Theology Proper (God) – The Back of My Mind

Monotheism and the Trinity

Posted on:

February 26, 2025

Modified on:

February 28, 2025

Biblical references to the Trinity

Common illustration of the Trinity relationship. From stainedglassinc.com

Well… there aren’t any instances in the Bible where the Trinity is named as such, which is why some Christians and pretty much everyone else deny its existence.

The Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit can only be inferred from hints scattered throughout Scripture.

Even the term “Godhead” in the KJV, which at least sounds somewhat Trinitarian, is merely an infrequent translation of the Greek θεότης, (theotes), which actually means something like “the essence of being a deity.” In the ancient world, the term was primarily applied to human leaders who claimed for themselves or were proclaimed by others to be divine. In Colossians, Paul used the term as a polemic against gnostic “elementary principles of the world,” probably referring to principles of Greek philosophical argumentation.

Old Testament references

Yet even attempts to find hints of the Trinity in the Old Testament mostly fail.

Elohim

The Hebrew אלהים, transliterated as elohim, is a masculine plural noun, usually meaning “gods,” “angels,” or sometimes “princes” or “judges,” etc. But sometimes it refers to the name of God, Himself, in which case the English transliteration is capitalized: Elohim.

If we are referring to the singular “One True God,” then why retain the plural ending? There definitely is a singular term corresponding to the plural elohim, and that is eloah. But that would be a reference to one of those generic gods, angels, etc. mentioned in the previous paragraph. Deuteronomy 32:17, for example, speaks of “demons [shedim], who were not [a] god [eloah]“

Could it be, then, that Elohim is a sneaky way of speaking of the Trinity? No, that would be a blatant admission that He is three separate gods, a polytheism.

The solution to this difficulty is that Hebrew plurals aren’t always well-behaved.

For example, while most Hebrew nouns are “regular,” there is a class called, logically, “irregular plural nouns” that don’t follow the usual rules. We have those in English, too: the plural of “goose” is not “gooses,” and the plural of “foot” is not “foots” (as my petulant spell checker is now informing me)!

More to the point, the way I’ve heard it explained by a Jewish Hebrew scholar is that Elohim is part of a small class of objects that are themselves complex and everchanging. For example,

מים – mayim – ‘water’ (exhibiting tides, waves, ripples, surges, currents, solutes, etc.)
שמים – shamayim – ‘sky, Heaven’ (exhibiting clouds, storms, dust, fog, birds, lights, etc.)
פנים – panim – ‘face’ (exhibiting expression, complexion, hair, health, etc.)
חיים – chayyim – ‘life’ (exhibiting birth, growth, health, age, death, blinks, smiles, etc.)

Just like water, the sky, a face, or our life – God [Elohim] is something which cannot be captured strictly in the singular. Like these other concepts, Hebrew conveys to us that God is not stagnant and not stable, but is a fluid, intangible reality.
—Adam Zagoria-Moffet, article on stateofformation.org

To me, the bottom line on the question of whether or not the plural ending on Elohim can be used as an argument for the Trinity is this: English does not have singular and plural forms of verbs, but Hebrew does. Elohim, as a name of God, always appears with singular verbs.

Finally, it must be said that the plural ending on Hebrew names is not uncommon, for example, Efrayim (the son of Joseph), Yerushalayim (the holy city) and, from the genealogy in Genesis 10, Kitim, Dodanim, and Mitzrayim.

“Let us make”

What about the first chapters of Genesis, where Elohim says, “let us make…” or “let there be…”? Is this the Father speaking to the Son and Spirit? Inconceivable! If the “one” part of “three-in-one” is literal, then what one knows and thinks, the others know and think. But more fundamental than that is the definition of omniscience. Surely all three are omniscient, not just The Father. What one knows, all three know, instantaneously. That has surely got to be implicit in the whole concept of “tri-unity.” The only exception to this might be with the “kenosis,” when the Son emptied Himself and became incarnate.

Philippians 2:6 (ESV)
[6] who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, [7] but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Evidently, taking on flesh meant losing or weakening of some of that intimate connection.

I absolutely don’t believe that this is God talking to Himself. To my mind, the most probable alternative is the following:

In Gods and Demons, I reviewed the theology of the late Michael Heiser, who I was undecided about at the time, but have come to like very much. He presented a great deal of both Biblical and extrabiblical evidence to show that the Heavenly Host, collectively called “angels” (aggelos) in the New Testament, were created to perform the same supervisory functions in the non-living cosmos that mankind was later created to perform with respect to all life-forms on earth.

Genesis 1:26–28 (CJB) emphasis mine
[26] Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth.”
[27] So God created humankind in his own image;
in the image of God he created him:
male and female he created them.
[28] God blessed them: God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and every living creature that crawls on the earth.”

In their supervisory role, the angels occupy a heavenly hierarchy, with the highest ranking serving as a council (the “Divine Council”) that serves and reports to Elohim. Heiser makes a very good case that “let us” in the context of creation is the triune God (all three members in accord) speaking to this Divine Council.

Echad

Another claim of linguistic evidence for the Trinity is use of the composite plural verb echad in the Shema, Israel’s most important confession of faith. I view this as more promising, but still not definitive.

Deuteronomy 6:4 (CJB)
[4] “Sh’ma, Yisra’el! ADONAI Eloheinu, ADONAI echad.”
[Hear, Isra’el! ADONAI our God, ADONAI is one]

Or, in our vernacular, “Hey, listen up, people! There is only one God; and He is our God!”

There are basically just two Hebrew words for the number “one”: One of them is yachid, which means just “one.” Only one. One by itself, not part of any composite whole. The other is echad, which means “one, a composite unit, composed of a multiple of something.” One English alphabet composed of 26 letters. One banana bunch composed of a bunch of bananas. One nation composed of 50 states. Or perhaps, one God composed of three Persons.

As important as monotheism came to be, why isn’t the Shema worded as, “Sh’ma, Yisra’el! ADONAI Eloheinu, ADONAI yachid“?

The Shema as written seems to give Trinitarians a bit of breathing room, because instead of clearly saying that there is only one undivided God, it leaves open the door for saying He might be a set of something. A Trinity? To combat that notion, the late head of the worldwide orthodox Lubavitcher movement, himself reputed by some of his followers to be the long-awaited Messiah, had this to say:

G‑d did not have to create a world to be yachid. He was singularly and exclusively one before the world was created, and remains so after the fact. It was to express His echad-ness that He created the world, created man, granted him freedom of choice, and commanded him the Torah. He created existences that, at least in their own perception, are distinct of Him, and gave them the tools to bring their lives into utter harmony with His will. When a diverse and plural world chooses, by its own initiative, to unite with Him, the divine oneness assumes a new, deeper expression: G‑d is echad.”
—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson

It seems to me that the Rebbe’s argument is grasping at straws. Nevertheless, I’m also not convinced that the Shema is sufficient proof of a Trinity on its own. It depends on what a “Trinity” actually is, which I’ll explore below.

Other references in the Tanakh (OT)

Christian scholars also point to a number of Tanakh (Old Testament) references to “a son of God” and “the Holy Spirit”) as proof of the Trinity. In hindsight, we can certainly look back and legitimately say, “Oh, yes…,” but that’s only in light of New Testament revelation. Since the only revelations God chose to give ancient Israel were the Tanach, His visible creation, and an occasional theophany, I think that the above can only be used as evidence, not as stand-alone proof.

New Testament references

The New Testament doesn’t specifically say, “God is 3-in-1” or “God is a Trinity.” Yet, to me, the evidence is compelling. First, if we believe that Jesus is God, as we surely must, then why did He consistently refer to YHWH as His Father, and who did He pray to? Second, why are there so many references to the Holy Spirit as a living entity?

But we can site other Scripture, as well (emphasis mine):

Matthew 3:16–17 (ESV)
[16] And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; [17] and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Matthew 28:19 (ESV)
[19] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

John 1:1–2 (ESV)
[Jn 1:1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [2] He was in the beginning with God.

John 1:14 (ESV)
[14] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Acts 5:3–4 (ESV)
[3] But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit … You have not lied to man but to God.”

Romans 9:5 (ESV)
[5] To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

2 Corinthians 13:14 (ESV)
[14] The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

1 Peter 1:2 (ESV)
[2] according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood:

Characterizing the Trinity

Why is there no specific Biblical mention of the Trinity? Well, perhaps it is because the ancient world had no scientific or linguistic tools sufficient for the task. Explaining the Trinity is beyond the ability of even 21st Century Theologians.

Attempted analogies

The Trinity is usually defined as “one God, three Persons.” Essentially, we’re saying, “one equals three,” which is a paradox, a seemingly unexplainable contradiction. Lacking an explanation for the Trinity, most Christians eventually end up seeking an analogy to at least make the concept more palatable. But philosophically, I think that the only analogy to a paradox would have to be another paradox. In this case, it would have to be something like, “TRUE equals FALSE,” or a Boolean “A equals NOT A.” What have we gained? Nothing but more confusion.

God is like nothing else in the entire universe. There is absolutely nothing else in all of creation that is similar in either form or function. He is unique and incomparable!

There is no possible analog that can help us understand the Trinity. Nevertheless, people continue to try:

Egg

The common egg analogy that we’ve all heard is way, way, off base.

For one thing, an egg doesn’t communicate. An egg yolk doesn’t say to its shell, “Okay, you hold things together, I’ve got a chicken embryo that I’m feeding, and we aren’t ready to hatch yet.”

An egg also doesn’t think, plan, design, perceive, or communicate, and it sure doesn’t create!

Human as image

Another very common analogy that many Christians cherish is that of mankind as a “triune body/soul/spirit.”

This one is convincing to many because they see that arrangement as precisely what constitutes “the image of God.” I disagree for several reasons:

A body/soul/spirit analogy assumes that we are God’s image ontologically. Ontology is the study of the nature and essential properties of something that exists.

But physically, we bear no resemblance to God whatsoever.

Intellectually, it may appear that we are similar (though inferior) to God, but I would argue that God, being unencumbered by a flesh and blood brain or even a computer chip, is intellectually more alien than anything we could possibly imagine. He is intimately connected to every facet of His creation in ways that are completely incomprehensible to us. That we know and understand an infinitesimal portion of what He does is only because He gave us the ability to observe and learn, using our vastly inferior senses.

Personally, I agree with theologians like Michael S. Heiser and John H. Walton, who understand God’s image to be functional rather than ontological. We were created as human beings in order to represent Him on earth, for purposes set out in

Genesis 1:28 (ESV)
[28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Furthermore, the body/soul/spirit analogy breaks down for me because I don’t think there is Scriptural support for this traditional trichotomous view of human ontology.

Yes, trichotomy (“division into three parts”) is suggested by:

1 Thessalonians 5:23 (ESV) emphasis mine
[23] Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I don’t think there are any other passages that clearly list all three of these elements (and no others) in one place. There are many references that, taken alone, would support a dichotomous view (body/spirit), and even one that supports a tetrachotom0us view (heart/soul/mind/strength (where strength = body):

Mark 12:30 (KJV)
[30] And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

In view of modern understanding that thoughts, emotions, behaviors, feelings, memory, and so much more are all housed in the brain, it makes most sense to me to believe that man is a soul, composed of a physical part that is fairly well understood and a spiritual part that is beyond our understanding.

Genesis 2:7 (KJV) additions mine
[7] And the LORD God formed man [the body] of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [spirit]; and man became a living soul.

As an analogy for understanding the Trinity, I don’t think the body/soul/spirit view comes close, because the components that make up a human aren’t in any sense at all separate personalities. The body can of course “tell” the “spirit,” “I’m hungry” by growling its stomach, but where is the exchange of conscious intelligence in that?

Multiprocessor computer

My main home office computer is one machine containing eight separate microprocessor cores. Eight “brains,” so to speak. An “octity”? Frankly this analogy isn’t very exciting. Computers don’t think, they compute, by electronically emulating, not neural activity, but mechanical switches.

Distributed AI

This disturbing analogy anticipates the coming future when the Internet will be an autonomous network of interconnected Artificial Intelligence nodes. But no matter how powerful these nodes become, compared to God they will still be hugely limited both in intelligence and in ability to interface with humanity. They will always be machines, with hardware and software, but never with a spirit component.

Light

Although I don’t believe that any analogy can do justice to the Trinity, I suspect that some philosophical paradox might be at least closer to the truth.

Here is a conundrum that consumed the world of physics for a hundred years: is “light” a particle or a wave? If a particle (a “photon”), then you should be able to bounce two photons off each other. If a wave, then when they collide, they don’t bounce, they “interfere,” meaning that their “amplitudes” combine, either constructively or destructively.

Since the particle and wave theories would appear to be mutually exclusive, which one is true? Both of them! Both theories have been individually proven in many different ways. Perhaps what will tie these contradictory theories together will be Quantum Field Theory, which is way beyond the scope of my blog.

The point of mentioning the particle/wave nature of light is only to stress that it is a relationship that for a long time was disbelieved entirely, then was believed by most, but understood by nobody. A paradox not quite solved to this day. The Trinity is at least that counterintuitive!

The electroweak force

Most of you have probably seen a demonstration in school of a magnetic field. The teacher sets a bar magnet on a sheet of white paper, then sprinkles iron filings over that. The filings quickly align with the invisible lines of force associated with the magnet.

Demonstration of magnetic lines of force around a bar magnet. From etcourse.com

What this demo doesn’t show is that there are also invisible electrical lines of force, oriented orthogonally (at right angles) to the magnetic field lines. Theoretically, the fields generated by any source, in this case a simple bar magnet, extend for an infinite distance, but since their strength attenuates rapidly, it can only be detected for a relatively short distance.

In addition to the combined, two-part “electromagnetic” field, there is a third field connected to the electric field and the magnetic field: this is associated with the so-called “weak force,” which plays a part in nuclear decay.

The three interrelated fields discussed here are collectively called the “electroweak” field. This 3-part unified field might also lend itself to discussions of Trinity analogs, but like all others, it falls short of doing justice to God.

Like other attempted analogies from science, the principal usefulness of this one is to demonstrate, simply, the uselessness of trying to understand one impossible-to-understand phenomenon by comparison with something that is equally impossible to understand.

Strange physics

Physics is full of phenomena that are demonstrable, but definitely “stranger than fiction,” and from which an imaginative Christian physicist might try to come up with a Trinity analog. For example, who would ever have thought that:

The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.
The closer you are to massive objects, the slower you move through time.
Time and space are completely interdependent.
Though we only see three dimensions of space (up/down, right/left, forward/back), there may be many more that we can’t see and that challenge our intuition (see illustration below).
The universe is fully digital! Despite what your math teacher taught you about points on a line, there is a very small but finite distance, called the Planck Length which defines a lower limit to size of or distance between objects. There is also a corresponding Planck Interval of time.
Despite the proven fact that nothing can travel through space at faster than the speed of light, two particles, even quadrillions of miles apart, can be “coupled” such that each of them instantaneously “knows” if the other changes states. Albert Einstein himself, one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics, never fully believed this well-demonstrated quantum mechanical phenomenon, and called it “spooky action at a distance.”

6-dimentional Calabi-Yau manifolds. One of the weird things I’m interested in. The odd structure on the left is one of a great many possible configurations of a mathematical model of what six extra dimensions of space would look like. The grid on the right shows one plane of normal 3-dimensional space, with a Calabi-Yau manifold at each possible location, that is, spaced about 10^(-35) meters, the Planck Distance, apart. This is about one ten-trillionth the diameter of an electron. String Theory, the subject of decades of international research, postulates that, though we can only see three of them, there must be a total of at least nine dimensions of space in our universe. From nieuwsgierigheid

Ontology of the Trinity

As much as most Christians crave an analogy to help explain the Trinity, my contention is that the uniqueness of God and the inexplicability of “spirit” and “spirit beings” makes meaningful analogy fundamentally impossible. Furthermore, because God is complex and analogies are by design simple, any attempted analogy can do nothing, in my view, but trivialize God!

Now, abandoning any further attempt to analogize, I’m going to ponder the “ontology,” or metaphysical essence of the Triune God.

Spirit

It seems to me that the tri-unity of God must be viewed in the context of His existence as a disembodied spirit.

There could be no other lifeform in the universe even remotely like God. Even the terminology of biology is meaningless. God’s substance is “spirit.” That is something beyond the realm of science.

“Spirit” is something that science can’t detect or explain, yet if our faith is founded on reality, it exists, since God, His angelic host, and the immaterial part of a human are all composed of spirit. Conscious spirit, unencumbered by the limitations of physical mass and energy, or any other component of the physical universe, is limited only by the will and power of a superior spirit. Created spirits are limited only by the will of their creator.

Scripture seems to say that God is both immanent (fully in touch with all aspects of His creation) and transcendent (in all ways possible, above and beyond His creation). In Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time, I explain that this duality is what we call “omnipresence.” It means that He is constantly present and aware, at all points in both space and time. This implies that He both permeates and envelops the entire universe. Which further implies that His “omniscience” is not limited to seeing all but extends to personally experiencing all.

I have heard it said, many times, that God needed to experience the same temptations as us in order to empathize with us. In view of the above, I think this is a logical fallacy. The senses and consciousness of all creatures are an open book to Him. The incarnation was not for His education, it was for our faith! So that we can empathize with Him! Seeing Him take on flesh and become like one of us, we see His sacrifice and suffering.

When you really think about it, it seems that life as a bodyless spirit would be impossible. With no body to support, I can see where most biological organs would be unnecessary, e.g., entire systems for digestion, respiration, circulation, skin and skeleton, reproduction, etc.

But intelligence, communication, and empathy, for example require some complex cognitive mechanism beyond a computer core in order to function. Since I don’t question the existence of God, or that He indeed is spirit, the only conclusion I can draw is that there is physics that is still beyond our grasp. Big shock, eh?

Think of some of the “higher-level functions” that only God could perform:

God alone preexisted everything else that exists.
God alone created everything else that exists.
God’s intellect and abilities exceed those of all that He created.
God commands all the forces of creation.

God created the universe and all of its animate and inanimate contents with an ability to function—in my view independently of His constant oversight and control—in accordance with physical laws of His design, but subject, at His sole discretion, to His override, either in whole or in part.

There is another interesting ability held by spirit beings, including individual members of the Trinity, angels, demons and even humans (like the shade of Samuel at En-Dor 1 Samuel 28): They can take on physical substance. With respect to the Trinity:

The Father occasionally manifested Himself at specific locations, e.g., the burning bush, the fire above Mt. Sinai, and the shekinah over the Mercy Seat.
The Spirit manifested as tongues of fire at Pentecost.
Above all, we note the incarnation of the Son.

For more on this subject, see Gods and Demons.

Locality

Three spirits, or three intellects in one spirit?

My concept of an omnipresent Triune God implies that all three members of the Trinity must occupy the same space, simultaneously. Because I don’t know what “spirit” is, I can’t define what that statement actually means. Does it mean like the smoke of three cigarettes commingling in space, or that literally every infinitesimal iota of space and time contains all three. The first implies tritheism, so I lean towards the second, and indeed, the orthodox definition of the Trinity is “one God, three Persons,” or “personalities.”

Orthodox Christianity has defined the Trinity as three complete personalities within a single entity composed entirely of spirit. In a quantum mechanical sense, that maybe starts to make a little sense, but no physicist really understands the quantum universe, and the Creator is certainly more complex and mysterious than His creation.

How important is monotheism?

So, is the orthodox definition true, and does it even make a difference?

Undoubtedly, monotheism is an important subject in modern religion, but it has not always been that way. Today, “monotheism” means belief in one God. In ancient times, even as late as the 1st century, “monotheism” meant worship of one God.

Christianity claims to be monotheistic, but so do its two biggest rivals, Judaism and Islam, and both of them charge Trinitarians with being blatantly tritheistic, worshipping three separate gods. The Qur’an states over and over again, “There is only one God: He is Allah, and he does not have a son!” The Rabbi at an orthodox Lubavitcher-Chabad Jewish synagogue within walking distance of my house says, “We Jews might have accepted Yeshua as our Messiah if he hadn’t claimed to be God.”

Certainly, Biblical Israel, like the rest of the world, believed in multiple Gods. Whether they were right or not depends on how you define the term, “god.” Merriam Webster today defines “god” as

The supreme or ultimate reality: such as the being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped (as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) as creator and ruler of the universe.
…
or less commonly a being or object that is worshipped as having more than natural attributes and powers’

While modern Christians and Jews alike would agree on the first definition, the second was not at all “less common” in Biblical times. If an angel, good or bad, is worshipped, then he meets the second definition. Though they were polemicized by the prophets as “gods made by human hands,” inanimate idols were normally worshipped, not for themselves, but rather for the spirit beings who inhabited them. I have long believed that the pagan gods were real, evil, spirit beings—after all, they were able to duplicate for the Egyptian magicians the first miraculous signs that Moses was told to use as proof that his God was present. Human beings, on their own, don’t have magical powers!

It wasn’t until Jesus claimed to be God that the Jewish sages refined their definition of monotheism, changing it from “belief in” to “worship of.”

Thus, while I don’t personally think the Trinity amounts to polytheism, I do think that the question is historically moot. By the time of the Patristic Church fathers, polytheism of any sort was viscerally unacceptable in the Judeo-Christian world. Though I’m not quite 100% convinced, I’m more than willing to stick with a monotheistic definition because, even though I think there is no unambiguous Scriptural proof one way or another, I am well enough accustomed to the paradoxes of physics that the concept “goes down easy.”

Eternality

No part of the Trinity is created. Does that mean that they have always existed, from eternity past? Neither the Hebrew nor the Greek Scriptures actually make that clear, in that they do not unambiguously explain what the term “in the beginning” is referring to, other than that it is when “the heavens and the earth” were created. What is clear is that all three preexisted everything else that exists.

Most cosmologists and astrophysicists are unwilling to believe in an eternal Creator, so they instead believe in an eternal creation. Either alternative is unfathomable to the human mind, but so is the concept of either God or the universe popping up from nothingness.

Relationships

if Jesus is Yahweh’s son in the same sense that I am Harold’s son, then we’re faced with all sorts of unanswerable questions that make no sense at all in the context of a spirit being with no material substance. I can’t fathom a mother-God or spirit-DNA. Obviously to me, the father/son terminology has to be functional, not biological.

Scriptural context indicates that there is a hierarchy between the three. Jesus clearly stated that He always does the will of the Father, and at the same time He implied that the Holy Spirit does His bidding.

Because God is a spirit, not tied to any physical body; because He claims to be omniscient and omnipresent; and because both time and space are a property of the universe He created, I conclude, as mentioned above, that He must both occupy and extend beyond the bounds of the universe and be free from any dependence on them whatsoever.

Appearance in Heaven

The Bible reports several very explicit prophetic visions of God seated on a throne in heaven: Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1 and 10, Daniel 7, and Revelation 4 being most striking. I don’t think that these visions can be reconciled with God as an omnipresent spirit. Instead, I think that what the prophets are “seeing” are representations of preconceptions popularly held by ancient peoples. Visions, not reality! This is more or less how the pagan deities would have been visualized in contemporary surrounding cultures. If 21st century American Christians can’t visualize the Christian Trinity, how much less would primitive denizens of the Ancient Near East be able to set aside their ingrained preconceptions? And how important could it have been to ask them to do so? In my opinion, not very!

Conclusion

I don’t recommend that anyone try to interpret or understand the visions listed in the previous paragraph. Or, for that matter, other visions described in the Bible, like those interpreted by Joseph or Daniel, or experienced by Peter. Visions spoke truth to those to whom God gave an interpretation. They are not for our interpretation or understanding. Other than as recreational exercises, if that’s what rings your bell.

Similarly, I don’t recommend trying to untangle the ultimate explanation of the Trinity. God has not chosen to clarify it for us yet.

The Ancient of Days

Posted on:

August 18, 2023

Modified on:

February 4, 2025

Between research, and then pushing my aging brain to get things “on paper”, my blog posts generally take a long time to write, and I assume a long time for you to read—sorry. My goal with this one is to just go with what I know (or if you disagree, with what I think I know) and knock out something shorter. With maybe a few slightly off-topic thoughts thrown in. Just my ponderings here…

Mathematical Infinity symbol, Pixabay free image.

Infinity is a concept that most people are familiar with and that I have encountered over and over again during my long life, primarily in three contexts: pure mathematics, physics, and theology. Not so much petroleum engineering, my professional field.

Infinity is a useful concept—essential, in some respects—but it is not a real thing!

Defining the Infinite

Infinity is the concept of the unimaginably and immeasurably

It’s what you get when you disobey your grade school math teacher and divide by zero. It’s so big that when you double it, it’s still infinity. If you double it infinitely many times, it’s still just plain old infinity: ∞

God and Infinity

Theologians like to apply the term infinite to God. All of His attributes are said to be infinite in scope. Well, that may be, but the Bible doesn’t actually make that claim. Infinity was not a known concept in ancient times. If God had claimed it, nobody would have understood it anyway. The most you’re going to read in ancient literature is “a whole big bunch!”

Enormity only gets stated in idiomatic terms. For example, many English translations say that the “army from the east” in Rev. 9:16 will be exactly 200 million strong. The actual Greek says literally “twice ten thousand times ten thousand”, which is way bigger than the record 12 million that the US fielded in 1945, and way, way bigger than the next biggest human army in history. There is no question in my mind that John was speaking merely of a very large army. See also below.

That is not to say that God has no infinite attributes. I’m simply pointing out that, given the Bible’s silence, it’s a philosophical question, not theological.

God’s Size

In Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time, I discussed God’s omnipresence in terms of His spanning, encompassing, infusing, and in fact subsuming all of everything that is—space, the universe, in other words, all matter and energy that exists. The 93 billion lightyears estimate I mentioned for the diameter of the universe is probably a minimum.

Some astronomers still throw around the term infinite for the actual size of the universe. That discussion goes beyond my pay grade. 93 billion lightyears is enough of a living space for me. That’s 550 quadrillion miles, or about 3 million trips to the sun and back. So, God is at least that big! If the universe is infinite, then God is more infinite… Huh?! That doesn’t mean anything quantitative.

God’s Age

In the same previous post, I explained that God’s age, as does His size, spans, encompasses, infuses and subsumes the age of the universe.

Some scientists postulate an infinitely old multiverse; that is, a master universe that grows, “buds off” like a hydra or a nematode, and the “baby universes” each have their own, random sets of physical laws. This theory has very tenuous scientific support and was proposed mainly to explain the mind-boggling (to unbelievers) Anthropic Principle, the unavoidable observation that our universe has a huge set of physical characteristics, many of which are independently necessary to support life in any way that we can envision. The idea is that if the multiverse is infinitely old, then it has spawned an infinite number of buds, and with infinite tries it is statistically likely that at least one of those is anthropically friendly. Hence, they have no need for the God hypothesis.

(Incidentally, they would never admit to this, if they even made the connection, but physicists have a theory that might account for a “god” popping into existence out of nothing. It’s a theoretical consequence of random quantum mechanical fluctuations over an infinite period of time. This is what is called a Boltzmann Brain, and no, I don’t believe that accounts for God! I’m just pointing out that, as much as I love science, it does have its inconsistencies.)

The Spirit Beings I discussed in Gods and Demons are immortal and everlasting, which means that they will survive forever if God lets them, but they have not always existed because God created them to manage the cosmos. Eternality is not the same as everlastingness. Scripture says that God alone is eternal—but what does that mean?

The assumption made by most theologians is that God has existed from the infinite past. There’s that pesky, undefinable infinity again. I don’t deny it, but I can’t comprehend it. There are some respected conservative theologians (don’t ask me who, I think I remember some of them, but I’m taking a vacation from research for this post, and I don’t want to slander anyone if I’m wrong) who acknowledge that God’s existence may define the term, “eternal.” That would be to say that His existence did have a beginning, and that beginning marked the beginning of eternity.

I neither believe nor disbelieve that. Once again, it is philosophy, not theology.

Daniel 7

[9] I beheld till the thrones were cast down [set in place], and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.
[10] A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.

[13] I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of man [Daniel’s conception of the coming Messiah] came with the clouds of heaven and came to [approached] the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.

[22] Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.
—Daniel 7:9–10,13,22 (KJV) the annotations and emphases are mine

Daniel 7 is perhaps the most pivotal chapter in all of prophecy, because it explains so much that we read elsewhere in Scripture.

My emphasis here, though, is on the cast of characters. The stage is a meeting in heaven of God and His Divine Council. Those in attendance are,

The Ancient of Days, also called here the most High. The three instances in Daniel 7 are the only occurrences of the term, “the Ancient of Days”, in the Bible.
The term “son of man” appears many times in Scripture. At a minimum, it simply means a male human being. It is frequently used in the prophetic books to emphasize that the prophet is merely a human, delivering God’s divine words. Here, though, Daniel has added something important (see Son of Man, Son of God):

A human being is ushered into the presence of God in heaven. But the phrase, “with the clouds of heaven” is something that appears frequently in Ugaritic and Babylonian literature to signal the movements of Ba’al. The use of a polemic here is Daniel’s (or rather, the dream’s) way of saying that this particular Son of Man is divine!

Second Temple Era Jewish scholars, the Pharisees and their scribes, were divided on whether Daniel was actually referring to a divine Messiah or something else, but without question, when Jesus quoted this verse in Matthew 26:64 and applied it to Himself, the high priest and Sanhedrin sitting in Judgement of Him took it the only way possible, as an explicit claim not only that He was Messiah, but that He was divine.

[63] Yeshua remained silent. The cohen hagadol [high priest] said to him, “I put you under oath! By the living God, tell us if you are the Mashiach, the Son of God!” [64] Yeshua said to him, “The words are your own. But I tell you that one day you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of HaG’vurah [Lit., ‘the Power’, a euphemism for Yahweh] and coming on the clouds of heaven.” [65] At this, the cohen hagadol tore his robes. “Blasphemy!” he said. “Why do we still need witnesses? You heard him blaspheme! [66] What is your verdict?” “Guilty,” they answered. “He deserves death!”
—Matthew 26:63–66 (CJB) the emphasized text here is the quotation

There were also many, many of the Heavenly Host on stage. The “thousand thousands” in verse 10 are members of the Divine Council, while the “ten thousand times then thousand” are additional “angelic” witnesses. Here are two more examples of the idiomatic expression mentioned above. The Council members are the “they” of verse 13, ushering Jesus to God’s throne.
The term “saints” that occurs twice in verse 22 is קַדִּישׁ (qaddiysh, pronounced “kad-DEESH”). It means “holy”, “holy one”, or “holy ones”, and it applies both to redeemed humans and to loyal angels. That “judgement was given to the saints” can’t mean that they pronounce judgement, because that is Jesus’ job, specifically. Instead, it has to mean that they administer judgement, which is borne out in the statement that they also “possessed the kingdom.”

(Forgive me, but I’m going to throw in another rabbit trail here. My interpretation regarding “judgement” in verse 22 is an illustration of something that really bugs me: traditional, verses thoughtful, exegesis. I’ve personally read a number of commentaries on Daniel 7 over the years, and as far as I can recall, every single one of them has assumed that pronouncing judgement was in view, leading them to further assume that verse 22 is applying the name “Ancient of Days” to Jesus, rather than to Yahweh. Because we all know that it is Jesus who will pronounce judgement in the eschatological future.

Why? In no particular order, it is because (a) too many commentators lean too heavily on earlier works and forget to think for themselves; (b) too many Christian commentators overemphasize Jesus and relegate Yahweh to the “stale writings” of the Old Testament; (c) too few Christian commentators care enough about the ancient Hebrew and Near East cultural background to provide more that standard “Sunday School” answers to harder interpretive questions; and (d) simple careless thinking.

I’m not a theologian. I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer, and skeptical of anything I haven’t personally evaluated.)

Is God Ancient, or Just Old?

So, this brings me, ponderously to be sure, to the crux of my ponderings. Which may seem anticlimactic to most of you.

Is God merely old, or is He ancient?

Those are relative terms, of course. Age is a property of “stuff” and stuff didn’t exist until God created it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, in effect, says that everything ages. But aging, and time itself, are properties of the universe. Isaac Newton notwithstanding, God does not age, because He is not bound by the universe He created.

As most of you know by now, I’m an “Old Earth Creationist.” In my view, God defined the physical laws, and then by His word, He spoke the universe into existence, in all of its building blocks and the forces that drive them. At one point in time and space, about 13.7 billion years ago. He decreed it, and He continues to supervise the orderly processes of birth, growth and maturation. Those processes are ongoing; God does not have to repeat them every week.

I have a different interpretation of the “six days” than those of Young Earth Creationists. To my senses, creation itself tells me that it is way more than 6,000 years old. Given that God doesn’t actually age, I would term Him truly “ancient” based on His resume. In my view, regardless of how long He has existed in currently understood earth-years, His “experience” is some 2.3 million times more impressive than a mere 6,000 years!

Next in series: “Gotcha” Proofs by Young Earth Creationists (The Lincoln Memorial)

Implications of God’s Omnipresence and Eternity in Space-Time

Posted on:

October 20, 2022

Modified on:

May 23, 2025

I have had trouble writing this because God’s Creation is so astoundingly complex that it has taken me over three months to settle on a narrative that avoids rabbit trails that are vitally interesting to me, but probably boringly obtuse to many of my readers.

My intention here is to explore two of God’s divine attributes that I think are very closely related, and to speculate, in the simplest terms I can come up with, how they might have additional implications in the light of modern physics.

“Theology Proper”

Any formal study of God and His creation is going to start with a subject from a textbook categorized as a “systematic theology.” The section of that book concerned with the nature and characteristics of God Himself is called a “theology proper.”

Intelligently discussing God’s Attributes is a tough task, because God Himself told us only what He determined we need to know, and the Bible was written in an age when neither the inspired human writers nor the intended readers could even begin to understand all of what was written, not to mention the vast majority of the topic that remained unwritten. In some cases, it seems to us as if some really important explanation is omitted that we modern humans would very much like to know.

Trinity

For instance, the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit can only be inferred from “hints” scattered throughout Scripture. Even the term “Godhead,” which at least sounds somewhat Trinitarian, is merely an infrequent translation of the Greek qeoteß, (theotes), which actually means simply “deity.” Paul used the term as a polemic against Colossian, gnostic pantheism, not as a theological description of the Trinity.

Attempts to find hints in the Old Testament mostly fail. The Hebrew אלהים, transliterated as elohim, is a masculine plural noun, usually meaning “gods”, “angels”, or sometimes “judges”, etc. But sometimes it refers to the name of God, Himself, in which the transliteration is capitalized: Elohim. Does the plural ending in this case imply multiples of God, e.g., the Trinity? No, because, while most Hebrew nouns are “regular”, there is a class called “irregular plural nouns” that don’t follow the usual rules. We have those in English, too: the plural of “foot” is not “foots”! However, English does not have singular and plural forms of verbs, and Hebrew does. Elohim, the true God, always appears with singular verbs.

What about the first chapters of Genesis, where Elohim says, “let us…”? Is this the Father speaking to the Son and Spirit? Inconceivable! What one knows and thinks, the others know and think. That’s got to be implicit in the whole concept of “tri-unity.” The only exception would be the “kenosis“, when the Son emptied Himself and became incarnate (Philippians 2:6–7).

Use of the composite plural verb echad in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) can’t be supported from the Hebrew grammar, either (see Monotheism and the Trinity, where I hedge a bit on this).

Why is there no specific Biblical mention of the Trinity? Well, perhaps it is because the ancient writers (and to a lesser extent, even today’s highly educated theologians) had no scientific or linguistic tools sufficient for the task. Explaining the Trinity is beyond the ability of even 21st Century Theologians. There is no known analog to make it clear to us.

Spirit

I suppose, personally, that it has something to do with the nature of sentience (consciousness—having senses and perceptions) without physical substance. “Spirit,” in the Biblical sense, is something that our best modern science can’t detect or explain. It isn’t matter. It isn’t energy. It is independent of either and in God’s case, it is superior to both.

Author and educator John C. Lennox suggests that man’s spirit, which is, in life, associated with his body, is what God means by His “image.” Dictionary definitions of “image” include terms like “reproduction”, “imitation”, “likeness”, etc., most of which imply that an image is in some way inferior to the original. God is spirit, whereas man’s spirit is confined to a physical body now, and even when that body is glorified, will still be constrained to locality.

Alternative sources

Many Christians, if asked, would say that only Scripture is valid truth. I believe that the perceptions of an educated Christian are capable of much understanding, even of issues that aren’t fully addressed in Scripture. To this end, I am going to blend in a little human science.

Scientists do two things, for the most part really well: they collect data; and they propose explanations. In either order; in fact, frequently in iterations. Sometimes the explanations have a devious political or theological aim, but more often than not, it’s just enquiring minds wanting to know. Honest data collection can’t possibly hurt us, because it is our God who provides the data!

I am going to combine the concepts of God’s omnipresence and eternity (or eternality) in following sections, but classically they were considered to be entirely separate Divine Attributes.

Omnipresence

Classical views

God’s omnipresence means that He is present, everywhere in the cosmos, simultaneously and fully. He is here and aware of His surroundings, at this moment, in my home office where I am typing this post. At the exact same instant, He is present and aware of plasma currents in the heart of a star billions of light-years from my office. Not just one star—all of them, everywhere. And then, there are also the falling sparrows…

At the same time, He is present on a throne at a location we call “heaven,” where the Bible pictures Him communicating with angels, prophets and sundry other beings. Where His throne and its setting are described in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation, I think that the prophetic visions are not to be interpreted as a specific place, but rather as an interface between God and others, depicted in such a way as to convey glory and holiness to limited ancient understandings.

Of course, the Bible also depicts God as from time to time present at specific localities, for example: in a burning bush; outside a cave on Mt. Horeb; in a pillar of cloud and fire; above the Ark of the Covenant; and in the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and later the Temple. These “theophanies” were instances where God chose to show a localized physical manifestation of his presence to reassure His people that He is more than just a disembodied concept.

Defining the cosmos

Hubble **eXtreme Deep Field** (**XDF**). This is a 2008 long exposure photograph of a very tiny area of the sky, and each item shown is a separate galaxy. From Wikipedia.

The astronomical term “cosmos” is defined by Merriam Webster as “an orderly harmonious systematic universe.” After millennia of honest science by many Christians and non-Christians, the current most popular view is that our universe (in my view, the only universe there is) is about 93 billion lightyears (550,000 billion-billion miles) in diameter—and that’s just the part we can see! A rough estimate that has been cited for years is that there are at least a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, with an average of a hundred billion stars per galaxy. That is probably conservative. It appears that most stars are associated with planetary systems like our Solar System. Most planets probably have one or more moons. But there is so much more out there than stars, planets and moons!

That’s the big stuff. Looking at the small stuff, most of you are somewhat familiar with the concept of atoms and molecules. You know that atoms consist of protons, neutrons and electrons. Actually, there is a whole “zoo” of other particles around us that are less familiar. Stars mostly burn Hydrogen. Our own sun burns around 200 million tons of hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, every second, and has enough left to keep burning for 4.5 billion more years.

God in the cosmos

God’s omnipresence means that He is present throughout the universe, as well as enfolding its entirety within the envelope of His presence. His omniscience (all-knowingness) assures that He is aware of every last particle within that volume, and His omnipotence (all-powerfulness) assures that His control extends to even the smallest sub-atomic particle within the volume. Does this mean that He is constantly propping everything up, or “micro-managing”? Clearly, He can fiddle wherever He wants to, and clearly (from Scripture), He occasionally does, but He is the author of the laws of physics, and I’m quite sure He is more than capable of having designed it to be self-sustaining! An automotive engineer can design and build a car, but he can also drive it without manually spooning gasoline to each cylinder. I trust my God, and I also trust what He has built and what He is continuously supervising.

The late Henry Morris rejected the “uniformitarian” concept that geological processes worked the same way in the past that they do today. But throughout his book, he mischaracterized the concept, as he did the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Both of those principles are valid only in a closed system, meaning no external interference. Both principles would say that an acorn dropping from the oak tree outside my office window will fall to the ground. But if I reach out and catch it, I haven’t violated the principle, I’ve simply violated the explicit assumption that the tree, the acorn and the ground was a closed system. My hand invalidated the assumption by making the system “open“. Was a world-wide flood possible without God’s intervention? Actually, yes, the physical laws make it highly unlikely, but don’t prohibit it. But we know that God intervened, so the laws didn’t apply in that case. (See Fountains of the Deep.)

Parenthetic: Is God’s omnipotence limited?

I think that most conservative theologians would say that it is! For example, Wayne Grudem states:

…it is not entirely accurate to say that God can do anything. Even [Scripture passages] must be understood in their contexts to mean that God can do anything he wills to do or anything that is consistent with his character. Although God’s power is infinite, his use of that power is qualified by his other attributes (just as all God’s attributes qualify all his actions). This is therefore another instance where misunderstanding would result if one attribute were isolated from the rest of God’s character and emphasized in a disproportionate way.
Grudem’s Systematic Theology (2nd ed.)

Many have added what I think should be self-evident, that God can’t violate simple logic. No, He can’t make a rock so heavy that He can’t lift if. That is a paradoxical absurdity. And no, He can’t make 2 plus 2 equal 6 (need I add, “in base 10”?). It is what it is.

Eternity (Timelessness)

Classical views

God’s attribute of eternity is comparable to His omnipresence, in that it defines His all-encompassing span of existence in time, rather than space. He is not only everywhere, but also everywhen. He is Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End. His temporal span is from eternity past through eternity future. When, at the burning bush, Moses asked Him His name, God replied in two ways. First,

God said to Moshe, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh [I am/will be what I am/will be],” and added, “Here is what to say to the people of Isra’el: ‘Ehyeh [אֶהְיֶה, I Am or I Will Be] has sent me to you.’”
—Exodus 3:14 CJB

The above is commonly taken to be an expression of God’s timeless existence; effectively, “I am now what I always have been and always will be.” This, however, is not so much a name of God as a statement of His nature. His “covenant name” delivered in the following verse, is a wordplay on the Hebrew ehyeh:

God said further to Moshe, “Say this to the people of Isra’el: ‘Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh [ADONAI], the God of your fathers, the God of Avraham, the God of Yitz’chak and the God of Ya‘akov, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever; this is how I am to be remembered generation after generation.
—Exodus 3:15 CJB

The 4-letter Hebrew name given here, יהוה, known as the “Tetragrammaton,” is commonly transliterated and pronounced as Yahweh (or, the grammatically corrupt version, Jehovah), but the vowels, and thus the pronunciation, are inferred rather than known. Strong’s defines it as “(the) self-Existent or Eternal“, but again, I think that this is an inferred, not a known, meaning, and based on the wordplay, I prefer to regard it as a proper name.

Defining time

Sorry, but illustrating timelessness isn’t easy. Some of you will recognize this as the BBC version of a time machine. Dr. Who’s disguised TARDIS.

Time, of course, is the concept that you perceive the present, remember (or not) the past, and anticipate (or not) the future. Physicists relate this to entropy, which some define as randomness, but that definition is deceptive. More accurately, a quantity called “degrees of freedom” increases. Newton’s Second Law says that, in a closed system (see above), entropy increases. At the risk of depressing you, an organism eats and assimilates its food, and grows. It may appear to be getting less “random” and more like an “organized” entity, but the fact is that each cell and biochemical molecule is simply part of a cycle of maturation and eventual death and decay. More cells mean more degrees of freedom. More stuff to go wrong. Scattered raw materials can be gathered and processed, and a useful machine can be manufactured, but all such constructs eventually wear out and fail, becoming scrap. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”

Space and Time: Spacetime

Both spacial and temporal location can be specified either relatively (here, there, now, then) or absolutely, using coordinates (for example, with rulers and clocks). But—think about this—are space and time merely abstract concepts, or are they real, tangible, things?

Space is most definitely real. It is not, as once thought, just the vacuum through which the “stuff” of the universe floats and moves. Now, observation and theoretical research suggest that space itself has properties that differentiate it from whatever is outside the universe. Time is evidently one of those properties, so also must be a real thing. Hold on to this concept: In the “old days”, the universe was thought to be an area in space; now we consider the universe to be space, time, and everything else that we know exists. Except, in my Christian “worldview”, for God and His realm, which are both outside the universe and permeating it to the smallest subatomic particle.

In 1905, Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity provided a theoretical framework for unifying the concepts of space and time. It turns out that there is a physical and geometrical relationship between the two seemingly unrelated concepts. To greatly oversimplify, if an accelerating object passes you at a high velocity, it will appear to you that it is foreshortened in the direction of motion, and that time is passing more slowly on it than on your own platform. The important thing in the present context (this post) is that both space and time appear to be—and in fact are—distorted, and their distortions are mathematically related. These effects are not easily seen except at velocities that are a significant proportion of the speed of light. It certainly does sound counterintuitive, but by now, the physics has long since been proved and integrated into modern technology.

God in time

Apologist author William Lane Craig, in his book Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time, examines the question of whether God’s Eternality implies that He exists within the framework of time or outside of time, looking in. In rather tedious detail, he approaches the question from the standpoints of theology, physics, and philosophy, and reaches the conclusion that God must exist within time in order to keep His bearings, since there would evidently be no temporal landmarks to go by.

Hmm… Lane is a very smart man who clearly embraces God in all His majesty, and he has obviously devoted a lot of thought and research into the subject. But his logic here, frankly, escapes me. God’s omnipresence means that He both envelopes and inhabits everything outside and inside the universe. His attribute of eternity implies the same with respect to time. The relativistic connection of space and time reinforces that implication. I see no reason that He should ever be disoriented, in any fashion. An expanded definition of “omnipresence”, then would state that

God simultaneously and instantaneously sees and remembers everything that exists and occurs at all locations in both space and time.

Note that I threw in the word “instantaneously” because, while nothing in the universe can travel faster than the constant speed of light, that is a limitation of space itself. Space with its enclosed stuff is expanding faster than the speed of light. There is no speed limit outside the universe.

What does Quantum Physics add to the picture?

A lot, and I only recently began probing the theological implications.

Newton’s First Law of motion states that, “An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.“ We call that tendency “inertia.”

It turns out that this law doesn’t hold for extremely small objects. We’ve known for about a hundred years that small objects like electrons and photons move in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable. The best you can ever do is calculate a probability distribution. Which was hard for many physicists, including Einstein, to accept, because they believed in a “deterministic universe“—if you know where everything is now, and the forces on it all, then theoretically you can predict the future. Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Make no mistake, he wasn’t a theist. What he meant was that he didn’t believe in a future determined by chance.

What does this randomness in nature mean, theologically? Warning: from here on, this is just my own speculation, not something from either science or theology. Take it or leave it. If there is randomness in the universe, then that can only be because God wanted it that way and designed it that way. If the future is truly random, then presumably even He can’t predict the future. <shock!!!> But God needn’t predict the future when He can see it! Remember, He lives in all times simultaneously. God fore-knows because He fore-sees.

Why would God have designed it this way? Perhaps it’s because He wanted to give the denizens of the universe freewill! That does not mean He’s lost control of the universe. Three reasons:

Large objects, like stars, planets and even baseballs and marbles, have enough inertia to obey the First Law.
If you flip a coin once, you’re equally as likely to achieve one result as the other, but if you flip it a thousand times, it’s virtually 100% sure that the total number of heads and tails will be very close to equal.
And, of course, God not only sees the future, but He can nudge it in any way that He sees fit. His sovereignty means He can, not that he necessarily does!