Creation - form or design?

[Jonesboy]

There is little awareness of the distinction between form and design in the act of Creation. Materialist religiosi construe God’s objects as designs, that is, as assembled material forms.

But forms need not be assembled. Forms include things like TV’s, cups and saucers, sunsets, and life forms. Indeed, form can exist without any active, “intelligent” material manipulation.

The Creation was not the creation of designs, but of forms. Without forms the world is blank, chaos, for there is no material property that distinguishes one material object from another.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

But the question is, how did material beings come to correspond to those forms? In the classic example (and by the way I don’t think this example applies very well to biological organisms) if you find a watch by the side of the road you intuit that the watch was designed and made by an intelligent watchmaker. Yes, God is in a sense the origin of the form of the watch, but that fact doesn’t begin to answer the question of the material genesis of the watch.

A word of caution: we have to be really careful on a subject like this, because the topics of evolution and atheism have been banned on Catholic Answers Forums. So far we technically haven’t explicitly gotten into those subjects, but it could be very easy for this thread to go in that direction.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Also, I’d like to make clear, a form doesn’t have substantial existence on its own without matter, any more than matter can have substantial existence without form. Existing things have both matter and form (in God there is no real distinction between the two, but that’s another subject).

A form, apart form matter, can be known by a mind but it doesn’t have objective being outside someone’s mind if it does not have some kind of matter, whether physical or spiritual matter. Forms in and of themselves can be said to come from God and even be coeternal with God inasmuch as God in His omniscience knows every possible form from all eternity. Nevertheless one of these forms is not an objective thing apart from any matter which may come to fit that form (with the exception, again, of the Form of God, which is its own Matter so to speak).

 

[Jonesboy]

But the question is, how did material beings come to correspond to those forms? In the classic example (and by the way I don’t think this example applies very well to biological organisms) if you find a watch by the side of the road you intuit that the watch was designed and made by an intelligent watchmaker. Yes, God is in a sense the origin of the form of the watch, but that fact doesn’t begin to answer the question of the material genesis of the watch.

A word of caution: we have to be really careful on a subject like this, because the topics of evolution and atheism have been banned on Catholic Answers Forums. So far we technically haven’t explicitly gotten into those subjects, but it could be very easy for this thread to go in that direction.

Yes that’s a good question and one I answered in a previous post a few days ago that no-one responded to. God breathes life or form into the void of materiality. Materials themselves cannot provide form.

God didn’t design objects like a factory worker designing and assembling a car. Design is our own anthropomorphic interpretation of form. God made form. Design is our own doing.
Aside from evolution, this formulation of creation avoids the conflicts of logic that can arise from omnipotence and omniscience.

 

[Jonesboy]

Also, I’d like to make clear, a form doesn’t have substantial existence on its own without matter, any more than matter can have substantial existence without form. Existing things have both matter and form (in God there is no real distinction between the two, but that’s another subject).

A form, apart form matter, can be known by a mind but it doesn’t have objective being outside someone’s mind if it does not have some kind of matter, whether physical or spiritual matter. Forms in and of themselves can be said to come from God and even be coeternal with God inasmuch as God in His omniscience knows every possible form from all eternity. Nevertheless one of these forms is not an objective thing apart from any matter which may come to fit that form (with the exception, again, of the Form of God, which is its own Matter so to speak).

Substantiality is a description of the behaviour of form. Some forms, like colour and sound, cannot be hidden but vanish and appear without empirical redress. Other forms, like objects, can be hidden. It would not be fruitful to organise forms into inner and outer, subjective and objective, which, in any case, aren’t opposites or related.