Creation: From a Man-made God to a God-made ManPage 1
Christian Churches of God
No. B5
Creation: From Anthropomorphic Theology
to Theomorphic Anthropology
or
From a Man-made God to A God-made Man
(Edition 1.1 19901201-20000919)
This work is directed at examining the logical basis of the Creation, Causation and the Attributes of God and the place of humans and sons of God in that Creation in harmony with the Scriptural account.
Christian Churches of God
PO Box 369, Woden ACT 2606, AUSTRALIA
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(Copyright 1990, 2000 Wade Cox)
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and
Creation
Contents
Preface
1Causation and Singularities
1:1Singularities and the Notion of Causation
1:2The Development of Causal Explanation
1:2.2Descartes and Post-Cartesian Causation
1:3Metaphysical Aspects of Science and Matter
1:4Testing Accounts of Causation
1:4.2Idea/Ideatum and Existence without a Cause
1:5.1Hume and Leibniz
1:5.2The Humean Positon
Harmony
1:6.1Unsound Aspects of Singularist Causation
1:6.2Supervenient and Intermediate Causation
1:7Counter Arguments
1:7.1The Argument from the Possibility of Indeterministic Laws
1:7.2The Singularist Account
1:7.3Intermediate Account
1:8The Direction of Time
1:9Simultaneous Transmission of Ideas
1:10Essential Properties of a Definition of Singularist Causation
2Creation and Absolute Creation
2:1.1Cyclical Creation and the Attributes of God
2:1.2Transcendence/Immanence Problems
2:2.1Absolute Creation
2:2.2Activism and Law as a Mechanism
2:3.1Ontology and Illumination
3Transcendence and the Sons of God
3:1Transcendence and the Angel of Redemption
3:2The Elohim, Morning Stars and the Sons of God
3:2.1The Elohim
3:2.2The Elohim as a Plurality
3:2.3Morning Stars
3:2.4Cherubim
3:3.1The Spirit of Man and the Angelic Order
3:3.2Original Millennial Doctrines
3:4The Logos and Creation
3:4.1Will and Nature
3:4.2Faith and Wisdom
3:4.3Men and the Divine Nature
3:5The Elohim and Free Moral Agency
3:6Pantheism Versus Transcendent Monotheism
3:6.1The Sons of God and a Continuity Argument
3:6.2The Union of the Holy Spirit
3:6.3Satan and Pantheism
4Material Creation
4:1The Creation of Man
4:1.1Pre-Adamic Humanoids
4:1.2Explaining the Sequence
4:2Philosophical Aspects of Evolution
4:3The Nephilim
4:3.1Qumran
4:4A Harmony of Apparently Conflicting Philosophies
4:4.1Nicene and Post-Nicene Distortions of the Philosophy of Religion
4:4.2An Alternative Explanation
4:5The Soul and Life after Death
4:6Early and Later Concepts of the Elohim and the Resurrection
4:7The Mechanics of Human Spirituality
4:8A Tentative Explanation of the Mind
5Summary
bibliography
Creation: From a Man-made God to a God-made ManPage 1
Preface
Up until the nineteenth century the science of the day was locked into the absurd quasi-religious theory that the earth was some few thousand years old, based on erroneous and illogical reconstructions of the biblical scenario. Many of these illogical myths are extant even today. As science started to estimate, based on its knowledge at the time, various estimates were made for the age of the earth, and therefore the sun/solar system. In 1854 Helmholtz came up with an age of 25 million years for the age of the sun and Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) came up with an estimate of 100 million years as the most likely figure. “Even Thomson, we know now, was more than ten times too modest in his assessment of the age of the solar system.” (John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang: Quantum Physics and Cosmology, Corgi Books, 1988, p.160). These calculations were based on scientific assumptions on how much energy the sun radiates and how long such a body could sustain that energy output. The energy released is in fact about 4 x 1033 ergs per second or some 1041 ergs per year (ibid., p.161). With the discovery of radioactivity the estimates of Helmholtz and Thomson had to be multiplied by some 10 to 100 times to produce a correct model of radioactive breakdown.
As understanding increased of the mechanics of the solar system, it became possible to produce models of the structure and possible creation of the universe. Over the decades of the 20th century it has become fashionable to dismiss contemptuously the concepts of Creation and Theistic Activism. It has also become fashionable to dismiss even more contemptuously the concept of demons or an Angelic Host. It became almost an accepted definition that causation was non-singularist or supervenient and that the universe was material. Whilst it is true that there are difficulties with singularist concepts of causation and also the postulation of immaterial sub structures to the material universe, it is nevertheless becoming increasingly difficult within standard paradigms to account for the smoothness and uniformity in the distribution of the universe. In view of the current measurements of background radiation in the universe and the attendant problematic smoothness and orderliness of matter, the Big Bang Theory of the universe is now acknowledged to be in serious trouble. That does not mean that we should be dismissive of the models of physical reaction but rather we should now be able to re-examine the paradigms within which they were constructed. In the work on Creation and the Host the work of some philosophers and scientists was found to be extremely useful, especially those dealing with singularities. Any Theist account necessarily rests on premises of Singularist Causation, and from these, singularities in the physical creation.
It is considered that the work done by Michael Tooley on Singularist Causation is of significant importance to the concepts not only of causation but for theistic activism and necessarily for the concepts of human action. It is contended that the Philosophy of Religion was placed in an historical and causal straight jacket by the rewriting of the understanding of the ancients as mythological nonsense, and the actions of some Christian philosophers have arguably destroyed the spiritual direction and understanding of many generations of humans. This incoherence has also placed religion and paleoanthropology in needless conflict. It is significant that Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking have together demonstrated that the questions of general relativity in their classical form (i.e. without allowing for quantum effects) absolutely require that there was a singularity at the birth of the universe, a point at which time began. (Gribbin, ibid., p. 381). Stephen Hawking has identified mathematical singularities where not only matter but space and time can be created (or conversely crushed out of existence to the physicist). The writer does not profess to be an astrophysicist and therefore any suggestions that were to be made regarding astrophysical models would be gratuitous. It is noted in his work A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Holes, (Bantam Press, UK, 1988, p.50) that Hawking has changed his mind regarding Big Bang singularity, in that the necessity for such singularity can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account. He is however having difficulty unconvincing his colleagues. Whilst the necessity for Big Bang causal distribution of the universe is certainly in serious doubt it is held that the logical necessity of singularities cannot be overcome.
It is unfortunate that Roger Penrose’s new work came out at the completion of this work, as its importance to the understanding of human thought is highly significant. There appears to be a drift to structural immanence and a form of logical monism may become a fashionable innovation stemming from the new physics. This is alarming in its implications for Transcendent Monotheism.
From Tooley's position on Singularist Causation it is attempted to develop a singularist causal structure which is coherently theist. The attributes and nature of God require of the structure of creation an absolutist moral and ethical system based on theoretical relationships as Laws which are not disembodied or relative. It will be shown that existence of spiritual entities and the capacity for evil are logically necessary to a perfect harmonious universe with absolute capacity, and that the existence of Angels, Demons and Evil is not only compatible with the omniscience and omnipotence of God, but is in fact logically necessary to absolute spiritual capacity. It is further argued that the substructure of the universe is necessarily, with the current concepts of Dark Matter Theory, a logical reflection of the action of the spiritual, and will prove to be immaterial spiritual and little understood. That the universe has a purpose only barely comprehended is a premise of the ancients and one being demonstrated as knowledge increases.
Chapter 1
Causation and Singularities
Assumptions
Similar to the position experienced by Tooley, the following assumptions are necessary.
1: Traditional empiricist views concerning what concepts can be treated as analytically basic are sound and hence, the concept of causation cannot be treated as analytically basic and thus stands in need of analysis.
2: Regardless of Wittgenstein’s work on the problematic nature of private language, a private language is held to be unproblematic for the purpose of causation.
3: Concepts that involve the ascription of secondary qualities to external objects can be analyzed in terms of concepts that involve the ascription of qualia to experiences.
4: Analysis in the opposite direction is impossible.
1:1Singularities and the Notion of Causation
Most views of causation have been reductionist and have treated causal relations as observable. These are unsatisfactory for the reasons outlined below and any treatment of causal relations which hopes to offer a satisfactory account of causation would appear to be realist, treating causal relations as theoretical. The assumption that causal relations are observable is a materialist view that is quite ancient. Originally theories of causation were theist with assumptions that some theistic causes were not observable save in the effect. The earliest alternate explanations of the actions of matter were basically animist, which assumed that corporeal structures acted the way they did because of their inherent nature. Bodies therefore acted as they did because it was the nature of the structure of the body. This essentially was a perversion of the early theist understandings of the nature of God. It is philosophically incoherent because it allocates an essentially indeterminate and logically polytheist structure to the universe. As seen below even Galileo was reluctant to abandon this animist causal explanation in view of the potential for offence to the religious scholars of the day who had adopted the Greek corporeal atomist explanation of science within a Chaldean theological structure which allocated an eternal soul to living entities. This theology was the basis of the animist structures of earlier ages.
To be coherent a Monotheist causal structure requires singularity of causation as an exercise of the will of the central entity called God. That entity logically cannot be a plurality otherwise a polytheist division of wills is introduced which raises philosophical objections of the type David Armstrong has raised to Dualism and which cannot logically be Monotheist. All entities that exist are therefore logically subordinate to the will of the central causal structure we understand as God and as such are extensions of that singular causal will. It is contended that all structures which impute division or plurality to the godhead cannot logically be Monotheist. They are essentially Polytheist and divisive and as such their existence must be of a transitional type with limited purpose. This is later dealt with.
The following analysis of causation is preliminary to any examination of the creation which is determined by the nature of the singular causal entity termed within our understanding as God, the Father and Maker. It is because of the logical reduction to God that singularities in the origin of the universe have been resisted by science. Similarly it has been from a desire to limit the concepts of an absolutist structure that scientists and philosophers when embracing singularities have tended to logical structures which render the singularity immanent and not transcendent. Such was the system of Spinoza, and the latest works out of the U.K. by Hawking et al. appear to be attempting an explanation based on captive immanence. This approach is a form of Monism rather than Monotheism.
Any singularity which is coherently Monotheist would also require that causal relationships be theoretical, not being disembodied or relative, and that such a singularity be not indeterminate. The existence of such a singularity would require an absolutist structure of fixed theoretical relationships where those relationships were established as laws concurrent with the creation of the entities regulated. A singularity responsible for the material creation necessarily must precede the material creation being immaterial in structure and substance. It must require also the immaterial underpinning of the material creation; otherwise all laws would not be theoretical but observable material and the original structure a physical or material initiation as an immanent structure of initial density not comprehensible and necessarily limited to the physical capacities of the material structure.
Superficially, a materialist Monism attendant upon corporeal atomism has been attractive since the Greeks refined it from Chaldean and Indo-Aryan theology. However, it is seriously incoherent both in its inability to purge its schema of metaphysical elements and its increasing inability to account for the orderly and even distribution of the physical system as knowledge increases.
There have been some incorrect assumptions underlying the notion of causation and some of these have been developed to accommodate the animist and polytheist systems that are in tension with revelation. Aquinas’ and other theological analyses of first cause essentially accommodate Greek views of causation. An explanation of the development of causal explanation and an analysis of the notion of causation follow. From this the importance of singularist causation and the implications regarding the creation and human action will become clear:
1. It will be shown that rather than traditional approaches involving claims of progression from human to the divine as an anthropomorphic theology, necessitating the appropriation of an immortal soul approximating that of the spirit of God and any angels there might be; the logically coherent schema is rather one of theomorphic anthropology and that there has been a fundamental misapprehension on the part of mankind regarding the nature, regulation and purpose of creation and mankind’s role in that creation.
2. We will examine and reject Cartesianism and from an examination of the nephesh, or spirit of man, show how it is logically necessary for all spirit or beings to exist as entities within the structure of God as parts of God: or be destroyed. The concept of destruction extended to the soul doctrine is philosophically inconvenient and polytheist. Logically the soul doctrine must be rejected along with traditional Athanasian and materialist concepts.
3. Indeed it will be shown the soul doctrine is fundamentally polytheist and contrary to the nature of God and that God is a controlling singularity.
4. It will also be shown that mankind’s spirituality is what might properly be termed non-essential theomorphism, where the divine in us is conditional and supernatural rather than derived from our natures.
1:2The Development of Causal Explanation
Pre-Cartesian Causation
One of the problems in an adequate understanding of the biblical method was the concept of causation as understood by the Hebrews and that understood by the Chaldeans and from them the Greeks and Europeans. The Chaldeans were animists and hence the concepts of causation were seen in animistic terms, i.e. that physical bodies possess a spirit which regulates its action in some determinist sense. The Greeks were to inherit this and Aristotle was to give it formal expression. Jennifer Trusted gives a good and simple analysis of this in her Free Will and Determinism, (Oxford Opus, 1984, p. 29 et seq). The four kinds of causes are:
1. the material cause: the physical matter;
2. the formal cause: the plan or design for the physical matter
3. the efficient cause: the source of movement and/or activity of the matter; and
4. the final cause: the ultimate purpose or intention in bringing the event about.
Now a reduction in the forms of thought away from Parmenidean Monism or formal theism towards restricted corporeal atomism, which occurred with the Greeks and continued on into Europe (finally resulting in the establishment of Positivism and the rejection of Theism), results in concepts of causation which concentrate on efficient cause as cause in the modern sense and others as modes of explanation.
The concepts of the causes as expounded by Aristotle are only now accepted as valid for events that depend on human (and perhaps some animal) actions. This has become so because animism was rejected as a view of nature. Latent Greek animism affected thought up into the Renaissance. The concepts of the Chaldean soul doctrine were coupled with it. “Even Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who died only a few years before Descartes, was not disposed to reject the animistic view of the heavenly bodies out of hand” (Trusted p.30). The concepts here are that, “if the ultimate explanation of any event is thought to be in terms of purpose then there is no problem of free will; for the ultimate cause is the will. It becomes senseless to ask what causes the will” (idem.). Hebrew and Chaldean Thought are therefore in dispute only as to the entity who wills. Hebrews, and indeed all Theists, argue that it is the entity God who wills. Chaldeans attribute an animistic spirit which permeates matter, from which derives immanent monism, and incoherently with that accommodate a form of pantheism in the Babylonian and Indo-Aryan systems generally.
1:2.2 Descartes and Post-Cartesian Causation
René Descartes (1596-1650) introduced a new type of explanation which said that “physical events could be fully explained in terms of prior physical events operating according to fixed laws ordained by God.” (ibid. p.30) Teleological explanations of events, especially ordinary physical ones, have become rather ridiculous as thought becomes increasingly materialist non-theist. However, physical explanations of human actions are also considered “bizarre if not actually ridiculous.” (ibid., p.31) For example: “Why are you walking up the road?” Answer: “Nerve impulses in my brain are activating my muscles.” The teleological explanations, e.g. “to post a letter,” are increasingly confined to human will, and external immaterial explanations are considered seriously bizarre, e.g. “the holy spirit moved me to act.” Such explanations increasingly precipitate psychological investigations and diagnoses which in the past may have been more readily identified with demon possession. Descartes’ explanation is mechanistic rather than animistic.