definition of

[Jim B.]

I think it's a thing about ultimacy. If you read foresthome's post carefully, you can see how, in those terms, final entropic heat death would tend to infer an "evil God," or at least an insignificantly powerful one & either case could raise questions about whether such a being is worthy of worship and adoration.

This sounds reminiscent of a kind of design argument, i.e. an attempt to draw conclusions about design and ends and about God's powers and nature from the way the physical universe is. It can give hints about God's nature but I don't think it can be exhaustive.

The traditional Christian idea is that the world was created to run and to run down. Bible says there'll be an end of time, a new heaven and new earth. So even within traditional interpretations, heat death makes sense.

Why does something lasting forever indicate greater power or creativity? Or greater value? And the inevitable question is: What if anything will come after? What met's saying seems to assume that the physical universe is all there is and will ever be. A kind of theological physicalism.

"Death is the mother of beauty." Meaning and form require limit and finitude. Endless existence is in tension with form.

[Metacrock]

you make excellent points as usual Jim. The thing about limit and beauty is brilliant. But does that mean God is not beautiful? Balthasar has a thing in asthetic argument for God. I wonder what he would say.

[Jim B.]

you make excellent points as usual Jim. The thing about limit and beauty is brilliant. But does that mean God is not beautiful? Balthasar has a thing in asthetic argument for God. I wonder what he would say.

Good question. Maybe in the aspects of God that people can experience, then God would be beautiful, as well as sublime. But God in totality is beyond anything we can experience or comprehend. In that sense, maybe you could say that God is the beautiful itself, the ground of beauty. And the thing about beauty and limit, which is from Kant, is that it applies to what we humans would call beautiful. Could there be kinds of beauty we can't possibly apprehend?

[foresthome]

Whitehead says somewhere that God remembers or "prehends", or something like that... I've sort of
forgotten my Whitehead -- anyway, let's say God remembers all the creativity and events
of the universe. Then the finiteness is not a problem. Blake says, "eternity is in love with
the productions of time."

Theology aside, we don't need the heat death of the universe to worry about creative
acts disappearing: just think of all the classical literature we know is lost, all the possibly
great books that got lost or never found a publisher, artworks destroyed by war... not
to mention all the billions of creative moments in people's lives that were forgotten
as soon as the people involved died, great parties for example! or the great ideas
we all have from time to time that we can't remember later!

God can exist in the creativity of the moment, and why not?

[Metacrock]

Whitehead says somewhere that God remembers or "prehends", or something like that... I've sort of
forgotten my Whitehead -- anyway, let's say God remembers all the creativity and events
of the universe. Then the finiteness is not a problem. Blake says, "eternity is in love with
the productions of time."

he talks a lot about prehension.

Theology aside, we don't need the heat death of the universe to worry about creative
acts disappearing: just think of all the classical literature we know is lost, all the possibly
great books that got lost or never found a publisher, artworks destroyed by war... not
to mention all the billions of creative moments in people's lives that were forgotten
as soon as the people involved died, great parties for example! or the great ideas
we all have from time to time that we can't remember later!

God can exist in the creativity of the moment, and why not?

the library of Alexandria, if it really burned.

welcome to the boards/ glad to see you8 hyere.

[met]

Whitehead says somewhere that God remembers or "prehends", or something like that... I've sort of
forgotten my Whitehead -- anyway, let's say God remembers all the creativity and events
of the universe. Then the finiteness is not a problem. Blake says, "eternity is in love with
the productions of time."

Nice answer and nice quote! :Perhaps Meta will comment on the young theologian's idea we talked about last summer of Being having depth not necessarily inferring that Being has either scope or breadth. I will see if I can dig up the link to his article again.

But I will also try to respond to you guys rebuttals a bit, too, just for the sake of the argument....

Theology aside, we don't need the heat death of the universe to worry about creative
acts disappearing: just think of all the classical literature we know is lost, all the possibly
great books that got lost or never found a publisher, artworks destroyed by war... not
to mention all the billions of creative moments in people's lives that were forgotten
as soon as the people involved died, great parties for example! or the great ideas
we all have from time to time that we can't remember later!

God can exist in the creativity of the moment, and why not?

But then don't we have a lessor of limited God who cannot keep up the production of beloved temporal forms? Almost like a finite God? Is that God enough? (Makes me think of the title of Arundhathi Roy's one novel: The God of Small Things.

Great, unknown creative acts can still pervade the future in subtler ways, even if their particulars are forgotten. (It seems likely, in fact, that things like "the first poet" and "the first poem" are lost in obscurity - if there was such a thing - but would still have to be considered incredibly influential, no?) But after the heat death of the universe? ... No, not so much. That seems an issue of a different magnitude.

[Jim B.]

Whitehead says somewhere that God remembers or "prehends", or something like that... I've sort of
forgotten my Whitehead -- anyway, let's say God remembers all the creativity and events
of the universe. Then the finiteness is not a problem. Blake says, "eternity is in love with
the productions of time."

Theology aside, we don't need the heat death of the universe to worry about creative
acts disappearing: just think of all the classical literature we know is lost, all the possibly
great books that got lost or never found a publisher, artworks destroyed by war... not
to mention all the billions of creative moments in people's lives that were forgotten
as soon as the people involved died, great parties for example! or the great ideas
we all have from time to time that we can't remember later!

God can exist in the creativity of the moment, and why not?

Exactamundo!

[Superfund]

From David Bentley Harts's "The doors of the sea." A definition of evil

"Evil is born in the will: it consists not in some other seperate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called. This is not to say that evil is somehow illusory; it is only to say that evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease.
Born of nothingness, seated in the rational will that unites material and spiritual creation, it breeds a contagion of nothingness throughout the created order. Death works its ruin in all things, all minds are darkened, all desires are invaded by selfishness, weakness, rapacity, and the libido dominandi-the lust to dominate-and thus tend away from the beauty of God indwelling his creatures and towards the deformity of nonbeing."

[Jim B.]

So can we say that heat death is a kind of natural evil (at worst), so that the question becomes a variation on the problem of evil? If that's so, how do we know that the evil is a real deficiency of God's power or will rather than just an unavoidable consequence of achieving a greater good?

If no single moment has any intrinsic value, then it's hard to see how stringing an infinite number of them together necessarily confers any value. In fact, the argument can be made that endless duration could actually detract from value in most cases.

[Jim B.]

From David Bentley Harts's "The doors of the sea." A definition of evil

"Evil is born in the will: it consists not in some other seperate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called. This is not to say that evil is somehow illusory; it is only to say that evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease.
Born of nothingness, seated in the rational will that unites material and spiritual creation, it breeds a contagion of nothingness throughout the created order. Death works its ruin in all things, all minds are darkened, all desires are invaded by selfishness, weakness, rapacity, and the libido dominandi-the lust to dominate-and thus tend away from the beauty of God indwelling his creatures and towards the deformity of nonbeing."

I can see this applying to moral evil. What does he say about natural evil? Is it a consequence of moral evil?