In Search of the Scientific Accounting of Spirit and God’s Spirit: Recent Critiques and New Inspirations

Response to Dumsday's “Palamism and Dispositionalism”

“…The defeat of evil, then, is the restructuring of dynamical emergent systems in nature such that its newly rebalanced bundles of energies manifest fidelity to Christ, who is the paradigmatic revelation of the image of God. My exploration into the neurotheological perspective of Christus Victor atonement theory (Raslau 2021) and the scientific understanding of spirits including demonic powers (Raslau 2021, 2022b) may be seen as natural outgrowths of applied PPT.…”

“…If the identity thesis holds, then wouldn't God's energies share in the blame for the evil perpetrated by nature's powers? I have raised this concern myself (Raslau 2022b, 17) and suggested two possible paths forward: (1) affirm that at least some of nature's powers are not God's energies (identical to Dumsday's Option 4); (2) substantiate a sufficiently robust defense of free will. As mentioned earlier, the first lacks parsimony.…”

“…Option 4 is an intriguing one whose merits I too have weighed (Raslau 2022b, 17). While nature's powers are God's energies, it may be that some of nature's powers are not God's energies.…”

“…22For a discussion of Deacon's causal role of absence, see Deacon (2012), Deacon and Cashman (2016), and Raslau (2022a, 2022b). …”

“…55There is potential here for a new formulation of divine conceptualism, wherein unmanifested powers serve as the actualities underlying what often goes by “God's thoughts.” Divine thoughts cannot be taken literally for reasons expressed in Raslau (2022b), but God's creative activity of “thinking” the world into being can serve as an effective metaphor for divine energies coming into manifestation.…”