[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

… and I disagree with jallanite's interpretation …

You don’t indicate what you disagree with. I only cited Tolkien for what I posted. Do you disagree with what Tolkien wrote?

I would phrase it the way that during Third Age, one of the "natural laws" is also that Valar are not anymore directly intervening with the world. I would argue that it actually becomes exactly such an unchangeable law just like the fact that things fall down when dropped and so on.

Not quite. The sending of the Istari was an attempt to intervene directly in the world. Your attempt to rephrase it as against “natural laws” fails.

Obviously the Valar are no longer allowed to intervene so directly as they did at the end of the first age, but to claim they did not intervene at all goes against what Tolkien wrote. And even at the end of the First Age the Valar apparently did not intervene directly, but sent over Elves from the Undying Lands under the command of Eönwë, presumably no longer allowed to fight Morgoth directly as they did earlier in the First Age.

Even in Tolkien’s account in The Book of Lost Tales Manwë himself apparently did not take part in the expedition from the Undying Lands at the end of the First Age.

It appears that the Valar are increasingly forbidden from intervening directly, until in our own time, they are essentially forgotten altogether, unless either Manwë or Tulkas is to be equated with St. Michael.

If I were to answer this, I would copy Inzil:

So you say that Tolkien’s interpretation of his own creation is wrong, that you prefer Inziladun’s. I disagree. I prefer Tolkien’s as an interprevation of Tolkien’s writing.

As much tempting as it is, let's be careful not to confuse Eru with (Judeo-Christian) God, since even though the parallel is obvious, you cannot obviously put an equation there, and already such mistaking of terms can lead to different conclusions. (Actually, I slightly suspect the author of the first post of such "confusion in terms", but I may be mistaken and it's merely an inquiry applying the famous "god's potential" question to Eru, which would be actually good question; I am however very much aware of the confusion of terms in jallanite's posts, so let's be careful about it.)

I say that according to Tolkien’s writing Eru is simply the Judea-Christian God fictionialized. One might also identify him with Allah, Ahura Mazda or Vishnu. This is not confusion as you pretend.

The God of the Old Testament is also not shown to intervene greatly until it comes to the time of Abraham and his descendants. Tolkien recognizes a Fall of Man to be identified with the Biblical story. Then there is the flood, an account comparable to the Fall of Númenor, but separate from it. Presuming that Tolkien accepted the interpretation of the Catholic Encyclopedia and many other commentaries on it, Noah’s flood would not be a universal flood, but only a local flood. See http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=4737 . So there would be no reason to mention it from the viewpoint of Gondor or Arnor, if it occurred in the Third Age or earlier. Tolkien may have imagined it as occurring later.

The Valar are explained by Tolkien, in letter 131:

One the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted – well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.

This explains why the Valar perform events which in in Jewish, Chistian, and Muslim myths are performed by God without help. But the Biblical accounts have God sometimes speaking in the plural, presumably speaking to others of the heavenly host, so that it is not clear that God is to be imagined as creating everything simply through his own word.

If one wants to differentiate Eru from the Judeao-Christian God one need only point out that Tolkien’s creation is performed in very different time span and in a different order without any stated connection with the Sabbath day. But Tolkien does not seem to feel that this mattered. And in any case, he later decided that the Silmarillion creation story was only Mannish legend, that the Sun and Moon were actually as old as the Earth.

None of this has any connection to the question of omnipotence raised by PaigeStormblood. But if you wish to bring in natural law, being in ages in which Middle-earth lay under the sunless sky with flourishing vegetation and perhaps seasons, or bring in the Lonely Isle which according to legend was an island which was made to float on the waves, or bring in the making of the Sun and Moon from a fruit and a flower. These miraculous happenings are not considered by you to prove omnipotence.

That Saruman used force against Men and seemingly combined the lineage of Men with Orcs also indicates that not all deeds performed by wizards are equally unnatural.