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concurrences there are in God's nature and his relations to his creation.
Examples of How a Misuse of Formal Logic Has Distorted Models of God
Reason has been consistently highly esteemed in the Christian tradition as an essential
tool of understanding, along with other sources including sensory experience, intuition and
personal experience, testimony, and Scripture. However, in the Enlightenment (combined with
the scientific revolution) modern thinkers began to come to trust in reason (together with
publicly verifiable, empirical research) as the primary adjudicator of truth, overturning all other
criteria (at least until the advent of postmodernism and its precursors). The effects of this
emphasis have been destructive for theology since this move has meant that modern
understandings of God have been constrained by what can be comprehended by finite human
reason. All too often, enlightenment reason has formed premature conclusions about what is
logical and what is contradictory, resulting in a rejection of "contrary" evidence that seems to
contradict other, preferred evidence. Examples abound in contemporary thinking about God.
A Process God
Since classical Christian theism became more self-reflective and began developing
philosophical sophistication in the early church, it has asserted that God is absolutely
independent of his creation. He is self-existent and self-sufficient and does not derive anything
ultimately from the creation he made. Process theologians, however, have argued that this
assumption is not logically compatible with God's involvement in and concern for the goings-on
of his creatures, particularly humans. For example, Schubert M. Ogden complains that there
exists "an irreconcilable opposition between the premises of this supernaturalistic theism and the
whole direction of our experience and reflection as secular men."
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To begin with, secularists