iwpoe wrote:

Are any of us Divine command Theorists? Most of us, I think, are inclined to think that God is the ontological ground of goodness, but not that goodness is up to God's will. I part company with Craig, I think, on this matter: unless I am vastly mistaken about my interpretation of his ethical ontology.

Right, but he doesn't think it's up to God's will. The commands are from God's nature. God's will isn't part of it.

iwpoe wrote:

Re Christology, yes, Christ is the person with two natures, and I think it's the former not the latter, but I should sit down and make sure that the language conforms with what I understand Orthodoxy to be.

Which died on the cross? The person with two natures? Or one of the natures? Or both natures but not the person?
 

KevinScharp wrote:

Jason wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

The fact that Jesus's body was supported by water or suspended on the water without falling in is a natural phenomenon. The fact that Jesus's body existed at time 1 and not at time 2 is a natural phenomenon. That's all I meant.
 

In order for an event to be considered a natural phenomenon it has to both be an observable event and not be man-made. Since Jesus (being human) was involved in both examples then by definition it cannot be considered a natural phenomenon. They were of course supernatural phenomenon and hence cannot be countered by our best scientific theories. 

No scientist would accept this definition. That makes psychology, sociology, linguistics, economics, etc. not sciences. And it makes quantum field theory not a scientific theory. Come on.

I do not see how the "soft" sciences would have anything to do with studying natural phenomenon, examples of natural phenomenon are the sunrise, the old faithful at Yellowstone, the rotation of the earth or even a rainbow etc. Psychology for instance studies human behaviours not natural phenomenon. I also do not see how my definition makes quantum field theory unscientific. In no way did I say that all of science is solely based on studying natural phenomenon, what my point was that Jesus walking on the water is not a natural phenomenon since Jesus could quite easily make it happen (e.g. using his power or will) hence it does not come under the umbrella of natural phenomenon. 

KevinScharp wrote:

Greg wrote:

This is just not an adequate response. The scientific theory does not detail the various possible sorts of "openings" in systems; it just says something about closed systems.

Moreover, we can construct otherwise closed systems that we can interfere with. We cannot mathematically model our own behavior, though, and being able to do so in principle is surely not a condition for the conservation principle to be good science; if it were, then (for instance) humans possessing libertarian free will would imply that we could not be "openings" in closed systems of our own contriving, and that implication is surely incorrect.

Of course the scientific theory specifies what openings in the system are -- they're natural events that correspond to particular aspects of the mathematical structure in question. Closed systems are mathematically defined as are open ones. The mathematical structure for conservation principles is almost always some sort of abstract algebraic structure -- a group or a ring or a field. And it will display a certain mathematical property called symmetry. There's an amazing connection between conservation principles and symmetries that Emmy Noether proved (she's one of the most underrated scientists ever in my book). So, openings in the system are defined in terms of the mathematical structure.
 

Clearly you are more familiar with the details of the physics than I am, but this response does not seem to answer the objection. Taking a look at Noether's theorem applied to conservation of energy:

In other words, if the physical system is invariant under the continuous symmetry of time translation then its energy (which is canonical conjugate quantity to time) is conserved. Conversely, systems which are not invariant under shifts in time (an example, systems with time dependent potential energy) do not exhibit conservation of energy – unless we consider them to exchange energy with another, external system so that the theory of the enlarged system becomes time invariant again. Since any time-varying system can be embedded within a larger time-invariant system (with the exception of the universe), conservation can always be recovered by a suitable re-definition of what energy is and extending the scope of your system.

The question is, is the universe invariant under the continuous symmetry of time translation (I will just say invariant henceforth)? The theist (at least if he doesn't take my earlier approach, which I commend to him) says it isn't, because God has intervened in the past.

It might be true that each system can be associated with some mathematically describable 4-dimensional structure that is either invariant or not. That does not (as far as I can tell, with this layman's explanation of the theorem's implications for conservation of energy) imply that one can look at a time slice of such a model and tell which "openings" it has. So a calorimeter may be, for all intents and purposes, a closed system, invariant. I can still drill a hole in it, which makes it an open thermodynamic system. In the end, modeled 4-dimensionally, this all might be represented, and from that structure we can tell that it was not, in the end, invariant. But before I drilled the hole we could not have seen that. Of course, nothing changes here if the agent doing the drilling has libertarian free will and his actions are not mathematically representable.

Such is God's relationship to the universe. The question is, what is the universe's structure and is it invariant? From what I can tell, one doesn't have to be able to predict openings in the system--looking at the system itself--for them to be mathematically representable (from a global, 4th-dimensional perspective), for modeling a thermodynamically closed calorimeter does not require such a thing.

Maybe I am confused here, since my physics knowledge poses a limitation (and there are certainly limits to the sort of jargon I can digest), but Noether's theorem seems to give you an elegant way of representing the continuous symmetry of time translation, for actually closed systems; it does not, on it's own, seem to imply

(Noether's corollary) The universe's mass/energy is conserved.

KevinScharp wrote:

No, they're not second order properties, they're mathematical equations together with some ways of interpreting them. It's about the total amount of mass/energy in the universe (and certain subsystems thereof).

 If this is simply a set of mathematical equation for aesthetic purposes then it seems neither you nor I should be bothered with whatever problems are caused by it. They are mathematical equations about something that exists. The moment you've do that you've stepped beyond the shackles of science and started doing a serious ontology, btw, I'm glad you're doing the ontology. Just not happy with the fact that you don't wish to see it as such and bring scientific theories up again, which then makes me ask you the same thing I did before.

Either they are of nothing, or of something, if something, then you're talking about metaphysical existents. And then they aren't just mathematical equations without their ontological baggage. And, if its an ontological baggage that the theory seems to ignore (either for methodological purposes or something else) then my definition of empirical science kicks in and it hasn't explained all that there is to explain.

KevinScharp wrote:

What is your position on God's creative causality? What are your reasons for it?

John West wrote:

Here's a quick omnipotence argument. God can do everything logically possible and not against his nature. It's not logically impossible for the distribution of mass/energy to be what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. (It may be nomically or physically impossible, but it doesn't seem to be logically impossible unless we assume an energy transfer theory of causation.)  It's also not against God's nature for him to make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if he resurrects Jesus. Hence, God can make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. Hence, it's not necessarily true that if God raised Jesus from the dead, conservation of mass/energy's prediction is false.

If the world depends on God for its existence, everything in it, every entity, is dependent on him. His creative causality can be established by independent arguments that lead to his existence, the cosmological argument and the teleological argument in specific.

Jason wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

iwpoe wrote:

Technically Jesus' body rose into the sky until it was no longer visible. We don't know what was done with its mass/energy:

Acts 1:9:

And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

[καὶ ταῦτα εἰπὼν βλεπόντων αὐτῶν ἐπήρθη καὶ νεφέλη ὑπέλαβεν αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αὐτῶν.]

It could have been converted to energy, stored somewhere, chopped to bits, who knows? It's not even clear that after the resurrection itself the body is material in the way we normally understand material any longer. I don't know how God reconciles his actions with his general laws. Jesus claims to no be a spirit/ghost after his ressurection, but other than that, it's not clear.

So he has a material body -- and it ended up in heaven, which I'm assuming is not a location in spacetime. So some mass/energy disappeared.
 

All we can do here is speculate but the whole point of the Resurrection and Ascension is not to see "how" it happened but "why" it happened. It does not matter that God used so and so principle or so and so law or stopped certain principles / law or override it etc that is at the end of the day just process, the real question is God's purpose and reason behind it.

Actually, I don't think you have a good explanation for either. God doesn't explain anything for us unless we can appeal to God's psychology. And we can't.