God's Relation to the World

According to the first twenty-five verses of the Bible, God spent most of the first six "days" of Creation establishing the heavens and the earth; light; atmosphere; dry land between the great oceans; vegetation; seed plants; fruit-bearing trees; stars in the night sky; sun and moon; all manner of creatures living in the waters and birds to fly in the air; and the cattle, beasts, and "everything that creeps on the ground"; and He decided that what He had done was "good." In the 26th verse of Genesis 1, God determines to create man "in Our image" and proceeded to do so in the next. In imbuing mankind with dominion over all earthly things, God decided that what he had made was "very good."

In the five thousand, seven hundred-or-so years which have followed (reckoned according to the Jewish calendar), segments of mankind (or singular individuals) have made remarkable attempts to reinterpret or completely supplant what most of the Christian church (as well as some in Judaism and Islam) holds doctrinally to be the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of God--as literally revealed in the Bible. Some of these attempts have been labeled and dismissed as heresies, while others have evolved into highly developed systems of philosophy, or philosophies of religion; still others have been branded as "cults" by mainstream Judaism and/or Christianity, and treated as outcasts.

As God created man, He instilled in him a capacity for reason, as well as a capacity to wo

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ication is that divine knowledge is relative in all but one aspect ("God knows all truth, [but] not all truths are necessary" (Divine Relativity, p. 117). Second, the idea that human knowledge is relative "solely because of its inferiority" is essentially a wrong determination. And, third, that the "ideal case" of knowledge--absolute in certainty and sufficiency to the known--must in other ways "be literally and unrestrictedly relative" (Divine Relativity, pp. 8-9). Hartshorne explains that infallible knowledge (point three) is something which, known to itself, provides that all other things can thus be known. In this way, if something known to exist had not, the knowledge that it exists would be missing from the "infallible knowledge," but the knowledge of the alternative state of reality--unknown in fact--would be present. Thus, since God knows there are men, it necessarily follows that there are men. To the second point, Hartshorne maintains that not every alternative in the world requires a corresponding alternative in human understanding. Human beings have the capacity to "believe in what is not there to believe in" just as much as they can "fail to believe in what is there to believe in" (Divine Relativity, p. 10).

Category: Philosophy - G