I continue to review and respond to Michael's questions:
He states, "The first is that my principal objection, as an atheist, to the idea of God is that if God is here, we should not be. If he is God, he is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient and transcends time. If those things are true, there could be no reason, not only for him to create , but to *do anything at all.*
I can understand the argument. I remembered discussing this very thing in philosophy classrooms in the late 1970's and theology classrooms in the 1980's. In the end, I think the answer is one word: "Love."
God did not create us because of any lack in Him. He did it because He desired to provide us an opportunity to exist. Michaels' assumption, 'because God is perfect" therefore "He cannot need or want anything." This is a fair statement, based on philosophical assumptions about God. There are many logical reasons to believe this. BUT, the God of revelation is different from the 'god' of speculative human reason.
Herein lies the difference in our thoughts. Michael states that "a perfect, omnipotent being for whom all time is now" is unable to need or want. Probably, one answer, is simply to say, "It is a mystery. Stop talking and worship." [I personally think that is the message of the book of Job and places in Isaiah.] I think it is logical and reasonable to say, "The mystery of God is beyond our meager intellectual capacity." But the problem is, our theologies impact our activities (lived faith). I have heard complaints that all of this stuff in the blog lately is too difficult. Perhaps. But in the end, even simple people have theories and make statements about God. Even simple people need to address their assumptions, beliefs and the consequences of those beliefs.
I believe that God has the ability to choose. I do not think God created us to worship Him (as I heard the Bible Answer Man tell a young boy yesterday on the radio). The idea that God needs worshippers seems to be the sort of thing that Michael's arguments would address.
I think the question really is, 'what does perfection mean?' Why is it that we need to think that a perfect God in a timeless state could never be a God of love who chooses to create, out of sheer grace, a world where there is beauty and goodness, and freedom? I believe that God desires that others enjoy the wonder of life, of love, of service, of joy. It is His nature (something Greek philosophy did not include in its pondering, to any large extent) to love. This is also the scandal of Christian faith.
God made time. God made a universe. God enters that universe. From the Beginning, He comes and goes (see Adam and Eve where God comes at the cool of the day and cries out, "Where are you?") From the beginning God has chosen to limit Himself (WITHIN CREATION) as part of the cost of this love. To be in relationship with creation has cost God something. The cross is no accident, it is a revelation of what it means to be God in relationship with a limited, concrete, material, in-time creation.
But Michael's point, "God does not need" is vital to remember. God does not need us. Ever. Yet He made us, because He is love. The psalmist asks, "What is man that you should care for him?" What, in deed?
We are privileged to know, love and serve God. We are invited into relationship with an Infinite and Perfect Being. We are even allowed to blog about Him (and not be smote!). But in the midst of all the speculation and thinking we must stop to pray, to praise, to love and to serve. I am going to do that now.
Actually, even as an atheist, I no longer consider the argument that God would not create us because nothing can add to perfection, unanswerable.
ReplyDeleteOn an overly simple view of perfection, that would be true. But then I think of one of my favorite pieces of music, Mozart's string quartet no. 19 in C Major, the "Dissonance." Here is the opening:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjZylz3nCwQ
I applied my earlier argument about God's perfection to Mozart's composing technique, I would have to say that Mozart ought to have written a piece that was perfectly harmonious from the start, because dissonance would violate the perfection.
Instead, it is arguable that the *progression from* dissonance to harmony makes the work *better* than it would have been otherwise and is, itself, *part* of the perfection of the work.
If that is true, then arguing by analogy, we could accept that God could create imperfect creatures with the goal that they should attain a kind of perfection through union with Him. Just as the progression from dissonance to harmony perfects Mozart's work, the progression from spiritual "dissonance" to "harmony" with God would perfect his creation.
I was reminded of this while walking recently and thinking of the hymn in the Episcopal hymnbook "My God How Wonderful Thou Art" (sung to the musical setting "Windsor") which says, in the final stanza:
"For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart."
The words "thou has stooped" are critical here. The very act of stooping and the response that leads to a final union create, again, a value that would not have been present otherwise.
I still cannot accept that it would be consistent with a perfect being outside time to *begin* to do this--any more than the Sun would *begin* to be hot or bright tomorrow morning. What is good to be done by such a being must, it seems to me, have *always* been done, just as Christian theology says the Son was *eternally* begotten and did not begin in time. However, you've already stipulated that you are trying to understand God's actions as we experience them from within the flow of time.
So the idea that God might create something less than himself doesn't quite have the same force as I thought it did. Of course, in Christian thinking, we were not God's first creation; the angels were. Thinking in those terms, perhaps the war in heaven came about because the most illustrious of the angels also thought that for God to create humans with the goal of uniting them to himself was a violation of his own perfection; perhaps, for the first time, he began to believe that God had made a mistake and, like Puritans taking arms against Charles I in the name of upholding Charles's constitutional authority(!) rebelled because he believed he was upholding a principle that he thought the Deity must have inexplicably overlooked.
If that were true, it must have been obvious to God that the moment the first human emerged, that fallen angel would seek to tempt him. As I said earlier, foreknowledge, certain or not, would seem to make God responsible for all that happened afterward.
Here is a link to an interesting article from yesterday's New York Time about Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/alvin-plantingas-new-book-on-god-and-science.html?_r=1&src=recg