Monday, December 05, 2005
I Hate To Rain On The Parade
Amy over at the A-Team Blog is writing on the issue of interaction between the physical and non-physical.
We need to be careful in these meta-physical arguments. Science really is advancing in ways we never thought possible at the beginning of my life time, and in some ways our power is in fact god-like.
So what is the essential difference between us and God? Where does He begin and we end? I will argue in two places. The first is goodness. God is good, we are not. Thus, if God performs a miracle, it will always result in good; however, if we do something seemingly miraculous, that result of goodness cannot be guaranteeed, in fact it is unlikely. That's why power in the hands of God is not nearly so frightening as power in our hands. I may not always understand God's goodness, but I can rely upon it.
The other essential difference is God' ability to create from nothingness. Our creative ability must rely upon the pre-exisiting. We can reshape, reform, and transform, but we cannot create from nothing. In fact modern science really cannot conceive of nothing, there is always at least an energy field, that may be massless, but in this Einsteinian age it cannot be said to me nothing.
So how can God intereact with "reality?" -- simple He is fundamentally a part of it, not separate. He encompasses it and more. If I am writing a book and decide to edit it in such a way that the primary character in the book changes from male to female, when I hit "find and replace" on the word processor, to the other characters in the book a miracle will occur, but since it is my book, the interaction itself is straighforward -- I, as the author, am intimately a part of the story, I control it completely. The characters will never be able to explain "the miracle." It will seem to have come from something wholly apart from them, but to the contrary, it will have come from something that intimately encompasses them.
The key question with miracles is not "How," but "Why."
Why did you wave? There was nothing in the physical world that compelled you through the laws of physics or chemistry or anything else to raise your arm. Your action did not begin with a physical process; your action began with your will. Your will to raise your arm was not a physical part of your body. Your thought was non-physical--it couldn't have been measured because it had no mass and took up no space. Try describing your thoughts and your will in physical terms--what color are they? how big are they? how much do they weigh? These questions are meaningless because our wills are not in the same category as objects in the physical world which can be described in such terms.Much as I want to support Amy's central thesis in support of the miraculous, I have to pick on this argument. In this modern age of brain mapping a thought can be pretty well measured and described, not decoded just yet, but the chemical reactions and electrical impulses can be measured, traced and described.
We need to be careful in these meta-physical arguments. Science really is advancing in ways we never thought possible at the beginning of my life time, and in some ways our power is in fact god-like.
So what is the essential difference between us and God? Where does He begin and we end? I will argue in two places. The first is goodness. God is good, we are not. Thus, if God performs a miracle, it will always result in good; however, if we do something seemingly miraculous, that result of goodness cannot be guaranteeed, in fact it is unlikely. That's why power in the hands of God is not nearly so frightening as power in our hands. I may not always understand God's goodness, but I can rely upon it.
The other essential difference is God' ability to create from nothingness. Our creative ability must rely upon the pre-exisiting. We can reshape, reform, and transform, but we cannot create from nothing. In fact modern science really cannot conceive of nothing, there is always at least an energy field, that may be massless, but in this Einsteinian age it cannot be said to me nothing.
So how can God intereact with "reality?" -- simple He is fundamentally a part of it, not separate. He encompasses it and more. If I am writing a book and decide to edit it in such a way that the primary character in the book changes from male to female, when I hit "find and replace" on the word processor, to the other characters in the book a miracle will occur, but since it is my book, the interaction itself is straighforward -- I, as the author, am intimately a part of the story, I control it completely. The characters will never be able to explain "the miracle." It will seem to have come from something wholly apart from them, but to the contrary, it will have come from something that intimately encompasses them.
The key question with miracles is not "How," but "Why."
