This is a really helpful series - thanks Richard. So interesting...and I love Sanderson's work too - so this is a good time for me :) As I'm reading along, I'm wondering whether lament, "Lord willing", Job's response etc are all much more likely in an ancient world where belief in God (or gods) was a given assumption. There was no atheism/agnosticism to speak of so when suffering strikes you need either an explanation (punishment, 'hard magic' etc) or you need to appeal to mystery (relationship, soft providence etc)... There was no option of "this doesn't make sense and so therefore God must not be real".... but in the contemporary world when things go badly, we also have atheism/agnosticism on the table as live options. Which means that sometimes our questions lead us not to mystery/relationship/soft providence, but instead to doubt and atheism/agnosticism. Does that make sense?
That does make sense. I wonder if, post-Newton, the modern mind became very mechanistic/causal in how it envisioned the cosmos. And how that mechanical/causal imagination then gets implicitly imported into our theological imaginations causing us to worry over the "mechanics" and "causality" behind petitionary prayer, miracles, providence, etc. (Tomorrow I bring up theodicy, and it's the exact same problem.)
This is a really helpful series - thanks Richard. So interesting...and I love Sanderson's work too - so this is a good time for me :) As I'm reading along, I'm wondering whether lament, "Lord willing", Job's response etc are all much more likely in an ancient world where belief in God (or gods) was a given assumption. There was no atheism/agnosticism to speak of so when suffering strikes you need either an explanation (punishment, 'hard magic' etc) or you need to appeal to mystery (relationship, soft providence etc)... There was no option of "this doesn't make sense and so therefore God must not be real".... but in the contemporary world when things go badly, we also have atheism/agnosticism on the table as live options. Which means that sometimes our questions lead us not to mystery/relationship/soft providence, but instead to doubt and atheism/agnosticism. Does that make sense?
That does make sense. I wonder if, post-Newton, the modern mind became very mechanistic/causal in how it envisioned the cosmos. And how that mechanical/causal imagination then gets implicitly imported into our theological imaginations causing us to worry over the "mechanics" and "causality" behind petitionary prayer, miracles, providence, etc. (Tomorrow I bring up theodicy, and it's the exact same problem.)