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Howard A. Landman's avatar

The ID folks only want to talk about Design. They never want to talk about Manufacturing. We're not discussing abstract blueprints in some heavenly architect's office. We're talking about organisms that have been implemented in the physical world. So, any complete ID theory requires a description of the manufacturing process.

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Alexander Gieg's avatar

LOL! Well, in that vein I'd posit angels are, each one, a QFT field. ;-)

By the way, here are some other interesting properties of angels, according Scholasticism:

* They have free will but only the first time they make a decision, as this decision becomes unchangeable afterwards. Any further choice they make is delimited by the previous chain of choices, becomes permanent, and narrows down and delimits further decisions.

This follows from them not having any matter in them, since matter is understood, in Scholastic thought, as the source of changeability, and therefore the reason humans, and other material beings, can alter their choices while they're alive.

That's also why fallen angels cannot be saved: when they were in a position in which they had to chose between being for or against God, they chose to be against, and that restricted all further choices they took to always, invariably be against God. Those who chose to be for God similarly cannot change to ever become against him.

* They're shapeless, and unaffected by matter, but they can affect matter by, for example, constructing bodies they then can control from without, more or less as if they were remote-controlled robots.

This means any physical appearance of an angel assumes to interact with physical being is such a puppet, never the actual angel.

Additionally, the Bible mentions their preferred shaped-but-not-physical appearance (for example, when showing themselves in visions) are very, very weird. Not winged people with harps, but rather stuff like three-animal-head six-winged monstrosities, gyroscopic wheels full of eyes rotating around a central floating baby-like shape, crocodile-headed perma-burning humanoids (this one appears in one of the Apocrypha), and similar nightmare-inducing things -- and those are the good ones. The evil ones are even weirder.

* "Angel" is a term describing a kingdom (in the biological sense), not a species. That's because matter, when affected by a species, is what individuates that species into distinct members. Since angels don't have matter, this means each angel is both an individual and also its own species in its entirety.

* Finally, before modern cosmology developed and introduced the Heliocentric model, elliptical orbits, and the idea planets and stars are all balls of pretty regular matter, Earth itself being one such, Scholastics believed them to be, each one, an angel. Or, more precisely, one of the aforementioned angel-controlled puppets, their controlling angel having been tasked with time-keeping and with keeping cosmic regularities flowing.

I'd love to see these ideas used in sci-fi and sci-fantasy stories. They're much weirder, and much cooler, than the way fiction works usually depict angels. :D

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