Tag: aristotle

praying to move the Mover

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

In Luke 18:1-8 we get the “Parable of the Persistent Widow”. It focuses on her persistence to win justice against her adversary. All parables of Jesus have a point, but here we are told the point of this one from the start: to show disciples that we “should always pray and never give up.”

I’ve been saying for years that when we pray we shouldn’t think of God like a vending machine. The differences should be obvious. A vending machine doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t make decisions about what we need. It is created by something other than itself. It will eventually wear down and fail to work, operate, provide, give or respond.

But here I’m going to explore at least one characteristic of vending machines which bear at least some kind of likeness to God. That characteristic is that (provided they are not defective) they work. They operate. They provide. They give. They respond to our requests.

Vending machines move. You put the money in (coin, cash, card, or

Aristotle, observing that objects in the world are in motion, rightly reasoned that (pardon the redundancy) there must be a necessary being that is a) not itself in motion, but b) is itself responsible for all of the motion in the world.

Some would at this point want to jump in and point out that this leads to (or is) a ‘deistic’ view of God. A God who kicks off all the motion in the world and then sits back and does nothing else ever again. Just one big shove, and done.

Despite this being perhaps where our minds may go first, it doesn’t mean we have to imagine things like that. As in a pool or billiards table, instead of imagining God as the white cue that is hammered at the other balls and (we might imagine) immediately removed from the table after that first contact, we might also imagine God as the cue stick, or better yet as the player who is active both beyond and on the table throughout the whole game. The one calling all the shots.

Theologian C.H. Pinnock proposed that God is not just an ‘unmoved’ Mover, but rather the Most-Moved Mover. Unlike a deterministic deity with a fixed plan like clock-work, Pinnock had an ‘open’ picture of God’s sovereignty which we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that the Bible does not portray God’s sovereignty in such a way that conflicts with our experience of God ‘changing his mind’, feeling sorry that he made humans, or responding to prayers.

This brings us back to the teaching of Jesus, using the example of a pleading widow to teach us to “always pray” and “never give up.”

According to biblical theology, God has chosen to be the kind of God who wants to relate to us, and wants that relationship to be one of asking. Jesus, as a master teacher who knows human nature completely, clearly knows that we will get tired of asking and want to ‘give up’.

The short parable ends with Jesus concluding that God, who we should understand is very unlike the ruler who “doesn’t fear God or care what people think” is the kind of God who will, in his own time and own way, “bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night.”

I don’t naturally want to cry out to God day and night. Not for anything. I find the deistic view easier. God has determined it all. Down to the last detail. No need to give him instructions. Just trust and wait until the end, when it will all get sorted out.

But no. This parable shows God to be the kind of God who wants us to be – at least a bit – impatient and persistent with him. He wants us to “keep bothering” him, like the widow did to the unjust judge. God wants us to ask for at least a little of the ultimate future in the immediate present.

This will take practice, and getting over our pride which doesn’t want to look like a fool asking God for stuff all the time and it seeming (at least some of the time) to make precisely no difference.

If we go to the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, the prayer book that shaped Jesus’ prayers, we immediately see this kind of view as they call persistently on God for all things, all the time, in all kinds of ways.

In prayer, I have the shameless audacity to be trying to move the Most Moved Mover.

the explanation for everything, but not every thing

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

One of the common misconceptions of God is that belief in God is in some way contrary to science.

The logic seems to go like:
if a) I believe God is the explanation for X,
then b) there is no real motivation for ‘doing science’ to explain X.

This however collapses explanation into one level.

Aristotle, for example, talked about four causes for things. For example, for a coffee cup there would be:

  • a material cause – the materials that explain or cause this cup would be clay.
  • an efficient cause – the process that caused this cup to be was what we call pottery.
  • a formal cause – the identity or form of the object that resulted from materials and the process is a coffee cup.
  • a final cause – the purpose or goal of having a coffee cup is drinking coffee.

So there are many different ways to look at any particular thing (e.g. a computer), and different ways to look at the collection of things that we call ‘everything’ (e.g. Nature).

The belief that God is the explanation for ‘everything’ (e.g. existence itself) is not logically connected in any way to a belief that God is the efficient cause (so to speak) for every single thing that happens (e.g. every bank robbery, every tsunami, etc.). You can, in other words, be a theist and a criminologist; or a theist and a meteorologist. You can believe that Italian designers wanted to drink coffee from really nice cups, and still have plenty of reason to research what their coffee cups are made of, the processes involved, and why they chose the particular form or design.

Science is not in conflict with belief in God, just as a material or efficient cause cannot be in conflict with a formal or final cause. The problem comes when a material or efficient cause is mis-framed as a final cause; e.g. when ‘science’ is absolutely and dogmatically elevated ‘ to ultimate levels; in other words, to believe that everything can be explained by science (i.e. ‘Scientism‘).

So then, even if Scientism may have a problem with God, God has no problem with Science.
Indeed, God would be understood to be the final cause for all Nature – all creation; and the formal cause for the lawful and ‘scientific’ nature of Nature.

– – –

after-thought:
Note: in Pantheism (e.g. God is all; and all is God), which I do not hold, God is also the material and efficient cause for all things. Which gets very tricky making God materially and mechanically responsible for evil and suffering. God can only be ‘good’ within a worldview that makes a distinction between the eternally Free Creator and the purposefully free creation.