A providential rainstorm is attrubuted to God as seemingly coming out of nowhere, but later meterologists discover the storm was due to a rare polar vortex coming down unusually early and unusually far.
A miraculous rainstorm is attributed to God by a prophet, - - and yet afterward no trace of it can be found of it existing on local TV radars, airport radars, nor military radars, nor any air or barometric readings that could even make a storm possible.
John, got it now?
NOTE
200 YEARS AGO: Science would have been inadequate to distinguish the two.
By definition, “Theistic Evolution” is not a scientific term; it is theological discussion of some metaphysical and natural events combined:
A] God, before there was even a Universe, designed His goals, and how much precision (or lack of precision) He would use to achieve His ends.
B] Consistent with [A] God “front-loads” His designs into the starting moment of the Universe, allowing for any super-natural events He has planned to interrupt any natural causal chains He planned for (plus or minus any optional super-natural adjustments for degrees of freedom He may have included per some denominational biases), and also allowing for any optional adjustments for freewill events interrupting other natural causal chains), as well as God’s plans to interrupt events by answering prayers in real time, or by His changing how He responds to prayers, based on human variability in Freewill.
C] Consistent with [A] and [B], God spends most of His time in human-measure letting natural cause-and-effect build and evolve the structures of the Universe and the living things in them. Until humans arise, to God time does not matter; creation by evolution, or special creation, takes but a moment in God’s time.
Once humans have been evolved, God uses “special” creation, or super-natural/miraculous creation to compress the sequence of events in terms of human-measured time, or to accomplish things that natural causation cannit do (e.g., create a soul to go with the natural body).
“The question of God’s relation to time has generated a great amount of theological and philosophical reflection. The traditional view has been that God is timeless in the sense of being outside time altogether; that is, he exists but does not exist at any point in time and he does not experience temporal succession.”
Believe it or don’t, I genuinely know of no way to conceive of there both being a time and also there not being time. To me, time has existed for as long as time has existed, and something extending temporally beyond time makes no sense whatsoever. When someone speaks of of anything happening “before there was a universe”, I have genuinely no clue how I could possibly begin to understand them. The “how” in my question is a question about how one can conceive of there being time before the existence of time. How is this even remotely coherent, is what I am wondering. If that upsets you, that#s too bad. If it makes you question my motives, that, too, I can live with. The question at hand is not a theological one, regardless. What relation, if any God has to time is a different question. Mine remains unaddressed, for now.
You act like it is a peculiar failing of mine, or of this list, or of Christianity that your questian cannot be answered.
But we all know that the answer cannot be provided on this side of the pearly gates.
We might venture the thought that Christians are almost delighted that we dont have an answer - - and that we must look to God at the End of Days (whatever that might mean) for the answer!
I don’t assume that, no. Or at least I have said nothing to indicate such assumption, nor anything that would hinge on it. I also do not assume here that the universe began with the big bang. I made no reference to the big bang at all. But I find the notion of a time that is separate and independent of space rather difficult to reconcile both with natural intuitions about each, and with experimental findings. I do not understand what time is, if it is not one of the dimensions of spacetime. And I do not understand what universe means, if spacetime of one sort or another is not a necessary and sufficient component of it. Absent a universe, I cannot understand what time is supposed to be. It wouldn’t seem to be anything we colloquially mean/understand by time, and concepts like “before”-ness with respect to what ever this alternative-time is would likewise not be anything you or I mean when we say that some event A happened “before” some other event B. At best, I might conjecture that something logically coherent is meant and we are applying a familiar jargon to it, equivocating on something that is fundamentally not the same. I have yet to hear what could possibly be meant, though.
I don’t. I did not say this question could not be answered. I merely posed it: When you say “before there was a universe”, how is it possible for me to understand what you mean? If you say that cannot be answered, fine. I don’t think that is a failing on your part – or Christianity’s, for that matter – but speaking things the coherency of which you cannot communicate is… well, let’s just say it may get in the way of us understanding one another in some respects.