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DISCUSSION 1: THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T CARE! (for "Intelligent Design" on this page go HERE) (for "Orthodoxy and Creationism" on my Blog go HERE)
Fr. Gregory writes ... Consider our sun, the celestial body without
which there would be no life on earth. This is not simply because without
the sun the earth would wander dark and cold through interstellar space but
also by reason of another more fundamental aspect of life and even of
physical existence itself.
We all have to die and I don't
know, qualitatively speaking, how you can compare an 80 year old with a long
terminal illness and an 8 year old killed in Hurricane Katrina. All I know
is that life is an enormous privilege and gift for as long as it lasts. I
think that our lives are God's little experiment not only to get sentient
beings knowing themselves and the world around them but also, of course, God
himself. Our deaths then become a harvest of that intelligence,
consciousness, wisdom into that Greater Mind which is God Himself lovingly
bringing forth ever new creations to his own joy and the joy of his
creatures .... maybe eternally and without limit. To be consciously aware of
that if only for three score years and ten is an immense privilege. I look
forward to the time when we shall truly know and see him as a friend might,
face to face. David writes ... A very thought-provoking article! Fr. Gregory writes ... Ah, Mr. Kay ... I loved that guy. He inspired me more than anyone to do Maths. Anyway, David, I think I am write in saying that
at the Big Bang there was one superforce and it was only after cooling that
symmetry broke and along with it came into being the four elemental forces,
(electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force and gravity), along with
all those subatomic particles and fields. In other words symmetry had
to break for there to be life. The breaking of symmetry came about
from quantum fluctuations that we still theorise today in the false vacuum
of space. There is a sort of infinite regression though here.
Perhaps we should be asking not so much why the Universe isn't symmetrical
as why is the Universe so frothy? David writes ...
It’s the simple questions that usually tax science the most. Fr. Gregory writes ...
I believe that it is literally impossible for the human mind to conceive of
nothing. Here's my argument.
David writes ...
I agree completely. Following on from the first point you list, not only can
we not conceive of nothing but, for the same reason, we can't really grasp
infinity, timelessness, and the fourth or higher dimensions. Time is an
intriguing problem both in physics and theology. We can't conceive of there
being no time; yet, according to Big Bang theory, space and time came into
existence at some point. What was there before Time Zero? And, if there was
no time, how could there have been a transition from no-time to time, since
the transition must have taken place in time?! Timelessness, spacelessness,
and nothingness defy the brain's ability to analyse, it seems. Part of God,
at least, presumably exists outside conventional spacetime, in some mystery
state that our minds cannot apprehend. DISCUSSION 2: OUR SENSE OF TIME
Fr. Gregory writes ... The universal human experience of time is that it flows, it passes, it moves on ... quickly or slowly of course, but the image is that of a river that flows past us or carries us along. The trouble is that this is not how contemporary science handles time. Space-time, the four dimensions in which we live, move and have our being is a block concept in which past, present and future are merely different coordinates specified by an observer. On this account, time has no absolute character, it exists in a relational manner, wholly dependent on movement and change. Even if our human sense of time is really put down to a trick of consciousness there are even some who would describe consciousness itself in similar relational terms. It seems as if we are condemned to live out our lives wholly dependent on a comforting illusion. It strikes me though that this is a rather strange way for evolution to have driven human development. Normally evolution is a most realistic engine for life; it assists an organism adapt to its environment for the purpose of survival but here we seem to have been prepared for life with Alice in Wonderland. Maybe the White Rabbit should chill out and take on a different perspective! But why should this be so difficult? Could it be that we should not completely distrust our senses or perhaps, to take the other option, we should rather organise our social lives counter-intuitively on strictly scientific principles? Of course for most purposes we can pretend to live in Newton's absolute universe but with our subjective sense of time this really does raise very difficult issues.
There are, of course, philosophical and religious issues concerning time.
From my own Orthodox Christian tradition a distinction is made between
chronos and kairos, sequential time and fitting or appropriate time.
The former is value (if not observer) free, whereas the latter requires a
subjective, interpretative input. Perhaps this is what consciousness
has been designed to achieve ... an adaptation of time for human purposes.
Perhaps we are not slaves to the clock after all. David writes ... The notion that times moves by us or, alternatively, that we move through time is something we're all brought up with. It then becomes very hard to think of time in any other way. But even this familiar concept of moving time has its problems, because if time moves or we move through time, then another order of time is needed against which to measure the movement! Then we're quickly into an infinite regress. (I recommend J. W. Dunne's classic "An Experiment With Time" for an entertaining theory of time - and mind - based on this regress.) But the block universe of relativity, in which all of space and time is already (whatever that may mean!) laid immutably also creates difficulties, as you say. For one thing, it makes all of existence seem extremely pointless. Since every detail of physical reality - past, present, or future - is already determined, we have, in truth, no freedom to bring about another outcome. What interests me greatly is the meaning that can be attached to the present moment. There's no "now" in physics - no notion of a special moment in time. Yet to us, individually, it is everything because it's the split-instant at which our consciousness resides. Without consciousness, past, present, and future are stripped of meaning. Let me ask you, Father Gregory, about your belief about time as it relates to God. Cosmologists say that both space and time came into being in the Big Bang. Hence, there was no "before" the Big Bang in any meaningful sense. Yet, presumably, God exists both within and outside our material cosmos and was instrumental in its creation. If there was no "before" the Big Bang, how are we to grasp how God could have been active since activity of any kind appears to demand time. Fr. Gregory writes ... As it happens, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all agree that space and time were created along with the physical universe. At least in our Universe there was no space or time "before" or "in place of" the four dimensions of the space-time continuum which "now" is the context for all existence and consciousness. The "present moment" is a slippery idea. No sooner do we try and capture it and it becomes locked into (our) past. We may anticipate a future moment as "present" at some point of the space time continuum. No sooner has our lifeline intersected at this point than we face the same problem; the coordinates recede (or appear to recede) from our consciousness. Yet, we do not live either in the past or the future. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, an outstanding bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 19th century wrote the following:- "All creatures are balanced upon the creative
word of God, That diamond bridge is both our 4 dimensional coordinates and the sustaining of the Cosmos, moment by moment, (if we can speak in such a manner) by the creative word of God. It is not that God somehow kick-started creation and then sat back to watch the firework display. Still less is creation some sort of gratuitous unnecessary extra added ingredient conjured up to displace a scientific description of physical processes. That which God represents in creation is, as I have said, a sustaining power. Without his continuously creative word all would immediately collapse back into the singularity. It follows that the present moment is God "saying" (continuously) "BE!" Living truly "now" (rather than in our memories or dreams, essential those these are) involves living continuously with our consciousness connected to this creative word. "Before the Big Bang" is a meaningless phrase both in cosmology and the aforementioned religious traditions when applied to THIS Universe. In the conjectural Multiverse where there are many alternate, parallel realities, arguable there is still only one (mega) Cosmos. If THIS Cosmos had a "beginning" from nothing, then the same argument applies. If God has always been creating then we need to provide a model of divine activity that allows for both limited and unlimited creations. Such a model exists in radical monotheistic transcendence. Happily, in those monotheisms where God is
infinitely transcendent to all created categories, his activity requires
neither time nor space for he cannot create within a creation thereby
necessitating space and time which themselves must be created. To
speak of time and space in relation to God's Being is to speak nonsense as
surely as it is to speak of created existence without space and time.
God, being Uncreated and Transcendent has no such limitations.
Paradoxically, for this reason he also has the capacity to self limit in
order to manifest himself within a particular creation. Be that as it
may, it is radical monotheistic transcendence, omnipresent spatially and
temporally, that makes most sense of the world that we see around us ... or
so this writer thinks. David writes ...
"Now" is such a mind-boggling concept. There seems to be just one now - the
wavecrest of the present that continuously separates past from future. For
us, the very nature of consciousness seems to demand existence at just one
moment. Our awareness is like a spotlight that illuminates just one
split-second at a time. I can't even conceive what it would be like to be
aware in reality across a span of time. (I'm not referring to memories or
future speculation here but actual, trans-temporal mindfulness). Yet I
presume God has this awareness - awareness that spans, in one awesome
totality, all of spacetime, in this and any other universes. So, as you
describe it, He must be sustaining all of these points in space and time
simultaneously - saying "BE!", always and everywhere. For Him, there is, I'm
supposing, no sequential time or specific now but rather an
all-encompassing, omnipresent now. Is that how you see
it? Also, I'd like to hear more about the meaning of "kairos" - the
kind of time that the physicist is not familiar with. Does this refer to key
moments in history at which God acts, or is compelled to act, in
particularly decisive ways? Also, since God is omniscient and must somehow
know how the play will unfold, what does that say about the extent to which
we truly have any free-will? Fr. Gregory writes ... Everything you have said David before "Is that how you see it?" is a highly accurate and lucid description of my position, reflecting also Orthodox Christian teaching. You have also correctly identified "kairos" as used in the New Testament, save that compulsion qua God may only be predicated by Infinite Love, not any other kind of necessity. The more difficult question of course is the last. In Tom Stoppard's classic play, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," two minor characters from the play, "Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to deviate from them. In this Stoppard mirrors Stephen Hawking's famous "chronology protection conjecture" by which the past remains the past. Like the play and Calvin's topology of heaven and earth "all is fixed."
I really do think that Calvinism's conception of divine sovereignty and
omniscience / omnipotence has bequeathed a fatal legacy to western theology
... even amongst those who would most strongly repudiate Calvin. We
need to paint a new picture of human freedom and divine sovereignty ... one
where one does not collapse into the other. A similar challenge lies
before those who would seek to reconcile a completely self regulating Cosmos
and the same Cosmos as one totally dependent on God. Richard Dawkins
has referred to any theology beyond the chance product of emergent
complexity as "gratuitous." I want rather to suggest that we
appreciate a model of God's action which maintains creation's freedom and in
which gratuity as "gift" is a vital part.. In this model, without God,
creation would not be free at all. It would collapse under its own
weight, a dead thing. That is quite a different conception of God's
action and foreknowledge. In a sense we could say that God is
continuously writing the Play of Life as the actors respond within the plot.
The Orthodox Church has a theological term for this mutually enhancing
freedom of creation and God ... synergeia. Synergeia means that God's
freedom engenders ours and vice versa. That would make a completely
different rewrite of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ... and a much better
account of the relationship between God and Creation in my view. David writes ... This notion of synergia is quite compelling and links up with something I mentioned in our earlier conversation about why there is something rather than nothing. I went through a phase in the early 1990s when I was greatly enamoured with John Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle (my book Equations of Eternity was based on it), which sees the universe as pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. Basically, the universe comes into being and then evolves to the stage at which it can observe itself into being through quantum observership. If we accept that quantum systems don't become fully realized until they are observed - "fully realized" and "observed" being very loaded terms! - then it may be that global observership is needed to select and "actualize" the particular universe we are living in. The fact that the inhabitants are active in defining their cosmic home and place of origin ensures that it is fit and necessary for their existence (thus explaining so-called cosmic coincidences). In this scheme, there is a mutual interaction of mind, matter, and mathematics (or the laws of physics) at the root of reality. But later, I must admit, although I was satisfied by the logic and self-sufficiency of Wheeler's PAP, it seemed curiously sterile and pointless, as if it left out everything that was of personal interest and meaning. Is it possible, however, to see in the PAP a kind of physics-only aspect of the Orthodox position - in other words, what someone might conclude about the way the cosmos was set up if they chose not to believe in God? The Godless PAP could be seen to work in an academic sense but is devoid of purpose, morality, love. The synergia you describe adds the vital ingredient that gives existence any point - our realization not as mere physical entities but as moral, spiritual beings. I could see in a God-infused PAP the scope for human freedom of determination, from the quantum level up, within a framework that is bound toward some inevitable global conclusion with a spiritual root. To take your play analogy further, if we are actors within the Play of Life then clearly we are here through courtesy - grace - of the Playwright. We are only given meaning through divine intervention. Is the reverse also true? Is God's existence given purpose through the lives of intelligence and consciousness throughout the universe? Is God even in some way fully realized through our realization? Fr. Gregory writes ... I wholeheartedly endorse your first paragraph David. Sign me up for "God-infused PAP"! Now to the intriguing question in the second. Although the answer to that last question David is necessarily speculative since we must maintain a certain agnosticism about God's own inner purpose and realisation in relation to creation, nonetheless your characterisation has the great merit of taking the creation seriously as a dynamic purposeful entity once consciousness activates / is activated in relation to its transcendent ground (God). That God might himself be "satisfied" by the evolving character of his consciousness imbued Cosmos and that in this satisfaction his own inner being might be augmented need not necessarily fall at the fence of God's matchless perfection. We might take an analogy from mathematics in Cantor's 19th century work on the hierarchy of infinity sets. (Thank you for your links here David!) Therefore, to the objection "how can one improve on infinity?" (substitute "God" for "infinity") one might respond that this is a malformed question. It is not a question of "improvement" but, rather, how God's perfection becomes realised in a higher order of relation; relation that is to something "not-God" ... in other words, creation. One can see something of this process in Olaf Stapledon's great work: "Starmaker." Here, the Creator in a sense becomes himself through the evolution of his creations. Perhaps in Stapledon's work there is an insufficient sense of the relation between Creator and creation. Einstein never could quite affirm that either. Somehow, it is thought, the Universe is so vast and seemingly impersonal and oblivious to us that we must conclude that God (if he exists) is a toymaker who cares nothing for his toys. He plays with them, breaks them, as might a child, and discards them without a second thought. No human father or mother neglects weaker more sickly children that the stronger might survive. How can God's parental morality be less diligent than that of humanity at its best? Surely this "god" is unworthy of our love. Indeed he is. The difference, the "added value" if you will from a Christian point of view (and more especially from an Orthodox Christian point of view) is that God, in the Incarnation, as a special example of a more universal principle, subjects himself to the vicissitudes of his evolving creation. He really does become exposed to the tragic as well as the exultant part of the creative process itself, "even unto death." (Philippians 2:1-11). Through this exposure he is able to bring creation to its fulfilment, proleptically in resurrection and, moreover, he grants participation of creation Now in that End. In conclusion I must speak of that participation, which is an ascent. St. Gregory of Nyssa who died in about 395 AD is one of the key eastern fathers in respect of stretching forward (epektasis) toward the Infinite (God) in the ascetic life. He sees humanity's calling as one of Infinite Ascent into the Limitless One whereby the whole Cosmos is transfigured (as humanity is a microcosm of the Cosmos). If this is true, which I believe it is, then our vocation in time is to be part of God's final purpose for the Cosmos which is to attain to the Unattainable, a high calling indeed, made even more glorious by the prospect that God himself through this manifests his own glory, a glory which is inextricably tied up with our own in synergeia. David writes ... Stapledon's "Starmaker" sprang to my mind, too! Nothing else in SF comes quite so close to spectacularly portraying what an all-powerful being might be capable of. Yet, as you say, the Starmaker seems often to suffer from our own weaknesses - growing bored with his creations and tossing them aside when they don't work out they way he'd hoped. One of the problems I have with my simplistic interpretations of the Old Testament is that the OT God seems behave exactly this way - flooding us into near-extinction when we don't measure up to expectations, etc! The cosmic scheme you espouse in your last post, Father Gregory, is very attractive to me, both scientifically and spiritually. I'm still struggling, however, over some issues regarding the extent of God's omniscience and our own apparent impotence - which returns us to the nature and necessity of time but places more questions over the extent of our freedom of action. The Resurrection is an integral and essential element in the fulfillment of God's creation, as I understand what you say. So, the events leading up to the Resurrection - the execution of Jesus, etc - in some way had to happen. Hence, God must have known "in advance" what would take place. This gave the executioners of Jesus no real choice - they had to play their part, however dastardly, in order for the cosmos to turn out the way it has and will. It seems that God required that some people be prepared to kill his Son in order for the cosmic plan to work out. This seems like prejudgement of a high order. I know, as you point out (though Stephen Hawking might disagree!), that we can't know the mind of God. But how can it be that to save Man and allow the universe to realize its full spiritual potential, some individuals were required to commit the ultimate evil? Fr. Gregory writes ...
Let's pen an alternative gospel David. Jesus experiences opposition
but is not killed by others but rather dies naturally of old age in his bed.
Through a long life he continues to heal the sick and manifest the Kingdom
of God, showing us all how to be reconciled to God and each other and how to
live. Upon his death, 3 days cold in the morgue, HE STILL RESURRECTS.
There is nothing at all pre-determined about his life. Sin still
exists and virtue also. Death still remains the final enemy; the
resurrection its undoing. To be an Orthodox Christian is to completely
unlearn Augustinian determinism in both its (moderate) Roman Catholic and
(extreme) Protestant form. In the Orthodox frame of reference; if hell
exists, we are responsible for creating it, not God, and God is well able to
"uncreate" it ... indeed this is what we believe the POTENTIAL of the
resurrection means for all the Cosmos (or Multiverse). Orthodoxy is
indeed a very different way of being a Christian! Welcome to another correspondent! Gillian Peall
Gillian writes on a connected issue ... Intelligent Design (ID). I’ve heard several versions of this. One end of the spectrum being, basically, Young Earth Creationism without the young earth! If evolution is allowed at all then it is controlled evolution, by God, and nothing to do with chance mutations and what have you. And a lot about if we had so much more or less oxygen/atmospheric pressure, or were further from or nearer to the sun, we wouldn’t be here – just seems to make us unique in a very self-centred way, At the other end of the ID spectrum, all that is said is that God=Creator-with-a-plan.
This is where I get confused! I know we can’t say ‘before’ the Big Bang, (BB), as there is no ‘before’. But if God is Creator, then he must have pre-existed the BB. But can you talk about God ‘pre-existing’? If he is beyond time and space, which he must be to be God, then everything is ‘now’. Including the BB and today.
Is this so? When I think about the vastness of the Cosmos my mind alternately worships God and wonders about his existence! I can’t believe that homo sapiens is the only sentient life-form in our galaxy, let alone among the millions of other galaxies. But I don’t believe man will find that out before the end of our world. Whenever that is. And I have to confess that the return of Jesus is another of my deep, deep doubts!
So, is ID a reasonable concept? I believe all that geology, astronomy, physics and the biological sciences tell us about the age of the universe, the earth and how the flora and fauna of this planet evolved. But presumably God didn’t just light the blue touch-paper and retire! I can’t imagine the God I read about in the Bible being surprised by how things turned out. (“Good grief! There’s a man!”) And this is mainly because he must know, if he is God.
Sometimes I imagine everything like a huge tapestry wall-hanging, like they had in medieval castles to keep the draughts out! It tells a story, starting, say, at the bottom left hand corner, with a man setting out on a journey. Then a few inches further in, we see the same man having a problem, and so on until he reaches the other side of the tapestry and gets to the castle/distressed maiden/home. But we can only see one spot at a time – the ‘now’ for ourselves. We can’t even see the ‘now’ for other people, only where our spotlight catches them. The ‘tomorrow’ and the future is invisible, the past badly lit and fragile. But God, as God sees the whole tapestry, from first to last, alpha to omega. And more, for he sees the whole cosmos.
Is this ID? Or a fragment of my imagination? I’m never sure how God can, or does, influence things. As you know, I have trouble seeing him as a personal God who loves me though I never doubt that he is a good God. Nor do I have trouble reconciling the Almighty God of the Cosmos with the God in the design of a snowflake, or the beauty of the smallest of cells. I can, just, hold that paradox together. I think it just makes my worship and wonder greater.
I do struggle though. Are there really any answers? Can
faith ever be black and white, right or wrong? Fr. Gregory writes ...
From where I am standing your description and explanation makes perfect
sense. The trouble is that "Intelligent Design" and "Creationism" represent
movements, themselves diverse, which are flawed in their understanding of
the relationship between revealed truth and natural science. We don't need
to use them. Let's sketch a few issues. Gillian writes could you enlarge on this statement ...: "To be an Orthodox Christian is to completely unlearn Augustinian determinism in both its (moderate) Roman Catholic and (extreme) Protestant form. In the Orthodox frame of reference; if hell exists, we are responsible for creating it, not God, and God is well able to "uncreate" it ... indeed this is what we believe the POTENTIAL of the resurrection means for all the Cosmos (or Multiverse). Orthodoxy is indeed a very different way of being a Christian! " Certainly
Gillian! Fr. Gregory writes ... One of the most disastrous legacies of St. Augustine to the Christian west has been his doctrine of double predestination. In this doctrine he asserted that human choices for and against God (heaven or hell in their consequences) are false and illusory. God directs the response for in no way can his power and responsibility be diminished by anything human. Double predestination asserts that even the damned have no choice in the matter. God has chosen their fate as well. In his latter life Augustine became very sombre, even morbid in his preoccupation with human depravity and the transitory nature of this life. He lived to see the barbarian horde destroy a once cultured and lively North African church (where he was bishop), Perhaps this explains the dark turn in his later thought that, arguably, made God the author of evil as well as good. A negative assessment of human freedom and human nature, in evidence since his youth, now reasserted itself much more strongly. Much of this theological determinism was honed in Augustine's disputations with the British monk Pelagius who asserted a much greater role to human freedom than most Christian theologians and Augustine in particular were prepared to allow. One cannot avoid the conclusion though with St. Augustine that the more he emphasised grace and God's sovereignty, the more he denied any aspect of human freedom whatsoever. The Church in the west never accepted the more extreme aspects of his thought. Indeed the famous monastery at Lerins challenged and tempered Augustinianism in the Catholic tradition. In this, the west remained at one in spirit with the Christian east where Augustine was never such a significant figure. At the Reformation, however, Jean Calvin, in particular, fearlessly took up the standard of Augustinian grace and for the greater part of the Protestant world consolidated its position. It's noteworthy that most of the Reformed Tradition in recent times has either clung tenaciously to double predestination in a shrinking sectarian constituency or abandoned it altogether and become universalist. The cultural heritage of this theology in the post-Christian west has been much more persistent such that it is now almost impossible nowadays to converse about God without the objection arising that theism is fatally compromised by evil. Well, if God is the source of evil, then yes. One then either has to deny the reality of evil or suppose a dualism in which Satan becomes God's equal adversary. Either way, human freedom is still not accommodated ... nor can it be whilst the religious infrastructure remains unmodified Augustinian or Calvinist. I hope I have showed
in some measure here that Orthodox Christianity has a very different take on
human freedom, the evolution of the Cosmos and God's activity. David writes ... As pointed out, both creationism and ID span large spectra. However, it's becoming increasingly difficult for anyone - scientists especially - to give publicly any kind of credence to these ideas without immediately being pigeon-holed with the rabid Religious Right. And so the debate and debaters become increasingly polarised. Yet, surely, what's being proposed in our conversations here is that God is the overall architect and designer of the cosmos and therefore that (lowercase!) intelligent design is indeed a fundamental principle. I'm intrigued by Father Gregory's assertion that randomness is an essential element of the universe as he understands it. Do you think this God-instigated randomness is effectively the uncertainty principle we see in quantum mechanics? In other words, did God inject quantum uncertainty into the cosmos to give it the necessary freedom of action and evolution? Of course, there are those - disciples of David Bohm - who are still hoping to find hidden variables at work which would take the randomness out of the subatomic realm. In a sense, are you saying, Father Gregory, that Orthodoxy would expect those efforts to fail? And this gets me on to another point. It's the contention of supporters of ID that the complexity we see in the universe could not have come about by chance alone - that it must have been supplied (by God). In other words, they are saying that high-order complexity alone stands as a scientific (or at least a logical) proof of the existence of God. And, as Gillian says, they say there are too many very special conditions required for life for these conditions to have come about with divine intervention. Nonsense, replies the atheist scientist. Complexity - or the propensity for it - is just another one of those things that the universe happens to have been born with. Of course the universe is complex, they argue, because otherwise we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. There could be countless trillions of non-complex, essentially randomly-structured universes "out there". We just happen to be in one that has evolved, and by good fortune had the built-in qualities, to become wonderfully ornate. So, I ask two questions. How is one to answer this challenge from the atheist scientist? And second, is there, in fact, any way that science can prove, beyond reasonable doubt, the existence of God, or are all such efforts ultimately doomed to failure? After all, if we could supply very strong evidence for God through science, who would need faith? Oddly enough, as a scientist, I always find myself feeling most removed from a Christian God when I contemplate the vast, objective cosmos of astronomy and physics. In those moods I become quite Buddhist in my thinking. But when I switch to the personal, to the individual, then I'm more in tune with the notion of a caring Creator who's mindful of each one of us. For me, science as it's normally practiced and understood seems to take me further away from Christianity. Fr. Gregory writes ... I think I need to tweak and clarify my own thought about randomness here David. It is not so much randomness itself that is required but the freedom of the Cosmos to evolve its own complexity, and with it, life. Freedom within the realm of inanimate or unconscious matter translates to randomness-within-law. Freedom in the conscious real translates to purposefulness-within-law. Consciousness is a higher order freedom for matter than mere randomness because with this comes a boost to complexity and purposeful self-reference ... the Cosmos knowing and directing itself, self aware evolution if you like. There is an inherent, God given power of growth here that can only work when there is freedom. A similar argument can be made for love as the highest level order of complexity; in a slogan, "no freedom, no love." In this essay Father Deacon Andrey Kuraev refers eloquently to the God give inherent creative power of the Cosmos itself, evoked by God ... "Let it be!" God does not create a finished product but rather a potentiality, and materials over which he invokes a word, (the Word). I, therefore, disagree with most (if not all) proponents of ID in so far as they reject even in the slightest degree the freedom of the Cosmos to be itself and to generate its own complexity. I also disagree with the atheist whose only objection to God is that there are possibly many universes which don't work or "take" as far as life is concerned. How could we possibly know what significance those worlds have? We have no data to reject God simply because of an all too human understanding of "wastage." As far as your second question is concerned, nobody, believer alike, can prove the existence of God. We may propose evidence of design in complexity, albeit generated by the Cosmos itself in response to the putative divine 'fiat.' Decisions of faith may be based on such intimations, tendered more plausible; but at the end of the day one has to decide for oneself how to "read" the world ... which brings me to your last personal reflection on a personal God and a seemingly impersonal Cosmos. I can only offer you my own ruminations about this based on my own experience, thought and spirituality. When you and I were at school together David and shared our passion for science and astronomy (as we still do) I developed an unshakeable conviction that God existed and my evidence toward that decision of faith was precisely the vastness and beauty of the Cosmos. I could not (and indeed did not) derive from that alone though my belief that (to paraphrase) "every hair on my head is numbered" and "not a sparrow falls ..." For this more personal dimension of faith I encountered Christ himself in the lives and faith of Christians. They had a relationship with Christ and a reality to prayer that I found utterly fascinating and compelling. However, I only met those people for two weeks of my life when I was 22 years old. Everything that has happened subsequently in my life developed out of that first step of faith I made in 1975. It was and is a matter of experience, not conjecture, that I came to know Christ as the human face of God. Since then and continuously I have returned to science many times to deepen my understanding of this wonderful Cosmos and this wonderful life that I have been privileged to share albeit for a short time. I cannot believe that such beauty is without meaning for beauty is meaning and beauty is Christ, (for me at least). I have not, therefore, experienced any disjuncture between my knowledge of God as Creator and God as Lover. Even suffering and death itself has not shaken that, primarily because in my faith Beauty itself was crucified and rose again into a New Creation. Maybe this is because there is a good dose of Buddhism in my Christianity as well! I certainly derive much insight from the Buddha's characterisation of the impermanence and flux of all material existence. Where I part company with him is in the basic agnosticism of a faith that has rendered the gods "useless." But, Buddhism's antecedent background is Hinduism not Judaism; so I am not starting from the same place. I have to speak of what I know and, notwithstanding my sin, frailty and finitude, I know Christ. He is the Pantocrator (as we say in the language of the Christian East). The King of the Cosmos.
Colin writes ... Dear Fr Gregory, Fr. Gregory writes
... Colin writes ...
Dear Father Gregory, Fr. Gregory writes
... Colin writes ... Fr. Gregory writes Dear Father Gregory, Dear Colin If indeed we assume that humankind failed to attain to immortality in the protected environment "inside Eden" (there was a part of creation subject to death and suffering "outside Eden" to which of course we were consigned for our own protection, God not wanting us to die eternally by eating from the tree of life) then the link between human transgression and death in the cosmos is by no means clear. I can't imagine that Satan was around pre-Fall doing nothing but just waiting for us to trip up before he could unleash physical death in the Cosmos first time round. Maybe since Satan is hyper-anti-God, death is "in his blood" contrasting God of course who is wholly Life. The tragedy of human disobedience in Eden is that we multiplied death and Satan's power by allowing it to enter our God-protected domain ... hence we had to leave, for death can have no place in the kingdom of God. The resurrection then becomes God retaking the world from Satan to extend Eden and restoring human potential to immortality ... theosis. Fr. Gregory
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