RE: Care to Seriously Consider the Existance of a Creator (God)?
April 26, 2020 at 5:34 pm
(This post was last modified: April 26, 2020 at 5:35 pm by Belacqua.)
(April 26, 2020 at 4:48 pm)theMadJW Wrote: Then tell us HOW they assembled themselves so very well ...on their own!
I'm curious how the Jehovah Witnesses describe the creator God. Is he like an individual, separate from other individuals? Does he make decisions, pull the levers of power, etc.?
I ask because there seems to be a variety of views among Christians. It may be fair, though, to group these roughly into two general types.
The first type is what I've described -- God is a thinking changing individual, who makes decisions and creates as artisans do. "I think I'll make it so that parallel lines never meet, but I might change that later." This being operates somewhat like Plato's Demiurge, as described in the Timaeus.
The second type is the one that all the major theologians hold to. Any theologian you can name from history, they don't agree with the type described above. For them, God (or the Second Person of the Trinity) is the Logos. This is a Greek word translated as "word" in John 1, but has a much wider meaning. It is used in the same way in Stoic and Neoplatonic, etc., philosophy.
The Logos is all of the principles and regularities of the world. It is the laws of nature and of logic.
When people here object that no God is necessary because nature obeys the laws of nature, they are arguing against the first, Demiurgic type of God. But, again, theologians don't believe in that type. For them, God is the non-physical sustainer of 1) being, and 2) the operations of being. If a self-organizing system can self-organize, it is because 1) the parts of that system are held in being continually by God, and 2) the principles and laws by which it organizes are God -- not decreed by God like tyrranical laws, but an aspect of God himself.
Does any of this sound familiar or right to you?
