Ephesians 6:5

[Dill]

(06-25-2020, 07:57 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Why does God get the credit for nature?

It took humans millions of years to evolve beyond basic immoral animals.

With the rise of monotheism, and the continuing concentration of power in one deity, that makes sense. The deity is separate from creation, since He made it.

One strand of credit for rigorous separation of god from nature goes back to Aristotle. Before him, Greeks generally considered the universe/nature as something which pre-existed gods. The father of logic posed the problem of cause and effect, and of "first causes"--in the case of the universe, a posited "unmoved first mover." That first mover can't be dependent on anything else. Nature is not "unmoved" and so is an effect of creation, dependent upon god.

Greeks were still pretty agnostic about the origin thing, until Christians synthesized Greek philosophy with Christian theology. For them, nature is not "unmoved" and so is an effect of creation, dependent upon god. And "fallen."

Anyway, the process of investing a monotheistic god with authority has produced the separation of god from nature (and probably the concept of "nature") and the rank order which puts god above nature.  Could be that is one condition for separating religion from government and the economy too.