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Am I Saved? If there is a more important question a Christian can ask, I can’t think of it. Some people struggle with this issue because it’s really not that clear from the Bible who is saved or how you know if you are saved. While some passages make it sound so easy and faith-based (e.g. John 3:16) others make it sound so hard and works based (Matthew 25:31-46 The Sheep & Goats). We are also constantly bombarded with do’s and don’ts and moral obligations - how does it all work and fit together? Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Samples asks the poignant question:
Is it more reasonable to believe that the universe came into existence from nothing by nothing or that, as the Bible says, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’?
I would think the answer is obvious and the supposed reasons for rejecting this conclusion are:
- Who created God?
- Which God supposedly did it?
Before I address these questions I think we must make clear that the probability of a universe popping into existence from nothing and by nothing is exactly 0. Not, some-small-number which over eons of time made the improbable probable but zero and at heart we all know this, as do all scientists. Things have causes, even if we can’t find them.
This means, however improbable we think He might be (usually based on the misguided assumption that God evolved or was created by something even more complex) God is infinitely more probable than the fat zero probability we have for a causeless universe.
The question “Who made God” is perhaps an honest one coming from a child but anyone who has bothered to consider what is meant by “God” will quickly realise that the question is nonsense – on par with “who made Tuesday” or “how many cabbages make a sunset?”. These questions exhibit a fundamental ignorance of what the concept of God is supposed to represent. Among other things, God is eternal. This means having no beginning or end and thus no prior cause. This does not prove that God exists but it does mean that the question “Who made the eternal” is nonsensical.
The question “is anything eternal” is universally answered “Yes” by atheists and theist thinkers for the simple reason that from nothing comes nothing. While atheists have always maintained the natural universe is this eternal recent cosmological discoveries have rendered this untenable – our universe is finite in age and began with the Big Bang which science can describe but not explain because of the breakdown of physical laws at the singularity.
It therefore appears reasonable and natural to conclude that the “something” which is eternal cannot be natural since nature cannot cause itself if it does not yet exist to do it.
We simply cannot avoid a transcendent reality in order to explain our universe. However this argument alone does not necessarily point to one God or another except to indicate that God must be outside of time and space, transcendent and eternal. Any creator God not matching this description must be rejected.
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Although we all seek simple truths, reality turns out to be not so simple and we learn to be suspicious of fast, sweeping generalisations. Questions like “Are humans good or bad?” may be answered simply by rhetoricians but upon closer analysis we begin to recognise that all humans are both good and bad. “Is nature our friend or enemy?” – well it feeds us and sustains us but it can also cause death and pain. The more we search, the more we discover that life, history indeed reality is paradoxical.
Pascal noted that humans are constantly wondering if they are great or wretched and that religions generally take either one of these views. Christianity however explains the paradox that we are “neither angel nor beast” – that we were made in the image of a perfect God and fell from grace and glory. Our only hope at greatness is to recognise our fallenness:
Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness….but there is a greatness in knowing one is wretched.
Further paradoxes which Christianity embraces:
- Loving our enemies
- Giving is better than receiving
- God is unreachable but reaches down to us
- The God who judges is the God who pays the penalty
A paradox is something which appears counter-intuitive and thus, we feel, wrong but upon closer inspection proves true. Motorcyclists know that you must counter steer in order to negotiate a corner, a fact which no non-biker would believe: you have to steer left to go right. Further examples from science are the Wave-particle duality of light or the fact that “solid” matter is mostly empty space (99.99..% nothingness). A paradox is not a contradiction but an apparent contradiction. According to logic 2 contrary claims cannot both be true at the same time in the same way.
We therefore have grounds for avoiding simplistic explanations and crediting theories which appear contradictory but best explain the evidence especially given the fact that life and our universe remains in a fine balance between static death and chaos.
