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Richard,
***In the above post, Harvey claims that god sets boundary conditions and sets a few things that have to happen, but otherwise leaves us alone. He did mention the possiblility of response to prayer. If god did act that way, then fairly often things would go wrong badly, and rather forceful intervention on god's part would be required, like the famous asteroid that wiped out the dinasaurs.***
Things do go wrong in the world, as the asteroid hitting the earth attests. Forceful intervention is not supernaturalism (e.g., the laws of physics stop working temporarily), rather the world is more malleable to change when it approaches crisis (i.e., near the critical point the system begins to behave 'unpredictably' which is consistent with symmetry breaking that occurs at the critical point). My view is that direction is mainly set at those junctures and the boundary conditions (God) determine the direction especially at those junctures.
***My experience, which is entirely subjective since it happened to me and is not repeatable, is that god or whatever is constantly meddling in our lives. So my opinion is that god is trying to make the world go a certain way, most likely to avoid the nuclear crisis as I've said many times before.***
I believe that too, but many of the events that happen are 'brute fact'. They are a consequence of the naturalistic flow of the world. The constant meddling isn't the capricious act of an semi-uninterested or semi-intelligent or semi-potent God, it is the effect of the boundary conditions having their effect on natural evolution. The world is constantly bumping into this divine order's boundary conditions. It just bumps 'harder' during crisis simply because it is more likely to respond to directional shifts at those times (as I said, nature is more malleable at those times).
***So my opinion is that god or whatever is basically weak, particularly in comparison to the creator type god of christianity or the perfect god of islam.***
You and Paul hold similar judgements about God. But, I don't see how this makes any sense. If God can have any significant effect on the world at all he would need to be vastly more intelligent than humans. If he acted as a human, then we would expect at least some effort at 'fixing' things that go wrong. We don't see those valient efforts of God, and I conclude that this kind of valient (but weak) God isn't an accurate portrayal of the type of divine order in place in the universe.
Warm regards, Harv |
