What Does Creation Mean - Answering Carl Krieg

New blog on the kid : What is the Common Providence · Creation vs. Evolution : What Does Creation Mean - Answering Carl Krieg

I just saw part 7, and now am going back to part 6 of Carl Krieg on Progressive Christianity (dot org), here:

Fifty Years Later – Part 6
What does Creation Mean?
by Carl Krieg on September 22, 2022
https://progressivechristianity.org/resources/fifty-years-later-part-6/

Even fifty years ago, whatever creation means, it does not mean that in seven days God brought the universe into being out of nothing. That story was written by the priests while the nation of Israel was in captivity in Babylon. The pervasive fear was that the Babylonian gods were more powerful than YHWH, God of Israel, and the Priestly story was presented as an affirmation of faith and comfort. God, our God, is the only God, who, on the first day created….and this God loves us even though we are captives in a foreign land.

This is what is called a "just-so-story" - there is no document saying the creation story of Genesis or any of Genesis was written originally by anyone in Babylon, the one type of ancient indication we get is that Moses wrote it down several centuries before such a captivity occurred, nearly a millennium earlier. Obviously, it could be used like here suggested either way.

More generally, we may ask, why is there suffering and evil in the world if God is in control? My answer then was to say that in God’s omnipotence, God chose not to be omnipotent. There is suffering in the world because God chose not to interfere in the course of nature, does not perform miracles that contradict this course of nature, and does not answer petitionary prayer that asks God to violate this course of nature. That was the only consistent approach. Otherwise, why would God stop some tornadoes but not others? heal some people but not others?

I would say, there is another consistent approach - God choses to exempt one thing from being directly and totally controlled by His will. That thing being created free wills.

There is no law of nature against God healing every sickness in every hospital right now. There is a certain lack of miracle workers who God could confide the task to while at the same time making them courageous witnesses to truth. And with some experience of standing up for truth, I understand this lack very much - it is difficult to confront error whenever one is around, and even more difficult to do it orally offline. God choses those who work miracles of healing because they do some other work of His too, usually. Christ healing lepers was witnessing to truth and to His being God, and source for God's forgiveness of sins. And that His Church was the fulfilment of the latter half of Jeremiah 33. Next large scale miracle workers will probably be the two witnesses - who will also work punitive miracles over collective injustices. See Apocalypse 11.

Asking for a miracle is not asking God to violate laws of nature or violate anything else He respects.

But answering such a prayer at a given moment or not is a question of God making such and such a person's story right, in the case of those who get saved.

Why would God not stop the tornados of late 2004? Well, the area was one with lots of sexual sin involving prostitution (even of children) and contraception, and it was known to many tourists in that capacity.

But if you say that God does not directly interfere in the natural process, how, then, does God get anything done in the natural world?

I would absolutely not say any such thing! God's palette, as said on the other essay, involves:

• divine fiat, like creation days, creation of spiritual creatures, including after the creation days new human souls, turning of the universe around earth, forgiveness of sin, infusion of sanctifying grace, final beatificifation of a soul granted to see Him;
• angels obeying Him, like sun and moon and some other planets getting driven around the zodiac or like people getting warned by their guardian angels from dangers,
• demons defying Him, like when they remove some obstacle to a man by doing evil around another man who had chosen evil, or like when they show their fear of God (St. Christopher before a Cross, and that demon who told a wizard "don't you EVER send me after a Christian again!")
• men using and abusing our freewill, a very varied colour on the palette;
• natural processes under the control of any or all of above - thunder and lightning are obviously to some extent phenomena of electricity and hot air heated by it, and static electricity uploading slowly in clowds - but you cannot prove that a cloud absolutely had to unload precisely there and then rather than five seconds or five minutes earlier or later. The scholastic idea that demons have some power in these phenomena is not off the chart - it is actually somewhat underlined by Christ's anger when stilling the storm.

The answer was that although God does not interfere in nature, God does utilize natural processes to get things done. So God heals a person by guiding the doctor to do the right thing. But that line of reasoning goes nowhere. How does God guide the doctor?? Where does the chain of causality end? I had no idea.

First of all, God certainly does heal people miraculously still today, some people are diagnosed as incurable and then healed in Lourdes. Back when Tuberculose Peritonitis was a slow but fairly certain killer (before antibiotics), some such cases were healed in Lourdes.

But finding a doctor (or knowing a house cure that works) was in question here. Or generally speaking, the natural means (not just doctors) for any given end (not just getting well).

First, the line of causality is not one unbroken stream since the universe began, with everything causally decided for today being so through causes that left no other alternative since millions of years ago. God, angels and demons, human freewills are all of the time inserting new strands of causation in the causes studied by physics.

Second, supposing the line really went all the way back to creation, like storms being only physically caused (which as said I disagree with), CSL had an answer : God would have arranged all of the line of causation leading to one particular storm, leading to one particular shipwreck (like one without causalties on Malta) from the creation of the universe, it wouldn't be more difficult for Him than for you to arrange a line of metre to end in one particular rhyme. If you haven't, Carl Krieg, CSL has, Tolkien has, even I have.

On the cosmic scale and with regard to creation, God’s tool was evolution. That was how God created. It was easy to say that there is something rather than nothing because of the divine will, and also to say that how that something came to be was a natural process of evolution. There is no conflict, therefore, between science and Christianity. They speak of different dimensions of reality, the thatness, and the howness. That seemed like an acceptable solution.

It's not. Evolution has no howness for new cell types (remember that one celled organisms have one cell type, or perhaps a generational rotation of two cell types at the most, while beings supposed to have evolved from them have - in our case perhaps 200* - many different cell types) or the evolution of language (singular).**

Think of what we have discovered in the last fifty years:

There are trillions of galaxies. Trillions! The universe is expanding at an increasing rate, and we don’t know if it will ever stop. In the finite future, the outer reaches will have traveled out so far that their light will never reach us. We will never know that they existed. All we may ever know is our own galaxy. And it will be destroyed in its merging with the Andromeda galaxy.

There may be eleven or more dimensions. The protons, neutrons and electrons that we see make up only six per cent of the universe, the balance made up of dark energy and dark matter, about which we know absolutely nothing, other than that they exist.

Incredible how much one has to be credulous about to be incredulous about the true God!*** I don't believe in trillions of galaxies or in dark matter and dark energy. I do believe there is something about which we would even naturally know that it exists, and furthermore that it is good - God. Having revealed Himself, He has made sure more is available, thanks to Bible and Church Tradition. Including a universe created from nothing° and that as recently as little more than 7000 years ago.°°

And you know what? This is compatible with both all I know about scientific actual observations, and how God's providence interacts with what is already created. Both what I believe, and what I reject is compatible.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
18th Lord's Day after Pentecost
9.X.2022

* "Experts estimate that there are around 200 cell types in the human body."

Source : Medical News Today : What is a cell?
Medically reviewed by William C Lloyd III, MD, FACS — By Tim Newman — Updated on August 23, 2022
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320878

** The issue is confused because we say languageS (plural) "evolve" into other languageS and especially simply "evolve" all the time, but that is a misnomer for fashions, and especially it is no key at all to how language could have arisen in an evolutionary scenario.

*** Es ist unglaublich wie viel man glauben muß um ungläubig zu sein - Cardinal Faulhaber.

° 2 Machabees 7:28.

°° Historia scholastica and Roman Martyrology say Christ was born 5199 after Creation.