2.8 The Big Picture

In Ch 8 - 'God in Retreat', p245 of Robert Winston's "the story of god" under "Creation: what, where and how?"..

"Did God do something unique - not merely make matter, but create 'something out of nothing'? Humans are capable of making things, but, according to Jewish tradition, only God can create. In Hebrew there are various verbs meaning to 'make', but in Genesis, one verb describes specifically what God did: bara - 'he created'."

Now it appears that Mr Winston is a 'practising' Jew or sufficiently so to be a 'member' of a synagog adhering to the rules of the sabbath. So in this part of the book 'God' gets capitalised. He actually means God.. and "bara" means create from nothing. Which all allows for 'God' to have the hypothetical role of fundamental originator of everything.. without too much controversy. Thus introducing Ralph Cudworth Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge University.. as a "great hero of mine".. he says (p268)

"His contribution was to suggest that there was a plastic nature to the universe: God set things in motion, but thereafter the universe behaved according to its own laws. This view influenced Spinoza and the nineteenth-century philosophers, and in reality is not so very different from that held by many religious people today."

And so to quote Brian Cox "Wonders of Life" p9 Introduction..

"As someone who thinks about religion very little I reject the label atheist because defining me in terms of the things I don't believe would require an infinite list of nouns - I see no necessity contradiction between religion and science. By which I mean if I were a deist, I would claim no better example of the skill and ingenuity of The Creator than in the laws of nature that allowed for the magnificent story of the origin and evolution of life on Earth, and their overwhelmingly beautiful expression in our tree of life. I am not a deist... I simply don't know"

So there it is, the Jew and the none deist, in agreement with the atheist, telling everyone else what sort of 'god' you may have if you want to be in the club!

No wonder deists (majority of world population) have a problem..