Reading God's divine nature Part II (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Tuesday, August 06, 2019, 13:50 (1725 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTES: "What is God? McCabe’s answer is that God is that which accounts for why there is anything at all. “God is whatever answers our question ‘How come everything?’”

"Among the things we need to delete from our conception of divine action is the idea that it amounts to an “interference” with what happens in the world. Creation is not a matter of God tinkering with the natural order so as to make it do what it otherwise would not do. It is a matter of his making it the case that there is any natural order at all.”

Goodbye to David’s proposal that God dabbles – specially designing this, that and the other in order to prepare different organisms for different environments which he may or may not have programmed or dabbled, although he is always in full control.

QUOTE: Once again, negative theology is crucial, because we have to subtract from our understanding of this model any of the limitations that apply to finite intellects like ours. (DAVID’s bold)

Why do we “have to”? This means that ANYTHING we believe we can understand about God – e.g. that he can think, plan, design and have a purpose just as we can - must be wrong. How does McCabe KNOW that his God has no human attributes?

QUOTE: Negative theology is an essential corrective to theological misunderstanding, but it is not a complete account of theological language, and sometimes McCabe says things that seem to give the opposite impression. All the same, these days the greater danger is to go to the opposite extreme of crudely anthropomorphizing God, and McCabe does a great service in exposing the folly and theological shallowness of doing so. (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: I wish I could have been in the past as clear about God's nature as this essay and its interpretation are about God's nature. He must not and cannot be humanized. He is what we cannot imagine. Yes, He is crudely, a human invention of our wishes, but after deeper thought it is patently obvious, living organisms, complex as they are, must have had a designer. But at last we must see the negative side of trying to define God or imagine His thoughts. I don't, but dhw does as he attempts to be an imaginary theist.

Who are you kidding? We both accept the logic of the design argument, but you then insist on imagining your God’s thoughts and methods: he is in total control (though you’re not sure about local changes in the environment), designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder either through preprogramming or dabbling, and is all-purposeful but from the very beginning has had only one purpose in mind: to design H. sapiens, and he “had to” design the rest so that they could eat or not eat one another until he designed H. sapiens, though you have “no idea” why he “had to” do it this way.

As for the article, you might just as well say that life and the universe are the product of some unknown and unknowable power and leave it at that. It’s your fixed beliefs that have led to all the alternative speculations. Just don’t give the unknown power a name, and stop pretending that you know its purpose (if it has one), and its inexplicable method of achieving that purpose, and then we can all sit happily together on the fence. “Negative theology” might just as well be called “negative atheism”: life and the universe are the product of a natural order which came into existence through a cause about which we know nothing. I suggest a single term for both: “agnosticism”.