![]() ![]() There is the God who is on our side in wars who would have us kill for his sake. There is the cosmic bellhop who sits at the end of a cosmic telephone exchange dealing with billions of calls every minute and whom the caller hopes will alter the course of events to suit the caller. There is the God of the gaps who is brought in to fill the gaps left by science that God grows smaller with every advance in scientific understanding of the universe. There is the God who set the universe going in the first place and then left it except for occasional interventions in the form of miracles which rarely happen. The primary question is not, do you believe in God? but, what do you think you would be believing in if you did believe in God? There is the God who can do anything, who could prevent nuclear war, who could have prevented the holocaust - but didn’t. Why bring God into the argument at all? Hasn’t the notion of God been disposed of by science and the Enlightenment and more recently by theologians themselves who have written about the death of God? The critical question to ask is which God is dead? There are many concepts of God and many of them should die. The relevant question now is, in what sense, if any, is there divine activity in the universe. The old notion of a divine being controlling the universe from outside is no longer credible. The ecological model of nature is put forward as a credible alternative to materialism and mechanism. The laws of mechanics have all to do with external relations. Internal relations have nothing to do with the laws of mechanics. They are influenced, moreover constituted, by their internal relations with their environment. The proposition of those chapters is that materialism or mechanism does not explain the world, but that individual entities from protons to people are influenced, not only by their external relations. In previous chapters the case has been made for a crucial role for purpose as a causal agency in human life, in the rest of the living world and in all individual entities to the farthest reaches of the universe. More than two thousand years ago, the wisest of men proclaimed that the divine persuasion is the foundation of the order of the world, but that it could only produce such measure of harmony as amid brute forces it was possible to accomplish. ![]() God is not before all creation, but with all creation. Charles Birch Chapter 4: A Cosmic Purpose ![]()
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