Peter Sanlon (2014) describes GOD as a qualitatively different kind of existence to the one of his creatures (87). Being outside of time does not mean that God cannot know what happens inside of time, nor that he cannot interact with a temporal order. Quite the opposite! It does, of course, shape the way he does these things.(88) As Sanlon makes clear in the same passage:

 It would perhaps be odd for him to create something he could not interact with.    Similarly God created time. It is part of the created order. And though God is not        himself temporal, he can interact with, and know all that occurs in, the times he has made.Indeed, precisely because God is not temporal he has perfect knowledge of all events in time.(‘Simply God’ 88)

[NB] This God is not to be confused with any other ideas/notions/theologies or philosophies of God—either pre-modern, modern or post-modern—as shall be made clear throughout the development of this argument.

Introduction

In this section I shall, briefly, address, what may be considered the ‘straw men’ (demeaning caricatures) of modern and post-modern attempts at lessening the culpability of the classical ‘image’ of God in the light of evolutionary theory—and also in the light of contemporary religious and philosophical notions of the reality of God. The views offered here are considered incontrovertibly necessary to the defence of the God of the Bible against other notions and ideas that may be seen to better fit the evolutionary paradigm but that only serve to remove the problem by the substitution of the God of Scripture with a lesser ‘deity’.

Constraints on God

Should God be limited in his ability to produce or concoct the best possible plans for fulfilling his creative objectives, God would not be omnipotent. Christopher Southgate (2008, p.29)  argues that the sort of universe we have, in which complexity emerges in a process governed by thermodynamic necessity and Darwinian natural selection, is the only sort of universe that could give rise to all that the earth has produced. To affirm evolutionary process as being ‘the only way’ through which God could achieve his objectives one has to assume that God was unable (lacked the ability) to bring about his creative objectives without this astronomical/ biological framework—or that God’s use of such a process was the best possible means through which God could bring about the best of possible outcomes. This is, a similar point to the one noted in (Alexander, 2008), that sees biology as a ‘package deal’ (p.279). If biology should be a ‘stand-alone-package-deal’ that has no significance other than it being the product of an undefinable creative genius, it is reasonable to suppose that the ‘creator’s’ benevolent characteristics be called into question—unless there is more to the story other than God’s desire to create.  This is, of course, assuming that there has been an intentional pathway within the evolutionary process—otherwise there would be no reason to suppose that any such future outcomes could be considered anything other than random outcomes within the naturally selective process of evolution. Jeff Astley (2009) asks whether or not God could have ordered nature differently and then answers his own question by saying, ‘perhaps not’. Astley goes on to say however that materiality inevitably involves imperfection—a tendency to disorder, decay, fragility, and mortality (p.167). Astley’s point is significant as it is the case that the accusation against the ‘designer God’ is often that of incompetence—the design is simply under par or faulty. Ergo, God is either impotent or fails to meet the necessary criteria or the presuppositions of the complainant. This assertion is false, as I argue elsewhere.

Keith Ward’s (1990) comments are insightfully apposite when he refers to ‘natural’ evil as ‘an inevitable consequence of this kind of world’.  I hasten to add here though: it is, most likely, that this world is not governed (low case) solely by ‘natural forces’. (I  address this elsewhere). However, from the perspective of Theistic Evolution, this, it seems, is the only possible world in which carbon-based-life could obtain.

‘A Question of Ontological Veracity’

In this section I shall briefly, though importantly, address the notion of the ‘Creator God’ as the ground of being rather than as a determinate entity; in other words that the creation, though not purely the product of chance and necessity, was not—according to those who wish to eliminate any trace of anthropomorphism[1] .

Should the term ‘God’ refer only to a ‘ground of being’ first cause—a first cause that defies description or a ‘first cause’ that may, loosely, be described as ‘nature’—then there would be no case to answer as there would be no personal creative-agent against whom a comparison be made or a ‘charge against’ may be brought.

The notion of a ‘Ground of Being’, presumably, thought by its ‘theistic’ advocates, to deal with the problem of natural evil—as it reduces the problem of evil by depersonalizing  the  biblical notion of God—so much so that the ‘creative process’ is indistinguishable from the ‘natural’ processes of materialistic evolution. Yet, it is such a view that is commonly espoused by advocates of Process Theology[2]—along with others. Amazingly, this notion of ‘god’ is taken to be the ‘ultimate reality’ that some ‘theists’ are captivated by. Indeed they may even choose it while misunderstanding its ‘final futility’—for it is, I suggest, materialism by another name. Regarding this alleged futility the process theologian, Wesley Wildman, asks what kind of entity the divine reality really is? His conclusion is that the God of the Bible seems to be made in the image of its authors. In short, God’s determinate nature is known in our longings. Everything else we say theologically must serve this overridingly important version of ultimate reality, and this becomes the crucial criterion of determinate-entity theism. The views of Process Theology have little to do with any perceived notion of the goodness of the Triune God of Scripture—but everything to do with a material view of both origins and ‘god’s’ imminence. Wildman’s picture of God bears no resemblance whatsoever to this God.

He opines:

Speaking of God as the ground of being removes the possibility of proposing a divine      character that is profoundly different from the character of the world. This is its chief    theological difference from its competitors. Determinate-entity theism requires a divine  goodness that our best scientific vision of the cosmos does not easily support and so positively requires some ontological distance between God and the world and a layer of theological explanation for why the world is the way it appears to be despite the purported impeccability of God’s moral character (my italics) …Ground-of-being theism needs neither to explain a discrepancy nor to distinguish among events to articulate the divine nature. (Wildman 2007, p.281)

Wildman’s views are clearly expressed. Indeed, it would seem that the notion of God as a ‘determinate entity’ raises enormous philosophical and theological questions—especially with regard to the problem of [natural] evil. It is, of course, possible that the God revealed in the Bible is a figment of the imaginative wishful thinking of latter day ‘hominids’—particularly the authors of the Old Testament. It is the case that the ‘divine goodness’ described in the Scriptures is a difficult fit with the apparent evidence. However, it is striking that many distinguished theologians and philosophers are content to hold to a more classical approach. Keith Ward (2008) comments that to call God good is to say that God actualizes within himself the best of all possible perfections—moreover, Ward suggests that:

If such a God produces a universe like this, then God remains good, whatever the universe is like. A supremely good God might, then, necessarily create this universe, or some universe with similar characteristics.(92) 

By ‘necessarily’ we take it (though Ward doesn’t state this) that the sovereign God chose to create this universe in order to bring about the best of possible circumstances, i.e., the ‘best possible world’. This does not imply lesser capabilities on God’s part but rather that this world is, de facto, the best possible world—the world in which God’s ultimate ‘Good’ purposes can be achieved. This is not to say that this ‘best possible world’ is the world that we inhabit today—or even the world that has existed ‘some-time’ after God’s proclamation of, “…and it was very good…” (Genesis 1:31).Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, the world that is known to modern science is not necessarily  the world as it existed at the beginning.

As far as Biblical Theism is concerned, there should be no willingness to dilute God’s attributes i.e. ‘Omnipotence, Omniscience, [Omni]presence and [Omni]benevolence—for a ‘mess of pottage’. However should there be any attempts at ‘dilution’ the most likely candidates would be those of omnipotence or any notion of benevolence. Should God be declared ‘less than powerful’ or ‘not quite as powerful’ as previously thought, the question of God’s benevolence becomes less crucial. Omnipotence, however, remains crucial to any argument for the goodness of God—at least that which takes seriously the legitimacy of the biblical narratives.

The ‘God is not benevolent’ view seeks to remove the notion of both evil and benevolence from the ‘stage’ but, nevertheless offers a reason for the existence of ‘harms’. For proponents of this position, the argument is likely to be that God does not have the necessary characteristics that enable him to behave with consistent benevolence. Wildman gives an outline of the possibilities: Firstly, he makes clear his view that, (a) a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active deity cannot create through evolution and (b) that therefore God the creator is not a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active deity. He states that we can preserve those affirmations symbolically (for whatever reason), but goes on to say that:

… they no longer refer to a divine being with intentions and awareness, with feelings and intelligence, with plans and powers to act. Rather, they refer to the ground of being itself, to the creative and fecund power source in the depths of nature, to the value structures and potentialities that the world manifests. They refer to the God beyond God, which is to say the truly ultimate reality that hovers behind and beneath and beyond the symbolic gods we create and deploy to satisfy our personal needs, to make sense of our world, and to legitimate the exercise of social control.  (W. Wildman 2011) 

There is neither time or space to discuss Wildman’s assertion that the God of the Bible could not have created through an evolutionary process, though I disagree entirely with Wildman’s conclusions—as his views of God’s presence/influence in Creation differ totally from my own—and are at total variance with any serious exegesis of the first few chapters of the Bible. However, I accept that the above opinion does offer, to some extent, a challenge regarding both God’s benevolence and providence within the evolutionary process. Wildman’s ‘god’ though lacks ‘substance’ lacks any notion of benevolence—indeed lacks anything in real terms. Naturally ( no pun intended), this ‘god’ cannot manifest personal concern for the products of any likely creative processes because this ‘ground of being factory’ has no ‘mind’ and no personality from which to proceed. Nevertheless, Wildman’s alternative is somehow able to ‘allow for’ the transformation of the material in the cosmos that, in turn, allowed for the evolution of the biosphere etc.

The aforementioned notion of ‘god’, offers a not dissimilar view to Sigmund Freud. Freud’s view offered by (Nicholi, 2002)—that the very idea of ‘an idealized Superman’ in the sky—is so patently infantile and so foreign to reality seems, most likely, to stem from a total miscomprehension—even caricature of the God of the Bible. It is no doubt the case that some may naively interpret the biblical notion of God in the way Freud expresses, but some (an increasing number even) may, due to this kind of reasoning or lack of a plausible notion of the God of the Bible, wish to find an alternative ‘god’; this, I suggest, is totally the wrong direction to take as it leads to another path—a path void of any notion of ‘God’ whatsoever—to anything other than an unworthy caricature of the God that Scripture reveals.Wildman is of the opinion that ground-of-being theologies are important because of their denial that ultimate reality can ‘possibly’ be a determinate entity at all—and that this establishes a valuable theological contrast with determinate entity theisms. The ‘ground-of-being’ view of the ‘personhood’ of God as well as God’s possible interaction with the world may, as Wildman suggests, produce a hopeful intellectual response to these pervasive evils. But, at the same time, this view favours philosophical logic over and above the revelation of Scripture.  Wildman is mistaken in his deliberations—his alternative ‘deity’ being unacceptable. It is unacceptable for two reasons. Firstly, as a result of his dissatisfaction/ disappointment with the ‘performance’ of the God of the Bible Wildman offers an extra-biblical, pantheistic alternative. Secondly, the substituted, ‘ground of being’, alternative, apart from being unbiblical, fails to convince me that ‘it’ has any #substance whatsoever.

Regarding, the ‘narrative to Scripture’, Peter Sanlon, rightfully says that:

[F]or the drama to be of any significance whatsoever there must be real actors in the play. If the metaphor of a drama has to be developed further, then it must be insisted that the scriptwriter is also real. The God who creates, speaks, directs, interacts and participates must be a real person before he can do any of these things. In the technical terminology, ontology is prior to revelation and salvation. Systematic theology recognises this, and asks the entirely appropriate questions ‘What kind of being is he?’ And: What may we know of him from his words and actions? (Sanlon, 2014, p. 72)

God is the Triune ‘determinate entity’ who has created all things and who sustains all things for His ‘good’ purposes. Ergo, the God of Scripture is the ultimate ontological reality. DW

 

Process Thought and Omnipotence

In this section I take a cursory glance at Process Theology as it applies to ‘Omnipotence’.

Cobb & Griffin (1976) state the dominant position of process theologians clearly enough when they pose the question of why evil exists when there is in existence, according to classical and biblical theology, a God with ‘controlling power’—suggesting that:

… a major reason that Christian theism has clung on so long to the notions of God as a      Controlling Power is that thereby it can assure believers that God’s will, despite           appearances, is victorious—for the sake of this assurance it has risked seeing God as the  author of needless suffering and even moral evil. It has risked the implicit denial of         human freedom and the rebellion of humanistic atheism.” (1976, p. 118)

There is a something to be said for this critique. However, the above depiction is an extreme caricature and it is not the picture of sovereignty that is anywhere near to that adhered to by the author of this book—or to that even of Open Theism which offers freedom without, mostly, denying the overall sovereignty of God (Pinnock, 2000). Indeed, the Process interpretation of God offers a rather simplistic view of sovereign reality as it does not allow any means with which to comprehend any notion of ontological veracity for this alleged ‘ground of being’ other than as some kind of nebulous force akin to that of pantheism. Indeed, it does not offer anywhere near sufficient reason to replace the God of Scripture with any ‘straw man’ scenario in the form of dialectical hypothesis. Wildman (2006, p.274) acknowledges the difficulty in that whatever God is, on the process account, it is exceedingly resistant to anthropomorphic modelling, “and certainly nothing like the personal God of so many sacred texts and religious pieties”. Wildman ‘s summary accurately describes the problem from both perspectives.

 

The God of process theology is considered to be a God that does not abuse, or ‘coerce’ but persuades—throughout nature and in living beings. The God of process theology cannot override free will; it is not that he will not but rather that he cannot (cannot as in does not have the potency to so do). According to Griffin (Lubarsky & Griffin 1996), the redefining of the omnipotence of God may be the solution that dissolves the problem of evil as there is no likelihood of culpability on the part of this particular notion of God. Any possibility of continued adherence to the biblical view of omnipotence is ruled out as is made clear from the following, rather long but apposite, quotation from Griffin:

 

Because our universe was created out of chaos rather than out of absolute nothingness, so  that creative power is inherent in the world (as well as in God), the creatures’ twofold creative power of self-determination and efficient causation cannot be cancelled,   overridden, or completely controlled by God. On this basis process philosophy denies the second premise in the argument…saying instead that although God is all-powerful—not only in the sense of being the supreme power of the universe but also in the sense of  being perfect in power, having all the power one being could possibly have—God cannot unilaterally prevent all evil. If being ‘all-powerful’ is taken to mean being omnipotent in  the sense of essentially having all the power, however, then process philosophy simply denies the first premise’s assertion that a being worthy of the name God is all-powerful by definition. (Griffin 2001, pp.223-224)

Both the logic and implications of this kind of thinking are clear. There is, according to this view, in the world of matter:

• matter that pre-existed the emergence of ‘god’, an inherent creative capability out of which appears the process of evolution
• a process that ‘god’ could not interfere with but only persuade.

So it is from within the alleged ‘inherent creative capability’ of matter itself that the force of evolution manifests itself (ex nihilo, nihil fit)—and not out of the MIND of the God of Scripture—ex nihilo. DJW

Griffin states that God, though having all the power possible, does not possess ‘ALL POWER’ and therefore is not capable of preventing evil or of much else regarding the biological evolutionary process.The idea that any such imagined requiredness could exist as a de facto state of affairs—‘conjured up’ as a more convenient replacement for the God of Biblical Theology—is hardly convincing. Moreover, the notion that ethical principles (or any other come to that) are likely to emanate from anything other than the actual character [Mind] of The God, who is by His very nature ‘the ultimate good’ is equally unconvincing. [Here], I am in agreement with Gregory Boyd (2001) who opines that:

…unless God’s essential nature is necessary and actual—apart from his interaction with    the world, neither the enduring nature of God nor the contingent nature of the world can be rendered intelligible. God must be self-sufficient within himself, creating and relating  to the world out of love instead of metaphysical necessity. (p.276)

Conclusion.

In the light of the problem of creaturely suffering the process ‘alternative’ may seem an attractive proposition—one that may fit in with some current understandings of reality, but it cannot be taken as the final word regarding the God of the Bible as it fails miserably to do justice to the character of [that] God. This view of God, helpfully, dissolves the problem of evil.: A ‘god’ with restricted or limited ability can hardly be held responsible for failing to address the problem of suffering in any significant way. Indeed, this ‘god’, it could be said, cannot entertain any kind of ‘planned intention’—vis a vis the creation of anything much—most certainly not creation ex nihilo. This ‘god’ though could not be mistaken for the God of the Judeo/Christian Scriptures as this view of God is a step into the unknown and ‘unknowable’, and is not a God we could visualise and, most certainly is nothing like the Triune God of the Bible.

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig offer a helpful summary regarding the difference between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ objects:

We have seen that God, though immaterial and spatio-temporal, would be classed by     everyone as a concrete object in view of his being a personal causal agent. Perhaps that provides a clue to the distinction between concrete and abstract entities. It is virtually universally agreed that abstract objects, if they exist, are causally impotent; they do not  stand in causal relations. Numbers, for example, do not effect anything. (Copan, 2004)

If one were to collate all the articles/books I have in my collection (and it is not insignificant) that (attempt to) offer a ‘solution’ for the problem of ‘Natural Evil’— i.e. in the light of the evolution of the biosphere—one would find a clear demarcation between those who can, in reality, offer no defense or find no excuse—except that similar to the argument of process theology—a defence in which there is no likelihood of apportioning blame as there is ‘no ontological reality’ who may stand trial.Those that argue that the ‘reasonably short period’ since the evolution of ‘sentience’ allows for a limited amount of suffering—therefor an excuse for the God of the Bible—are ‘clutching at straws’. Alternatively, there is the ‘Greater Good’—eschatological ‘just so’ argument—a heaven in which all the harms and ‘loss of potential’ etc. shall be recompensed. For those wishing to offer the Fall of Genesis 3 as a defence for the effects of predation, parasitism, plague etc.—theirs’, is an admirable but—not insignificant task. It is a ‘task’ though that I address elsewhere.

Derek j. White 2018

[1] The ‘design product’ of personality/personal ingenuity. i.e. the God of the Judeo/Christian Scriptures in particular.

[2] Process Theism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Specifically, process theism is a product of theorizing that takes the categories of becoming, change, and time as foundational for metaphysics. The metaphysical underpinning ofprocess theism is often called process philosophy, a label suggested by the title of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality. Historical Notes on … · ‎God and Creativity · ‎Dual Transcendence in … · ‎Panentheism  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-theism/

 

The Anglican Church’s mission statement was adopted by the Lambeth Conference of bishops in 1988 as the ‘Five Marks of Mission’—clarifying that ‘The mission of the church is the mission of Christ’:

1. To proclaim the good news of the Kingdom
2. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
3. To respond to human need by loving service
4. To seek to transform unjust structures of society
5. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and to sustain the life of the earth.

Although these ‘Five Marks of Mission’ are a standard part of the Church of England’s statement regarding its ‘Practice of Mission’ it is most likely the case that other missiological ideas have, in practice, been more influential.Rather than use the afore mentioned 5 points’ Wright prefers a ‘3 point approach’[2]:

Early in his magnificent biblical survey of God’s ‘mission’ The Mission of God, Christopher Wright expresses his dissatisfaction with a definition of mission that stresses only the root meaning of the Latin verb mitto, ‘to send’. From Wright’s perspective, mission flows from and participates in the mission of God’[1]. “The New Testament mission of the  church, according to Wright, is holistic, by which he means that the Great Commission is about more than seeing people ‘saved’ in the traditional sense. For Wright and others, the gospel is about participation in God’s healing of the world and therefore involves issues such as injustice, poverty, politics, economics and ecology. M.Moore (2012)

Church,Society,Creation

The 5 Marks of Mission’, similar to Wright’s, offers a ‘3 Way Perspective’–a mandate, in no particular order, to serve society, care for creation and to build the church; the hope being that the three together will bring about the transformation of, not just our particular society, but the World. However, you will  have noticed, in particular, that two of the five points from the 1988 Lambeth Conference: (1) ‘to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom’ and (2) ‘to teach, baptise and nurture new believers’ have been subsumed under the one rather nebulous heading of ‘Building the Church’.Though it is appreciated that a ‘lone hub’ gives no indication of direction (it depends on which angle it is observed).

Regarding ‘Transformation’ Wright suggests that, “in ways only God can accomplish, through his purging and redeeming power, the work of the church will contribute to the new creation in which God will reign and we will reign with him.” (2017, P52) Continue reading →

‘Bearing the Marks of Our Mortality’  by Gijsbert van den Brink

The question whether humans were mortal before the fall only comes up in a religious, and more specifically a Judeo-Christian, context. That is not just because the notion of the fall refers to the Bible, but also because from a secular point of view it is obvious that humans must have been mortal all along. How else could it be? Don’t we bear the marks of our mortality in our very bodies, just like the animals, with cells dying all the time and organs having only a limited lifespan? And isn’t our body-plan at least part of what makes us human, so that if we had had immortal bodies at some stage we would hardly have been humans? From a scientific point of view, therefore, the very question whether there might have been a time when humans were not mortal seems odd. Immortal beings figure in fairy tales, myths and science fiction, but not in real life—neither now nor in the distant past. Adam and Paul Why would Christians be inclined to disagree with this view? The answer is: because a

Source: Bearing the Marks of Our Mortality