracles are in the world today. But when they do happen they are a sign of something extraordinary, the new world breaking into the old. There is a lot more to explain there, but I won’t try to tonight.

So let’s avoid unnecessary compartmentalising of events, good or bad. Let’s avoid overblown claims that every healing involves a complete suspension of the laws of physics, rather than what the world might describe as a lucky coincidence. Let’s also avoid the scepticism which denies any healings, which so often comes from a worldview which does not allow for the suspension of the laws of physics. Let’s instead glorify God for the wonderful things which he is doing, even when he is using physical processes to do so.

Answering the unanswerable on suffering

Posted on by
Reply

Sam was asked by Scott Gray some unanswerable questions, so after trying his own answers he decided to turn this into a meme and ask five others, including myself!

Here are the questions:

1. if the nature of god is omnipotent, benevolent, and anthropomorphic (that god is a person, who sees suffering as wrong, and can change all of it), why does god not act to relieve all suffering, or at least the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest amount of people the greatest amount of time?
2. if you were god, and you were omnipotent and benevolent, how would you respond to suffering?
3. if this is not the nature of god, what is the nature of god, that allows suffering in the world?
4. if these are the wrong questions to ask, what are the right ones?

Wow! How am I supposed to answer this? I will have a quick try, but don’t expect anything profound. I won’t try to make four separate answers here, but perhaps answer all four questions together.

The basic reason, as I see it, why God does not simply remove all human suffering is that in doing so he would have to override the free will which he has given to his human creatures. (I will not go into the separate issue of animal suffering here.) The issue here is nicely illustrated by the psalmist, speaking here as the mouthpiece of God:

Do not be like the horse or the mule,
which have no understanding
but must be controlled by bit and bridle
or they will not come to you.

Psalm 32:9 (TNIV)

God could make us humans do exactly what he wanted us to do, controlling us by the “bit and bridle” of his almighty power. But this is not what he wants us to be like. He has made us with understanding and he wants us to act according to it. We can only do so if we are released from the “bit and bridle” and given our freedom. Sadly, as has been seen ever since the Garden of Eden, humans choose to abuse that freedom by doing all kinds of wrong things.

The inevitable result of those wrong things we humans do is suffering. Most human suffering is caused by human folly. I can say that even of natural disasters, whose impact is usually vastly more than it might have been because people have chosen, or have been forced by other people, to live in unsuitable homes in unprotected areas which perhaps should not be inhabited at all.

God could act to stop people living like this or take them out of danger zones. But he can do this only by overriding human freedom. And that is something he has chosen not to do. He has chosen to limit himself in order to make for himself a mature people who can stand on their own feet. So, just as a wise parent does not protect a growing child from every possible danger but allows him or her to learn by experience what is good and what is bad, so God allows his children to learn by experience, even of suffering. Just as his own special Son Jesus learned obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5:8), so we too, his children by adoption, are expected to learn obedience through suffering.

But suffering should not be taken out of perspective. As I wrote in a provocative post a week ago, at first quoting John Hobbins,

Suffering and death have no meaning whatsoever except insofar as they will be vanquished forever.

Indeed! To Christians death should be a joyful release from this earth (2 Corinthians 5:1-4), although of course tinged with sadness for those left behind, and suffering is temporary and a preparation for greater glory (2 Corinthians 4:17).

When we taste the heavenly glory, it will so overwhelm us that we will no longer count our sufferings here as something to be remembered or compared with anything else. This is how Jesus put it:

A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. 22 So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.

John 16:21-22 (TNIV)

I nearly forgot, this is supposed to be a meme and I am supposed to tag others. So I hereby tag Lingamish David, MetaCatholic Doug and Koiya Chronicle Eddie. It would be interesting just to see your initial thoughts, don’t feel obliged to post a theological tome!

Why I am ignoring Burma and China

Posted on by
Reply

I have not been moved greatly by the natural disasters in Burma (Myanmar) and China. Why not? Am I callous? I sometimes feel a bit guilty for this. But somehow deep down these things do not move me.

One thing that I could say is that the tens of thousands who die in high profile disasters like these are in fact a small number compared with those dying every year from largely treatable diseases like malaria, which causes over a million deaths a year. It may seem callous to calculate like this, but there are probably more lives saved or rebuilt per buck from providing simple mosquito nets to poor Africans than from responding to the latest fashionable disaster appeal.

But there is also a more theological reason for not focusing on natural disasters, which is well put by John Hobbins quoting David Hart:

[T]here is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel — and none in which we should find more comfort — than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

Hart’s essay is profound, and also touches on how this matter relates to understandings of the atonement. If this extract doesn’t make sense to you, read it all. It is in line with Hart’s conclusions that John adds:

Suffering and death have no meaning whatsoever except insofar as they will be vanquished forever.

Indeed! To Christians death should be a joyful release from this earth (2 Corinthians 5:1-4), although of course tinged with sadness for those left behind, and suffering is temporary and a preparation for greater glory (2 Corinthians 4:17). As for those who die without explicitly being Christians, it may well be that God reveals himself to them in their dying moments; or maybe God knew that they would never repent and believe and so there was no point in keeping them alive. In any case, God is in control of all this. We should avoid falling into the world’s way of thinking in which death is the ultimate disaster.

So, as Christians we should not let ourselves be distracted by giving excessive attention to natural disasters, which are bound to come, but should keep our focus on the work of building God’s kingdom.

Is there life on other worlds?

Posted on by
22

This has been a good week for those searching for life beyond the earth. The BBC Science and Nature web page links to three separate new articles pointing in this direction. Salt deposits from dried up lakes have been found on Mars, suggesting that once, billions of years ago, there were lakes of salty water which could have supported life, and that traces of this could be found in the salt. Beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, according to new evidence, very likely still today there are oceans of liquid water, which could well support life as organic molecules are also present. And for the first time these organic molecules have been found on a planet outside our solar system; although this particular planet is too hot for life, this finding, combined with the recent discovery of a planet of similar size and temperature to our earth orbiting a distant star, suggests that there may be billions of planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life.

It is highly unlikely that any life on Mars or on Titan will be anything like the intelligent aliens we know of from science fiction. Large organisms simply could not survive on Mars today; indeed it seems unlikely that any life could. Much more likely, both there and deep inside Titan, would be something like bacteria.

As for planets in other solar systems, from a scientific point of view anything is possible. But people have been listening for radio messages from aliens for 50 years and have so far not heard anything suggesting intelligent beings out there.

Would the discovery of life on other planets be a threat to the Christian faith? Certainly it should not be. If God can create life on earth, whether through natural processes (as I believe) or by direct creation (as other Christians prefer to understand it), he certainly can do so in other places, and we have no reason to think that he has not done so.

If there are non-human intelligent beings out there, one might speculate, or conceivably in future be able to study, whether they are also self-aware and spiritual beings, whether they too have sinned, and whether they too need to be saved by the sacrificial death and resurrection of the Son of God. CS Lewis memorably speculated in his novels Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus (also known as Perelandra) about intelligent inhabitants of Mars and Venus living in an unfallen Garden of Eden kind of environment. Of course we can’t know, until and unless we make actual contact. But the possibility of this should not be any kind of threat to our faith.

Fully human and born of a virgin

Posted on by
30

A few days ago James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix took a comment that I left at MetaCatholic and made it into his Quote of the Day. This has led to some discussion, partly because people took my comment in a rather more sexually explicit way than I had intended.

James has in fact made several recent posts on the seasonal topic of the virgin birth. I agree with his point that the child Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 is not Jesus and the mother is not stated to be a virgin.

James also quotes concerning the virgin birth from Arthur Peacocke, who I knew as Dean of my Cambridge college when I was an undergraduate. Peacocke wrote:

for Jesus to be fully human he had, for both biological and theological reasons, to have a human father as well as a human mother … it was probably Joseph.

Indeed. Continue reading →

My Ethical Philosophy

Posted on by
Reply

I have not studied ethical philosophy in any formal way. But I found it interesting to follow this tip from Doug Chaplin to the Ethical Philosophy Selector. My results are interesting:

1. St. Augustine (100%) Information link
2. Aquinas (94%) Information link
3. Kant (88%) Information link
4. Ockham (83%) Information link
5. Spinoza (79%) Information link
6. Ayn Rand (67%) Information link
7. Aristotle (64%) Information link
8. Jean-Paul Sartre (57%) Information link
9. Jeremy Bentham (55%) Information link
10. John Stuart Mill (52%) Information link
11. Nietzsche (52%) Information link
12. Nel Noddings (51%) Information link
13. Prescriptivism (50%) Information link
14. Stoics (45%) Information link
15. Cynics (42%) Information link
16. Epicureans (39%) Information link
17. David Hume (38%) Information link
18. Plato (28%) Information link
19. Thomas Hobbes (11%) Information link

So, while I have problems with the theology of Augustine of Hippo, it seems I am close to him in ethical philosophy. Given how I answered, it is of course not surprising that I am closest to the two major Christian figures in the list.

Why I am not a Calvinist

Posted on by
20

I’m sorry if I lost some of you my readers in my previous posts about five-point or TULIP Calvinism, including the one about the spoof that wasn’t. I know that for some of you these are burning issues which you know all about. But I’m sure that there are others among you who have little knowledge or interest about these matters.

I will here state openly that I am not a Calvinist, neither five-point nor anything else. A post today by Ben Witherington has reminded me of why not. If God has predestined everything, the fundamental basis of the Calvinist picture of reality, this implies that he has predetermined all the kinds of disasters which are so common in this world, and indeed every bad thing which happens. This makes him the author of evil. But this picture of God is in absolute contradiction to the biblical picture of the character of God who is both just and loving.

Continue reading →