Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Openness of God

  • Random Designer Wrap-Up

    I found the last several chapters of Random Designer quite attractive, I think partially because I’m from a Wesleyan background. We cross the “somehow” barrier and find that human beings, by whatever means that was accomplished, want to connect with their creator. In chapter 20, this is presented as “A Choice and a Chance.” The following quote (also used as an inset quote in the book) gives the flavor:

    An intimate, meaningful, and fulfilling relationship cannot be required. It can only be offered! Without the possibility of rejection, there is no opportunity for meaningful connection.

    Here I think Dr. Colling gets into one of the key potentials involved in looking at humanity from an evolutionary perspective, yet doing so as a theist, though I don’t know if he would go as far as I do. God takes risks by being the Random Designer instead of the complete dictator. There is the risk inherent in creation itself. Just what type of creature will arise that will think and connect? There is also the risk inherent in relationship. Will the person who seeks a relationship with God become a better person, or will he use the “specialness” of that relationship as an excuse to lord it over others? My own answers thus tend toward an “openness of God” theology. (Please be certain to distinguish my commentary here from Dr. Colling’s. Dr. Colling does not embrace the openness of God theology in the text.)

    Chapter 21, God’s Will: A Confusing Concept Becomes Crystal Clear promises clarity on a difficult topic, and here I have to express a bit of amusement. In general, once we come to an understanding of an issue, we think it’s crystal clear. I get caught here too. When teaching classes on the book of Revelation, I will inevitably be asked about some commentary in which the author says he has worked out the meaning of Revelation and it’s really very simple. I can point out that I have a row of commentaries on Revelation and several of them make a similar claim, yet do not agree on the meaning! So there are at least half a dozen crystal clear meanings to the book of Revelation.

    Understanding God’s will is rather similar, I believe. While I actually like Dr. Colling’s explanation, and I think he points in the right direction at least, it would probably take only a few minutes in a room with a Calvinist to get it all pretty confused again. Of course both Calvinist and Arminian would leave with a clear understanding–just different clear understandings.

    The chapter content is good. I think the subtitle is perhaps a bit optimistic, but then those who have no optimism don’t write books!

    Chapter 22, the rewards of perseverance builds on the spiritual view of humanity, while chapter 23 introduces the concept of “higher order random design.” I am not going to try to summarize this one. The key example is to be found in the human immune system. I think I followed it, but I am uncertain I can express it again myself. It does indeed express again the way in which randomness can produce order and design.

    Chapter 24 takes a step out into the unknown by suggesting that the genome may be as loaded as is possible and that we may well not move to greater complexity than human beings. It’s an interesting point, but one which I am woefully unqualified to analyze.

    Finally, chapter 25 deals with the call to relationship with the creator again. The form of expression and the theology here is very comfortable for me as it coincides closely with my own.

    Wrap-Up!

    This is the first time I have tried to blog through a book rather than read it completely and then write a few short notes or attempt a review. I see advantages and disadvantages. In once case, I re-read a section and commented on it further due to readers’ remarks. I think that second read had some value. So much for the process.

    What do I think of the book overall? I regard the first section as one of the best explanations of the basics of evolutionary theory for a layman that I have read. It does not involve the detail that a book like What Evolution Is includes, nor does it have the spice of Evolution, Triumph of an Idea, but it has substantial advantages too.

    First, I think it makes clear both the complexity of life and the power of the “random design” concept. Variation + Natural selection works. Dr. Colling is not afraid to look at abiogenesis and give us an idea of where the science is there as well. I think it is quite appropriate to separate abiogenesis from the biological theory of evolution for many purposes. At the same time, for many people the origin of life is the major question.

    Second, Dr. Colling is clearly an excellent teacher, and can explain complex processes simply. He apologizes to his colleagues in the scientific community for the extent to which he will simplify, and having read other materials, I know he is simplifying considerably, yet I do believe he gives an overall excellent picture. When looking at the forest one might misidentify a tree or two while still getting the shape of the forest.

    Third, Dr. Colling is talking about evolution in theistic terms, even when he is not talking about divine intervention. The recognition of God as the creator, and more precisely of God as the Random Designer underlies the entire book. The science is not divorced from theology, though science and theology are each given their spheres, their separate identity and their separate subject matter.

    Finally, these earlier points mean that this is a book for Christians and other theists who want to understand how one can still perceive God in an evolving world, as well as for those who want to understand how a theist can possibly manage that. One of my responses to the claim that nobody can be a theistic evolutionist is simply: And yet here I am. Well, now “here’s Dr. Richard Colling.” The second half of the book is a more explicit expression of the Christian faith that was always present even in the first half.

    One thing that struck me throughout was the basic honesty of this whole book. We have intelligent design proponents trying to pretend to do science without identifying their intelligent designer. Dr. Colling is unafraid to state from the start who he means by the Random Designer. That freedom comes with a lack of ulterior motives. This isn’t a sneaky way to get a specific type of “random design theory” into high school classrooms. It’s simply an expression of how one scientist who is also a man of faith sees God in random design.

    I would strongly recommend this book for any Christian who is considering the creation-evolution controversy, and also for anyone who wants to understand where many people of faith stand in terms of the relationship between science and theology. It is clear, informative, and challenging. I can’t ask for much more in a book!

  • Theodicy and Openness Theology

    Some time ago I made a few remarks on Dr. William Dembski’s article, Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science (last accessed 3/4/07). I think it’s a wonderfully well-written article, though I disagree with his conclusions. I’m going to discuss this article a bit more, but first I want to cover one or two points (in separate posts) that are peripheral. The first one is Dembski’s treatment of openness theology. In general, Dembski is quite fair to his opponents in this article, but I think he misses the boat just a bit on dealing with openness theology, as one generally does when one attributes motivation to other people’s beliefs.

    The entire section to which I want to respond is contained in a single paragraph on page 34 of the essay, starting with this:

    The overwhelming reason for truncating divine foreknowledge in current theological discussion (especially among openness and process theologians) is to assist in the task of theodicy.

    This misses the point somewhat. I certainly did not come to favor openness theology because I needed it for theodicy. In fact, I regard theodicy as a generally doomed business. Theodicy has proven useless to me. When I watched my 17 year old son die after a five year fight with cancer, it was not any principled theodicy that kept my spiritual life alive. It was simple experience of the presence of God, even around the time of death. God is whatever God is.

    No, the problem for me is that there is simply a gap between God as portrayed in different passages of scripture and even the God I experience. I don’t mean that my experience of God challenges scripture. In fact, one of my major reasons for accepting the authority of the Bible is kind of in reverse. The God that I experience in prayer, meditation, and worship, is so effectively described by the vocabulary of the Bible, that I have to accept the probability that my experience is similar to the Biblical writers.

    In fact, my personal experience of God is fractured in similar was to what a surface reading of many Bible passages presents. Without going into great detail, one needs to reconcile the God who “declares the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10) is “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (Hebrews 13:8) and yet “if a nation will turn from its evil, he will change his mind/relent” (Jeremiah 18:1-11). Many of us have become so theologically adept, whether we’re theologians or not, that we can reconcile those texts without thinking, bring the meaning of each into line with our theology.

    Similarly my personal experience of God goes through times of absolute sovereignty in which I feel carried forward without choice, and yet at other times places at which God allows me broad freedom. If my concept of God is too narrow for this experience, how likely is it to be broad enough for an actual infinite God who is the ground of all being?

    For openness theologians in general, and for me in particular, reconciliations of these aspects seem somewhat shallow, and seem to truncate one concept or another. The Bible speaks of humans having choices with consequences, consequences that would be different had humans behaved in a different manner. God repents frequently. In the book of Jonah, the prediction is that Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days. The people repent, and God repents. God’s grace is given priority over at least the appearance of his foreknowledge.

    Thus my motivation in exploring openness theology is more an effort to give full weight to all of these aspects of scripture and personal experience of God in my theology. I have never seen free will or such broader approaches as openness as all that helpful. In the end, God created absolutely everything, good and bad, whether he did so directly as in special creation or indirectly as in an evolutionary model. If God is the ground of all being–a definition I like–then all chains of causation lead back to God, and all things happen because God wanted the universe to be that way. This remains true whether he limits his foreknowledge or not.

    In such theodicies, a limited God is absolved from having to remove evils for the simple reason that he is incapable of removing them.

    Well, no, not really. In such theologies God would be incapable of creating logical inconsistencies in the universe. Thus the finite beings cannot simultaneously have full freedom and yet be restricted from being evil. I recall interviewing Dr. Richard Rice, one proponent of openness theology a few years back for a conference on the Religion Forum, and he commented that it was not that God could not know everything, but that he chose to create the universe in such a way that he would not know everything. (I lost the transcript of that talk, so that is from memory, but I believe it is an accurate representation.)

    But why engage in such theodicies at all? No sound arguments show that divine foreknowledge is logically incoherent. To argue against God knowing future contingent propositions invariably involves questionable assumptions about how the world, though created by God, might nonetheless impede God’s knowledge of the future.

    Except that what is actually argued is that God impedes his own knowledge of the future. Now I have not read every exposition by openness theologians, and I imagine there are those who would limit God in the way Dembski describes, but that is not a necessary component of openness theology. Openness theology would best be expressed, in my view, solely as God’s approach to interaction with this finite universe. It’s a way in which various possibilities have been reconciled in the finite, when in the infinite they had no need of such reconciliation.

    Further, I think that the coherence of free will and foreknowledge is quite illusory. William Lane Craig’s lengthy exposition to the contrary notwithstanding, I would still regard a fixed future as incompatible with free will. That’s a long discussion in itself, however, so I will hold with just the assertion at this point.

    Moreover, divine foreknowledge does not preclude human freedom. If God foreknows what I shall choose, then I shall not choose otherwise. It doesn’t follow, however, that I can’t choose otherwise. As William Lane Craig puts it, “my freely chosen actions . . . supply the truth conditions for the future contingent propositions known by God.”62 In contrast to theodicies that attempt to justify God’s goodness/benevolence by looking to divine limitation, I’m going to argue that full divine foreknowledge of future contingent propositions is indispensable to a theodicy that preserves the traditional understanding of the Fall (i.e., one that traces all evil in the world back to human sin). [Citations in this passage are from from William Lane Craig. I reproduce footnote 59: William Lane Craig, “Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb’s Paradox,” Philosophia 17 (1987): 331-350, available online at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/newcomb.html (last accessed January 12, 2006). Access date is Dr. Dembski’s.]

    Here we see, I believe another example of the type of reconciliation I’m talking about. For Dembski, preserving a traditional understanding of the fall is important, and thus he looks for a reconciliation of the various elements that includes that traditional understanding. I believe that he operates in a way that is very similar to the openness theologians, and for that matter to most everyone else, in that he sees a number of teachings in scripture and hopes to provide an overarching theory that will account for them all. I have no problem with that. I simply point out that others are operating on the same motivation, and not simply moving the boundary markers in order to make themselves feel better about God.

    One option at all times is to reexamine our understanding of any particular point in the light of whatever evidence we have available. This means that the ideas of free will, of sovereignty, of evil, and yes, the traditional understanding of the fall can be examined again and again as we try to reconcile the various pieces of information available to us. There is no God-given general theory of divine sovereignty and human will. That is something we have to look for.

    In addition, we have to look at the sources. One difference between various approaches to theodicy is sources. What weight is given to scriptural statements over observations of the natural world? I would have to say, for example, that an observation of the history of life on this planet creates an interesting question about the God who “sees a sparrow fall” (Matthew 10:29) and the God who permits “survival of the fittest” as the driving force in the diversity of life.