Store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven
where moth and rust cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal

Showing posts with label "God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label "God. Show all posts

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Mankind Created God In His Own Image

This statement is similar to “God's commands always seem to coincide with human desires.” A comment that deserves to be at the top of the stupid comments list however, is the title of this post. Here's what I mean.

. On the one hand atheists say that all gods are created in the image of their human inventors. Like:

[The Christian God is] “Arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins

You mean this God? This is the God that we created in our own image?

. Atheists say that Justice, as it’s found in the God of the Bible is nothing like justice as humans understand it.

Yet atheists also say that humans created God in their own image.

Which is it?

. Atheists say that fear of nature is what caused humans to invent gods as a wish fulfilment. But the Christian religion contains the concept of hell which is orders of magnitude worse than anything nature can throw at us.

What kind of wish fulfilment is that?

. Atheists say that God knows how everything will turn out and how He will act in every situation from now till eternity.

Atheists also accuse God of being arbitrary and capricious.

Which is it? It can't be both - except in the minds of atheists.


And finally, the greatest proof that the God of Christianity was not created in our image has to do with the teaching of Jesus that we are saved by grace through our faith in what Jesus accomplished by His resurrection.

There is not a human on earth that would or even could come up with the concept of salvation by grace alone. Humans, every single one of us demand that we "earn" our way to heaven through being good people. THAT is how you know a religion and that religions god(s) is man-made. Every religion BUT Christianity and even some religions that call themselves Christian (eg. Mormons) rely on good works for one's entrance into heaven.  

So which is it and why do atheists so frequently flip flop from one side of an argument to the other as the situation seems to demand?

Don't they care about integrity?
Do they think no one will notice?  

Friday, August 17, 2012

Objective Laws of Logic, Mathematics and Morality

That is the kind of universe that we inhabit. The laws of logic, mathematics and morality are not invented. Rather, they are discovered.

There exists independently of the human mind, a raw and immutable mathematical reality.”
Alain Connes – “Chair of Analysis and Geometry at the College de France”

Plato held that these laws were timeless and unchanging. In fact, he said they were “more real” than the things we perceive with our senses.” Plato understood that goodness and beauty exist and makeup reality. Certainly these laws are not something the way cars or buildings or even an atom is something. But they are not nothing either. In fact, these laws are necessary for our visible reality to exist. But where did this reality originate?

Mathematicians should have the courage of their most profound convictions, and thus affirm that mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them.” 
Rene Thom

If mathematical entities do exist, they have to exist necessarily from all eternity. That should not surprise since mathematics, morality and logic are part of the character of Creator God, who is an immaterial, eternal Being.

Mathematical entities are as real and mind-independent as Mount Everest. It's almost as though the physical world is built out of mathematics.”
Roger Penrose

To look for the cause of the universe is to look for God. A wondrous reality in which we live, is that when we are exploring moral good, or the laws of logic, or the laws of mathematics or the laws of nature, when we examine a flower petal, an insect wing or the human genetic code, we are in fact exploring parts and portions of the very character of God Himself.

God is a mathematician.” 
astronomer James Jeans

I'm not suggesting that moral goods are good because God thinks them, or even commands them. Laws of mathematics or logic do not exist because God thinks them. Moral goods exist, mathematical laws and the laws of logic exist because a logical, orderly and morally perfect God exists. Nietzsche was absolutely correct. Without God, there is no moral standard by which we must abide. He could have said, without God, a mathematically precise, life-supporting, moral and logical universe would not exist.

Not only do mathematical entities seem to be out there – eternal, objective, immutable – they also appear to be sovereign over the physical universe. How else can we account for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences?”
Eugene Wigner

The good that we ought to do are not based upon arbitrary or capricious commands, for the good that we ought to do flows directly from the character of the Being and existence of God Himself. Because God is morally good, only those thoughts and behaviours that cohere with God's nature can be called, good. This is what makes morality objective.

Because God is omnipotent, only a universe created by Him will hold together and have its existence according to the laws of logic and physics that we have discovered.

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that its right. If, in Galileo's phrase, the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics this could only be because the natural would itself is inherently mathematical.” 
Richard Feyman
Of course atheists by the score, think it preposterous that logic, morality and mathematical laws should exist independent of the human mind. 

But think about it! Wouldn't it be dishonest to pretend those laws aren't real if they are indispensable to our scientific understanding of the contingent world? Of course we don't observe these laws directly, but we need them to explain what we do see. It seems to me that we have the same kind of reason for believing these laws exist as we have for believing in Dark Matter or Higgs Bossen.

And if we believe these eternal laws exist, we must believe that Creator God exists because Creator God is the only logical explanation for the existence of these laws.

What kind of person would reject this obvious conclusion?