The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design by William A. Dembski

Author:William A. Dembski [Dembski, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Spirituality, Science, Philosophy, Non-Fiction, Christian
ISBN: 9780830832163
Publisher: IVP Books
Published: 2004-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

This picture of reality has a lot going for it, as witnessed by the increasing popularity of process theology throughout the theological world. It certainly provides a richer set of possibilities than the impoverished ontology of antiteleological naturalism. Also, it promises to resolve certain longstanding theological conundrums. By making God subject to principles that govern the world, the problem of theodicy has a straightforward resolution: God is benevolent but not omnipotent. He means well, but a lot of evil is simply beyond his ability to prevent. Religious naturalism also promises to do away with the legacy of Cartesian dualism: by eliminating the supernatural it allows for a nondualistic interaction between the mental and physical conceived as upward and downward causation within a single causal nexus. (Within Cartesian dualism the mental and the physical were two completely different kinds of causal powers operating in two completely different kinds of causal nexuses-the material and the spiritual.)

For the Christian, there's just one problem with process theology and the religious naturalism that undergirds it: its doctrines of God and creation are totally unacceptable. Christian theology is not process theology. Christian theology, properly so-called, regards the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, or creation from no preexisting stuff, as nonnegotiable. Creatio ex nihilo presupposes two things: that God is a personal being and not a principle, and that the world exists by a personal act, namely, an effected word spoken by God. The early theologians of the Christian church (like Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers) were all too aware of Plato's cosmology. The problem, in their view, with Plato's cosmology was just that: namely, Plato's world was a cosmos, an ordered arrangement governed by principles that even God would have to obey. The Christian God, by contrast, was absolutely free, and the world, as an absolutely free act by this absolutely free God, was not a cosmos (at least not in the first instance) but a creation.

There is a logic here that's inescapable and that leads in either of two completely opposite directions. Either God is free or God is bound. Unless God is absolutely free and the world is an absolutely free act of creation, then there are principles that constrain God in creation. (The issue of God being bound by his nature is not a problem here so long as God's nature is not set over and against God. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, identified God's essence or nature with God's existence.) Any such principles of cosmic constraint, however, are logically prior to God. But in that case the ul timate reality is not God but those principles. Take your pick-either the ultimate reality is the one personal God or something else is the ultimate reality, like Plato's forms or Whitehead's process. The one choice leads to theism, the other to naturalism.

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