Superglue – 1: God’s Eternal Decree

When objects need to be held together tightly, you need something that helps keep them together firmly. That something could be superglue: a tiny drop can hold an elephant.

Human thought also needs something to hold things together: meaning. You might like to refer to this holding substance as superglue; in this case intellectual superglue that gives meaning to the facts of the universe.

There are two choices when it comes to facts: either they are what God declares them to be, or they are what man declares them to be. It may be possible to postulate that things are what they declare themselves to be. But one of the reasons this idea does not go far is because facts are never brute facts: they are interpreted facts. A brute fact is a fact that has no relation to any other fact. It is completely isolated, and therefore a random fact. Interpreted facts, on the other hand, are facts that have some relationship which helps give them meaning. Thus, the fact itself can be “interpreted.”

Interpreted by whom? They could be interpreted by God as the ultimate interpreter, or they could be interpreted by man as the ultimate interpreter. At this point another question follows logically: is man capable of being the ultimate interpreter of facts to provide meaning to them?

To be the ultimate interpreter man would have to possess the attributes of God. In all ways man would need to “be like God”, resplendent with omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence — and, of course, infallibility.

Can the meaning of life come from the created order? Not without representing faithfully the Creator’s ideas of what determines meaning. Meaning is ultimately tied up in the act of creation itself. Just as the parts of a clock obtain their meaning from the clock designer and creator, so too the parts of the universe derive their meaning from the Creator.

This is the idea behind the Psalmist’s declaration “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (19:1), or St. Paul’s assertion, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). Just as a Rolex watch tells you things about its creator, so too does God’s creation speak of its Creator. And what it “speaks” provides meaning to itself.

Not so, says the “natural” man. The created universe tells me no such thing. Rather, it speaks of an impersonal evolutionary process that with time and chance has produced everything that you see. Meaning is not obtained from a Creator, but from the things themselves — brute facts.

Having said that, however, the “natural” man now has the task of tying everything together to create meaning. He is going to do this from the finite portion of reality, because he has denied the infinite portion of reality. To put this another way, he has made a metaphysical assumption about reality: that all is one.

The distinguishing mark of Bible-based religion is the assertion of Gen. 1:1. “In the beginning, God created. . .” There was, in other words, a beginning. This denies the idea of “always existing” that is often tied up in people’s notion of eternity. But eternity, from man’s perspective, is a time-bound concept of infinite regress. No matter how much you might think in creature-bound created concepts, the idea of forever-time does not move you from created to uncreated reality. While you may know that an uncreated reality that is beyond time “exists”, your notions of existence do not even come close to approximating the reality of it. To do so would require you to be uncreated being — like God. And while “made in his image” gives you a created understanding of God, it does not bring you to his reality.

Creation, then is the key to knowledge and to the determination of meaning. Meaning can only come from the uncreated Creator who made all things. And the passages of Scripture above deny the idea of brute factuality. They deny that meaning is derived “from below” rather than “from above.”

In this context, the meaning of “facts” rather than found in “brute” factuality is found in the mind of God. The created order is bound together by the purposes and act of God’s creation. The so-called “laws” of nature are only possible on the notion that there is a regularity in the created order. That regularity cannot be explained by “brute” or “random” factuality. In fact, there are no “laws” in a random universe; there is only randomness. There is no “glue” that sticks brute facts together in a random world.

To argue that God has created a world then left it to run by itself — the clockmaker analogy of deism — is only to return to the created order the necessity of finding and determining meaning. But finitude does not provide a rational basis for determining meaning. All you get from the finite, created order is confusion — when that created order sees itself as the ultimate determiner rather than the derivative determiner of meaning.

And herein lies the debate of the centuries over Christian theology: is the meaning of “facts”, of “things” or of “events” to be determined from the uncreated or the created order? While many people do not have a problem with the uncreated order determining meaning in a broader context and are quite happy to apply this to the idea of trees and stars and skies, they baulk at the notion of applying this idea to people and their actions.

The “superglue” that ties everything together is creation but not just creation as a stand-alone activity, as deism implies. Bible-based belief, in contrast, emphasizes God’s continuing involvement in his creation: not as the reactor to a world of brute factuality determined by the created order, but as the proactive creator who created His world — including all the actions that take place in the world — to conform to the purposes behind its creation.

All the facts of this world — the fact that you’re reading this discussion, or the choice you make about its content — are either brute facts with no meaning, or they are explained by the uncreated God who created all things certainly and surely to be what it was created to be and to do what it was created to do.

This is the thought behind Proverbs 16:4: “ADONAI made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of disaster.”

In Part 2, a continuing discussion on the “logic” of God’s eternal decree.