God in an Open Universe

Science, Metaphysics, and Open Theism

William Hasker, Thomas Jay Oord, Dean Zimmerman, Hasker, Oord

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608997435
  9781498257510
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877835
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Since its inception, the discussion surrounding Open Theism has been dominated by polemics. On crucial philosophical issues, Openness proponents have largely been devoted to explicating the underlying framework and logical arguments supporting their perspective against competing theological and philosophical perspectives. As a result, very little constructive work has been done on the interconnections between Open Theism and the natural sciences. Given the central place of sciences in today's world, any perspective that hopes to have a broad impact must necessarily address such disciplines in a sustained and constructive manner. To date such engagements from the Openness perspective have been rare. God in an Open Universe addresses this deficiency. This book demonstrates that Open Theism makes a distinctive and highly fruitful contribution to the conversation and constructive work occurring between philosophy, theology, and the sciences. The various essays explore subjects ranging from physics to prayer, from special relativity to divine providence, from metaphysics to evolution, and from space-time to God. All who work at the intersection of theology and the sciences will benefit greatly from these essays that break new ground in this important conversation.

part one

Open Theism and the Greatness of God

1

The Need for a Bigger God

William Hasker

In 1953, J. B. Phillips, Anglican pastor and translator of the New Testament, published a little book entitled Your God Is Too Small.1 In it Phillips set out and criticized a number of “too small” ideas of God held by some of his contemporaries, as a prelude to introducing the reader to a more adequate conception of God. Some of the divine caricatures criticized by Phillips are the “resident policeman,” a god identified with one’s conscience, the “parental hangover,” modeled on a domineering or otherwise unsatisfactory father, the “god of one hundred percent” who demands an instant perfection that is impossible for growing human beings, and the “managing director,” who is too involved in the overall management of the universe to take any interest in individual human lives.

A half century later, I believe we also are in need of a “bigger God.” Whether or not we are in thrall of the various “small gods” identified by Phillips (and some of them are still very much alive), we have a need to reflect on the greatness, the bigness, of the God we worship. It is my hope, furthermore, that thinking about this may provide us with a clue to the best way of thinking about several key questions that confront contemporary Christian philosophy and theology.

To begin with, and at the risk of tautology, we need to recognize that God is very, very big. In fact, God is enormous. More than that, God is really tremendous. In traditional theology, one of the attributes of God was said to be immensity, and that is just right: God is truly immense.2

True enough, you may respond, but why bother saying it? Does anyone actually deny what is being said here? Perhaps not—at least, no thoughtful Christian would deny it—but it is still important to say it, because in our imagination (and imagination is religiously powerful) we are very likely to be entertaining a picture of God that is “too small” to meet our needs. According to theologian John Haught, “The universe has outgrown the anthropomorphic one-planet deity.”3 To be sure, those attributes and activities of God that directly concern us are limited to those that have an impact on this one planet of ours. (Only a very few of us have ventured even as far as the planet’s satellite.) But a trap awaits us if we permit our religious thought and imagination to be locked in on a “one-planet deity.” For contemporary science has begun to tell us of a universe that is unimaginably vast. This our earth, enormous from the perspective of any human being, is itself tiny in comparison with the sun and the larger planets in our own system. The sun, in turn, is a minor star located on one of the spiral arms of a galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of such stars. The galaxy itself is only one in a universe that contains many billions of other galaxies. The distances also are unimaginably great. The passage of light is in effect instantaneous from the standpoint of all ordinary human activities, yet the size of the known universe is measured by the distance traveled by light over billions of years! Our powers of imagination and visualization are completely defeated by such magnitudes; we can conceive of them at all only abstractly, by the device of taking known measures and adding to them large numbers of zeroes.

And now comes the trap. “Isn’t it absurd,” we will be asked, “to suppose that your little god—a god first worshiped by a bunch of wandering sheep-herders in the ancient Middle East—has any relation to all this vastness? Isn’t it time to grow up, and admit that the real mysteries of the universe are the scientific mysteries of physics and cosmology, and not the parochial mystifications indulged in by theologians? And on the other hand, even if it should happen that there is some Cause, or Force, or perhaps Mind that is somehow the source of the entire universe, it is surely nonsensical to suppose that it would have any particular concern for such a minuscule, thoroughly insignificant part of the whole as the human race.”

To this we must answer, No it is not absurd or nonsensical, except perhaps in the sense that it is “God’s foolishness” that is “wiser than human wisdom” (1 Cor 1:25). We really do believe that the One who creates, and sustains, and energizes the entirety of this impossibly huge universe has chosen—amazingly—to take an interest in us, to care for us, to redeem us from our sins and make us his own children. That is not to say that God’s interests in the universe are limited to us! It is said of him that no sparrow falls to the ground apart from his will (Matt 10:31); the same will be true of the sparrows, or sparrow-analogues (if such there be), on a billion other planets in our own and other galaxies. We are right to be astonished at all this, but the invitation to disbelieve on that account should be firmly rejected. In order to see things in this light, however, we need to keep very much in mind, not only in our formal affirmations but also in our emotions and our imagination, that our God is a very big God.4

Divine immensity is only a first step on the way towards a “big enough” God, one who is adequate for our needs in the present moment. I propose that we should proceed by thinking of “bigness” in personal terms—that we should ask ourselves what we have in mind when we speak of a “big” human being. Here of course bigness is not primarily a matter of physical size—Shaquille O’Neal does not image the divine more adequately than the rest of us!—but rather of personal qualities, the qualities that lead us to say of someone that she or he is a “big person,” or a “great human being.” But aren’t we in danger of anthropomorphism here? Perhaps there is a danger, but the doctrine that human beings are created in the “image of God” leads Christian thinkers precisely in this direction. It is anthropomorphic to deny the differences between God and human beings, but it is also possible to exaggerate those differences in such a way that God becomes too abstract and impersonal to be the Christian God. In any case, the risk must be run; if we can’t think of God in terms derived from the best and most admirable human beings we know we shall have very little to say about God that is religiously relevant.5

So what are some of the qualities that make for a “big person”? No doubt different people will have somewhat different lists, but there are certain attributes that should appear on nearly everybody’s list. Such a person will be strong, wise, capable, reliable, and understanding, with wide sympathies, and generous with his or her efforts and resources. Further qualities come to mind when we think of such a person as the leader of a group or organization. (In Scripture, God is compared to a king, to a father, to the owner of an estate or a vineyard, and so on and on.) A leader who is a “big person” will establish and maintain the goals and the overall structure of the group or organization, and will inspire and motivate others to contribute to those goals to the maximum extent possible for them. A really great leader, we think, does not micro-manage her subordinates in such a way as to remove their own scope for initiative and creativity; rather, she develops these qualities in them and seeks to harness them for the greater good of the whole. At times a real leader may entrust resources and responsibilities to others even though she realizes that there is a danger of misuse and subsequent harm. (The father in the parable accedes to his younger son’s request for his share of the inheritance, with full awareness that the wealth may be misspent and squandered.)

If we agree that these are indeed the qualities of a big person and a great leader, and that our understanding of the character of God should be modeled on them, then I submit that there is one particular way of conceiving of God that best fills the bill. This is the view that has recently come to be known as “open theism.”6 According to open theism, God has deliberately chosen to people his world with individuals possessing a real, though limited, independence. Rather than micro-managing their lives by determining everything for them in advance, he allows them genuine scope for making their own decisions, for good or for ill. In doing this God takes important risks. Not the risk that the overall order of his world will collapse; he is wise, powerful, and well able to prevent that. But he risks that persons will rebel against his good purposes for them, with tragic results for themselves and for others. Indeed, both Scripture and everyday life are full of examples of persons who have so rebelled; some of them, by God’s grace, come to repent and to return to his fold and family, while others apparently persist in their disobedience. All this does not imply that God has a “hands-off,” laissez-faire policy in relation to his creatures, though it does imply that his interaction with them is in part conditioned by their willingness to accept his gracious and restorative intervention. (The father of the prodigal does nothing so long as the son insists on remaining in the far country, but as soon as the son evinces a desire to return the father takes forceful initiatives in order to restore him to the bosom of the family.)

This of course is a mere sketch of the core ideas of open theism; a fuller elaboration would require more space than is available here. Still more space would be required if we were to compare open theism with each of the main rival views of God, in order to show why open theism best fulfills our idea of God as a “big person.” It may be helpful nevertheless to set open theism alongside the view that most strikingly contrasts with it, as a way of bringing out open theism’s distinctive merits. The view I have in mind here is the theological determinism espoused by Augustine, probably by Thomas Aquinas, and certainly by Calvin, Luther, Jonathan Edwards, and a host of more recent Calvinist and Thomist theologians. The deterministic God, unlike the God of open theism, insists on retaining for himself the sole prerogative of deciding everything that takes place in the world, including what goes on in the minds and hearts of his rational creatures. All the decisions they make are merely their enactment of the decisions God has eternally decided that they should make; they have no decisional independence whatsoever. And since this is so, God takes absolutely no risk in creating the world as he has; he has complete assurance that everything will take place exactly as he has intended, and in the way that is most pleasing to him. To be sure, there is much in the way the world progresses that does not at all seem to us as though it is the way things would have been decided by an all-determining God who is also perfectly good and loving. But the fact that things seem this way to us does not mean that this is really the case; in fact, everything is exactly as God wants it to be, and our inclination to think otherwise simply reveals the limitations of our merely human perspective. (For this r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: Open Theism and the Greatness of God
• Chapter 1: The Need for a Bigger God
• Part Two: Science and Open Theism
• Chapter 2: Metatheoretic Shaping Principles
• Chapter 3: Religious Belief Formation
• Part Three: Open Theism, Time, and Relativity
• Chapter 4: The Fivefold Openness of the Future
• Chapter 5: Presentism and the Problem of Special Relativity
• Chapter 6: Open Theism and the Metaphysics of the Space-Time Manifold
• Part Four: Open Theism and Religious Life
• Chapter 7: Prayer and Open Theism