Hello Nilsen,
My apologies for slow replies, this week is turning out to be a real occurence of the old conundrum; "The more I do, the further behind I get."
Originally posted by Nilsen
Morning Seagoon.
As you said you can not prove the existence of God with hard evidence, just as I can't prove that there is no God.
That is not quite true. I would say that there is hard evidence for the existence of God, and that it is even available in three different categories,
the physical (or general revelation of his existence and glory),
the personal (or special revelation of his nature and will)
and the logical (which can be seen in the problems inherent in presupposing he doesn't exist and all the transcendent categories that we can only have or understand if he does exist).
The evidence that we perceive is precisely the evidence that we would expect to find for a God who is both personal and spiritual, who made the universe, is ordering it, and makes himself known to his creation through revelation. We see this in the very existence of creation itself, as Psalm 19:1-3 puts it
“The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard. Additionally, as our progress in science continues, and we continue to find that the universe is amazingly orderly with closely defined laws governing all its interactions, rather than chaotic and random the evidence for design continues to pile up. As we learn, for instance, more about the interior workings of cells, and see the irreducible complexity of their mechanisms, learn that the DNA strands in a single cell contain more information than all the libraries of the world and contemplate the fact that matter has no means of having generated that
information and that it cannot be accounted for with the sleight of hand of simply saying “time+chance=everything” or as we learn that life on our planet required an impossibly long list of things to come together, the idea of random, unthinking, chaotic matter creating so much finely balanced order and design becomes more and more impossible.
The evidence for His existence is there and always has been, the problem is that for well over 100 years now, our interpretation of that data has been inextricably wed to the naturalist presupposition that states “matter is all there is” and that regardless of what we find, the hypothesis that the universe is designed is unacceptable. As one biochemist put it to me, I realized that if the universe is designed then we have closed and locked the very doors that would allow us to understand the structure of the universe. While still not anything close to a Christian , what he has discovered as a biochemists about the structure of life has caused him to abandon the idea of non-directed origins for that life. As he put it,
“I guess like someone has said, I got tired of looking a Mt. Rushmore and saying 'I wonder how the random action of wind and rain acted to make the mountain look like the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln.' "
What you belive in is based on input from other people and/or some other experience that you have had and that you have chosen to give God credit for ,and that is evidence enough for you.
Nilsen, I grew up in an atmosphere so soaked with Naturalistic presuppositions that they were part of the very air I breathed. I expressed them on a daily basis without even knowing that I did, most people do. The very belief in the
non-existence of God has become so ingrained in our academia, that to even suggest otherwise or present why you think that might be the case is to face instant and terrible excommunication from the scientific establishment. In literature I read I absorbed and accepted elements of existentialist and nihilist philosophy based on the naturalism almost uncritically. In fact it was the process of examination of those worldviews, and especially running those systems, that began to turn me against those explanations and I ended up drifting closer to and then getting involved in Eastern mysticism and the occult, because while those systems were no “tighter” or better able to explain the data, at least they weren’t quite as hopeless. Throughout all of this personal journeying, I continued to despise and ridicule Christianity and Christians. It wasn’t merely a personal
experience or a credulous acceptance of the irrational that changed me, like C.S. Lewis I know what it is to feel the experience of being forced against one’s natural inclination to accept as truth that which we most fervently want to deny. You are free to dismiss my conversion however you will, but it was not quite the free-fall into credulity or the merely the desire to avoid reality. Actually it was the end of the unexamined life for me.
Yes i belive that the "universe" has created humanity and all other things around us, and I belive it has an open architecture based on open-source software. Its full of bugs and unexplained crashes but every now and then a string of code is made that boots up something that sorta works.
Space and time is never ending and at some point things just comes together. I belive that every second somewere an infinate ammount of new life, planets and whatnot is created somewere in space and always has been and always will. I do not belive there is a god out there that controls it all, and if it is then he is a sadistical sob based on proof you can see around you every day.
Clearly the parameters of the universe are not infinite, therefore an infinite amount of material cannot be being created anywhere. And actually, I think you’ll find that if you run your own system the idea of that system being open is not possible. In order to be “reprogrammed” new information would have to be created, new laws brought into existence, something that matter cannot do, and you have dismissed the possibility of a divine writer and editor. Therefore the “code” that we have is all that we have, all that there is now is all that there is and merely adding in an unexplained “source” for “new code” and new creation ex nihilo is importing your own
Deus ex Machina – creating a god inside the system to replace the one outside the system whose existence is denied.
As far as God being a “sadistical sob” (I’m reminded here of Yossarian’s dialogue with Lt. Sch**sskopf’s wife in Catch-22) that might be arguable if as deists and naturalists argue “whatever is, is right.” In other words, if the universe is right as it is, there is something wrong with the creator. The Christian theist however, argues from special revelation that
the universe is not right as it is that rather it is fallen, and suffering from the consequences of rebellion against the creator in the form of sin and evil and all their by products (disease, death, corruption, etc.) and that this is of grave concern to the creator, and that he is actively involved in the process of redeeming both his creatures and that creation in a way consistant with his nature so that neither love nor justice are lost.
- SEAGOON
