9 posts tagged “god”

There's a nice piece by J.P. Moreland over at the Scriptorium discussing logic, God, and Jesus as a logician.  I really respect Dr. Moreland's appreciation of logic.  If I'd been raised around believers who had a similar appreciation, perhaps I wouldn't be struggling as much with matters of faith and belief as I am.

I value logic highly as a truth finding tool.  If God exists, logic is such, in my opinion, that I must agree with Moreland when he writes that it "comes from the very nature of God Himself."  I might even go one step further and assert that logic is God which can be biblically supported by John 1:1.

Moreland refers to an article called Jesus the Logician by Dr. Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at Southern Cal.  Another related article, also written from a biblical perspective, is God and Logic by Dr. Gordon H. Clark.

Good reads for believers and non-believers alike--for believers because most traditional Christians don't take logic seriously and they should and for non-believers because it is refreshing to discover some Christians out there that understand and embrace the value of logic as a mechanism of truth.

Although I've become quite the skeptic or agnostic of late, it troubles me when ill-informed unbelievers, disbelievers, atheists, or whatever claim that it's reasonable to conclude there is no God because there is no scientific evidence of his existence.  Such claims beg the question.  Science deals with the natural world.  To demand scientific evidence of God assumes that God is not supernatural and therefore is not God at all.  Not only is this type of reasoning begging the question, it is also an example of the argument from ignorance because it assumes the existence of God to be false because it has not been proved to be true.

Victor Reppert has linked to a thought provoking article called "Is There Scientific Proof of God?" that is worth reading.  Here's a snippet:

...the only way science can empirically prove the existence of ‘God’ is if the Naturalist position is correct.  But if ‘God’ were empirically proven, He would necessarily be a part of Nature, and thus not Supernatural – nor God – at all.  To prove Him scientifically would be to disprove Him. In other words, if the Naturalist position is correct, science could never offer proof of Supernature because once science proves a thing, it proves that thing belongs to Nature.  If the Supernaturalist’s position is correct, no manner of science could ever offer proof of a supernatural God, because by definition God is 'not of Nature', the only realm where science is equipped to speak.  "...god isn't a scientific phenomenon, and hence cannot be evaluated using scientific methods."

A few days ago, I found an article that came out in June '07 explaining how discoveries in physics are leading researchers to the conclusion that "time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality."  It's a fascinating read and the information revealed has potentially profound theological ramifications.  The biblical perspective of God is that he is eternal--he exists outside of time.  Panentheism and process theism hold that the universe exists within God. If these ideas are correct, it follows then, that the most fundamental levels of existence would be outside of time.

A scathing commentary by Peter Berkowitz at WSJ.com's Opinion Journal has this conclusion:

http://www.opinionjournal.com

In making his case that reason must regard faith as an enemy to be wiped out, Mr. Hitchens declares Socrates's teaching that knowledge consists in knowing one's ignorance to be "the definition of an educated person." And yet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.

Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences, amplifying invidious distinctions among fellow citizens and obscuring crucial differences among believers world wide.

Playing into the anger and enmities that debase our politics today, the new new atheism blurs the deep commitment to the freedom and equality of individuals that binds atheists and believers in America. At the same time, by treating all religion as one great evil pathology, today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction.

Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings--woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes--are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women--a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation--is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.

Along the same lines, check out The Idiot's Guide to New Atheism at Prosthesis.

Yesterday I posted the conclusion of an article by Michael Gerson entitled What Atheists Can't Answer.  Christopher Hitchens responded with a piece of his own. 

Here's his conclusion:

"In a world without God," he writes, "this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution but designed for disappointment." Again, he substitutes the wish for the thought. We very probably are, as he admits, not the designed objects of the Big Bang or of the process of natural selection. But this sober conclusion, objective as it is, is surely preferable to the delusion that we have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture. That sick joke is one that we can cease to find impressive, that belongs in the infancy of our species, and gives a false picture of reality that we would do well to outgrow.

Complete Article at WasthingtonPost.com

Interesting piece found on Sam Harris's blog reaches this conclusion:

None of this amounts to proof of God’s existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement—which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature—imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

What Atheists Cant Answer

• Discover the healing power to be found in your cupboards at KitchenMedicineBook.com.  Check out The Truth About Salt for a good example of the sort of information you'll find on this very interesting website.
• Is someone telling you lies?  How to Spot a Liar reveals how to read a person's eyes to determine whether or not s/he is being truthful.
• For those who enjoy a good debate but never seem to come out on top, How to Win Informal Arguments and Debates offers a few helpful pointers on logic, psychology, and effective communication.
• When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."  From Kahlil Gibran on Love
• The Moldy Thomists of Tu Quoque ask:  Is God Beyond Logic? 
• If you want to see debate at it's finest, don't miss this transcript of the 1948 Debate on The Existence of God between Father Frederick C. Copleston and Bertrand Russell.  After some of the more recent debates transcripts I've read, the dialog between Russell and Copleston is remarkably refreshing.  It's too bad that many of the people debating these same issues in our day appear to sorely lack the same integrity these two gentleman demonstrated.