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Preview

 

To understand the book and its overall ideas, however, a preview is useful:

 

My religious aim is to see the God of theism as producing the world by continually generating it. God is not only at a distance and just decides natural laws, but rather the life of God is needed for all spiritual, mental and physical processes. These three, we will see, are the successive stages of operation of the life and power of God, and really do exist. (A big leap for a physicist, but I claim this carefully!)

 

In order to do this, we have first to start thinking clearly about God: the creator and source of everything. We are not going to leave God as clouded in metaphor or in thought only, but use our rationality to think clearly about him and how he creates. This will be the subject next Sunday: a synopsis of the needed ideas is listed on page 3:

 

1.     God is love which is unselfish and cannot love only itself.

2.     God is wisdom as well as love and thereby also power and action.

3.     God is life itself: the source of all dispositions to will, think and act.

4.     Everything in the world is a kind of image of God: minds and also natural objects.

5.     The dispositions of an object are those derivatives of divine power that accord with what is actual about that object.

 

The result might not be exactly science or religion as we perhaps have known them, as they may become slightly different when they are joined.  We should discuss each week the relation between the new ideas and your own existing ideas about science and religion, to see what is good.

 

We will find we can describe, I hope, a God of love who exists and does things. That there are existing spiritual and mental things (despite modern materialism). That all things (God, spiritual, mental and physical) are linked together in networks of causes and effects, but that still we are not Ôall oneÕ and we do not each Ôcreate our own realityÕ. That physics as known today might be approximately the end result of these networks of causes coming from God.
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