> I might look at a fine painting and greatly admire its workmanship, but if I also personally knew the painter, there would be an even greater fulfillment for me, as I looked at the painting and thought about how it reflected the character of my friend the artist.
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> Like you, I'm generally overwhelmed, awestruck and pleased at the complexity of the world, rather than dismayed at it. But my enjoyment isn't just an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty in the cosmos; it's also--perhaps mostly--the pleasure of thinking about the *kind* of God who designed the world in this way. I smile when I think about what kind of person God is: active, involved with and interested in his own creation.
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> Science may not be opposed to spirituality per se, but it is opposed to beliefs which are contrary to the weight of evidence. Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which science could produce substantial evidence that God is not *specially* active in the world today. Certainly that wouldn't prevent anyone from ascribing to God the authorship of the magnificence we find in the natural world; God could still receive our awe for his design work. But I, personally, would feel that I did not know the artist so well after all, and my enjoyment of the complex universe would be considerably diminished, or killed outright.
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> I'm not much interested in a laissez-faire God whose mind and purpose are foreign to me. Take away God's act of expressing his character as he works in his created world, and to me at least, you have taken away all that is worth believing in. Not just "God", but *this* God, the one who makes himself known to us, provides for us, actively governs the world he made. That's what makes the beauty of the natural world truly beautiful for me.
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> Iss "/act Brunnen_G deemed to be ruling" achar

Sorry, gotta butt in once more. :)

Issachar, I think I understand a part of how you feel. If I may rephrase what you said, I think you seem to be saying that you appreciate God much more because, as a thinking being who has received God's miraculously inspired Word, you have a deeper understanding of God than you could have from simply observing creation on its own, that, in the end, once God's special revelation is available to us and we experience it, the general revelation of creation is never really sufficient again. In that, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'll even go so far as to say that without special revelation of the Bible, it's impossible to really have a full understanding of creation, just as, in disagreement with the Postmodernists, I believe you can't really understand everything about a book until you know something about its author. You can understand a great deal without knowing diddly-squat about the author, but you'll never understand all. That's why the Bible is so crucial to our lives as Christians, and why evangelism, bringing God's word to others, is so important to our duties as Christians.

However, the only thing I take issue with (well, I don't actually take issue, I'm just a tad confused; if I've misinterpreted you, I apologize) is your saying God this way is "active" and God another way is "inactive". The way I see God, God can never be "inactive". The way I see it, even without the Bible, one can never say that one knows nothing about God, that God is foreign to one, that God hasn't done anything in one's life. Why?

Because one of the ways I define God (certainly not the only way, but one of the most important ones) is the, well, the Reason For Everything. God is why force equals mass times acceleration, why energy equals mass times c squared, why c is so many Planck lengths per Planck time, why pi to the power of e times i equals negative one, and why Arthur is sitting here typing this post instead of, say, having been eaten by a barracuda several years ago. Things happen because God wants them to; not only miraculous things, but all things.

If God ever ceased to actively put "effort" (a rather messy, misguided way to put it, but the only way I can think of) into "maintaining the world's existence" (something which I think is fundamentally against God's nature as a Creator and a God of love, but which would be possible for him to do), the world would cease to exist. If God ever STOPPED "maintaining" gravity, bang, the laws of physics are gone; if God ever stopped maintaining the physical workings of my body, bang, I'm dead, like that. God chooses not to screw around like this because it is in God's nature to be orderly, to be a lawful God, to do things in a logical way, I think; in fact, the absence of a preponderance of miracles coming out the wazoo is one way of God telling us his nature, telling us that at the root of things is a God of cosmos, not chaos.

Why do I make the distinction between God "letting it happen" and God "making it happen"? Well, because I think the idea of God "winding up the world and letting it spin" is rather silly, really; it presupposes a God limited by time, existing only at the "beginning point" of time, who then must spend the rest of eternity folding his hands and goofing around, because he is bound by a world of time. I think that's a very misguided concept, because, to me, time is a subsidiary function of creation that God is NOT limited by; God exists outside of time, God created time, and time operates to God's purpose. God is more like the author of a book than a computer programmer; there's no "hardware" separate from God that the world "runs on", so there's no way God can just make the world and then "let it go". God writes the whole of creation, and he isn't limited by the timeline of creation.

Even human authors, who are limited by their own timelines, aren't limited by the timelines of their stories; true, one might say most stories are written from beginning to end, but there's nothing stopping an author starting with the ending of a story and working backwards, or inserting something new into the middle of a story after he's written the whole thing, etc., and afterwards the story will still be a complete story that makes sense within its own timeline. It's meaningless to say a writer is only present at the "beginning" of a story and the rest runs on its own; true, the structure of a story may dictate that certain events follow others within the story, but the whole story is nonetheless the creation of an author who had to write the WHOLE story, not just the beginning, and if there were some part he neglected to write, that part wouldn't exist.

If I were to watch a "reality" movie, similar to the Blair Witch Project (only hopefully better quality with less jerky camera effects), one that purported to be actual videotape of actual events, I might read through the whole thing and not suspect the events didn't come from actual events, that what seemed like a logical chain of events happening one after the other was actually the product of a human being's imagination, that some scene the camera happened to capture was actually carefully planned and staged. I would think the plot of the movie was a "real" thing, something self-existent, not dependent on any person.

Similarly, it is possible for a person who chooses not to believe in a First Cause to look at the world and believe it is logically self-existent, that it requires no sentient Creator to exist. On the other hand, if the movie was written even better than that, if the cinematography, for all the realism, was just "too good to be true", the events happening too conveniently caught on camera, the actors too glib, the events too well-scripted, I would begin to suspect that something like that couldn't be "real" or self-existent, that someone had to come up with it. If something happened in the movie that was actually impossible or at least wildly improbable in real life, then I would be convinced someone created it. For the movie, that could be good or bad, depending on what effect the creators actually wanted. I think God wants us to be sure of his existence and purpose for the world, so he gives us miracles and the Bible, which in a sense are like "author's notes", little bits dropped in once in a while that disrupt what seems to be the logical "flow" of events based on the laws of nature, to follow a higher principle, our faith in God. (Just like an author will break the "logical flow of events" in a story to make something unusual happen, for the higher purpose of advancing the plot, for the higher purpose of expressing the story's theme.)

However, even if there were no miracles and there was no Bible (as was the case for many people who did not receive the Word and did not receive direct signs from God), I think a clear, honest look at creation, not trying to prove anything logically (which will lead you around in circles once you get down to a principle as basic as this) but simply seeing what feels most right, what intuition says is most true, will show that this creation had to have a Creator, and, more than that, show much of the nature of this Creator. (Hence Paul's admonition in Romans that Gentiles were equally accountable for sin as Jews, despite the fact that they received no Law or Prophets or miracles, because the evidence of the world and their own hearts convicted them.) Just as, in a way, once you've read a book someone's written, you know that person, not nearly as well as if you'd met her, but you do know her in a way, so by looking at creation we do get to know God in many ways. Science, being the study of creation, is far from being opposed to spirituality, in my view; it's one major door TO spirituality. (True science is, anyway, by which I mean true interest in the Universe for its own sake and an honest desire to advance knowledge. Technology, the use of this knowledge for ulterior ends, is a different matter entirely.) If I were in love with an artist, one of the things I'd do would be to look at her work; that wouldn't be the only thing I'd do or the most important, not at all, but if I really wanted to get to know her in every way, I'd have to take an interest in her creations. Same thing with God; to get close to him and love him, we have to at least care about the beauty he has created. Yes, it can't compare to the revelation of the Bible, just as reading some of your girlfriend's poetry can't compare with reading her love letters to you, and it certainly can't compare with direct communion with God, just as looking at someone's paintings can't compare with seeing her face, but it is still important. And yes, just as I can extrapolate some of Robert A. Heinlein's political affiliations from his novels or get an idea Vincent Van Gogh's emotional state by looking at his paintings, I can find out a lot about God from creation; I find that he is a God of order, a God of balance, a God of beauty, and, yes, a God of love. The way I find this may be different from the way others do, but nonetheless the impression the world gives me of its Creator is very strong.

However, I think you and I still basically agree, in that, yes, hypothetically speaking if someone could really, truly, prove to me beyond doubt that the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical event, my faith would be severely shaken, perhaps even disappear. (I can't say for sure what would happen, since I don't seriously believe that will happen, but speaking honestly, that's what I think would happen.) If someone could give me special, specific evidence that my idea of God is not true, then the beauty I get from creation would be shattered (kind of like if someone told me the Lord of the Rings was originally written as an advertisement). If someone could really, truly prove to me that God was not as I thought he was, then the evidence of creation would have no meaning for me. Why? Because general evidence that I get from an impression of creation is nothing compared to my specific knowledge I have from special revelation from the Scriptures.

On the other hand, I think I disagree with you when you seem to be saying that if I could EXPLAIN a miracle, not disprove it, well, then, the Scriptures are meaningless. I disagree very much. I don't think it's impossible or wrong for God to violate the laws of physics, but I don't think it's necessary that he do so, either; it may be proper in one place for an author to interrupt his story to give us info through an author's note, or it may be more proper for him to present everything within the events of the story. It's up to him, based on what the situation demands. Would it be any less miraculous if the Star of Bethlehem were a supernova in the right place at the right time? It may not be an impossible event, but it's still a darn sight improbable and hard to explain without God, right? And it actually increases my awe of God, in that the well-oiled machine he made of the Universe works so well, that his omniscience and insight is so great, that he could cause an astronomical event light-years from Earth to happen in just the right way to accomplish his purpose on Earth; such an accomplishment is nothing less than a work of art, like a pool player making a trick shot. Sure, he could pick up the balls and drop them in the pockets by hand, but what would be the point? The art is in the process of it happening. That's the reason I still read books and not Book-a-Minutes, because the beauty is in the process.

Anyway, thanks once again for having the patience to sit through yet another one of my opinions. I really appreciate your insight into the question of the "God of the closing gaps", something that's plagued me, too, though to me, the real gap, the Great Gap, will never be closed, and that is the simple question: Why? Why anything? Why existence? Why sentience? Why me? Why you? Why not nothing? God is the only answer to that question that satisfies me, and I do not believe anyone could give me a better one. (The only two other real answers that I see are: Nothing (nihilism), and Me (solipsism), neither of which I think are meaningful or satisfying. Of course, we could agree on God but not what he is like; I believe I have very good reason for believing in the God I believe in, but that's a different story.) Hope to discuss this further! Bye! :)