Meaning without God: life goes on and there is no purpose other than what we assign to life; life keeps going on and we are in the bridge between the past and the future. There is only a subjective meaning to life.
Meaning with God: we were created with a purpose- to glorify God, we are to be obedient and organize our life around Him and enjoy Him.
Q1. Can non-Christians glorify God?
A1. Their actions can glorify Him, but not they themselves. All moral actions are connected to God.
Q2. Isn't glorification and worship of an omnipotent God pointless? God knows everything and everything has already been known.
A2. We are to enjoy him.
Arguments for the existence of God:
1) The Mysterious Bang
There was no beginning point to the universe, according to some modern scientific thought; no singularity moment. If there was no "big bang" and everything wraps around, then is there any place for a God to start the world?
2) The Cosmic Welcome Mat
The universe was tailored to life on Earth, but we can only say that now as humans looking back. There might have been many options for life and many attempts at life. We are only a small part of the universe and if the universe is here for us, why are we only taking up a small part of it? If God is "non-efficient", is He intentionally so?
It might be an unlikely scenario that the universe evolved, but what about the scenario that an unseen God created us? Also, maybe there are other possibilities for life and we just happen to fall into one of those possibilities. If we were not here, then we wouldn't know what conditions life could not have occurred in; since we are here to observe, then we are allowed to notice how unique our situation is.
Swarm theory: lots of organisms together try to solve the same problem and they have a higher probability of reaching the solution than if one tried alone, even if they do not try together.
Given the above, at the beginning of our universe, lots of systems could have tried to make a livable universe and we were the only one that made it.
3) The Regularity of Nature
Faith: part of your reality, not in the realm of science, non-testable
Assumption: used to make up science, (science being the scientific process)
Science tests laws, faith lies only in the scientific method. Religion has certain questions that you are not allowed to ask. And we only have the ability to observe natural occurrences, not the supernatural.
4) The Clue of Beauty
Beauty is a side-effect of something else that evolved, and is not as simple as the "evolutionary" argument presented by Keller. We do not want to reduce beauty to the physical; we want to create a personal experience of it.
Love:
1) God causes who we love
Q1) Can God cause a Christian to love a non-Christian?
2) Physically, we love because of a purely physical desire.
Desire:
1) If we have a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy then that must mean that it is from God. There are categories of desire that can only be satisfied by the divine.
Q1) What if we have the desire to fly or go back in time?
Belief in God is innate, hard-wired in us. For over 200,000 years we have had a spiritual aspect to our existence. For the last 300 years, people have started to believe that there might not be a God (which began after natural selection slowed, modern medicine evolved and we began to use science over witchcraft).
Evolution:
Evolution comes from what we have observed in the natural world; yet we evolved to believe in a God. However, science is objective. If we don't use science and rely on religion how can we prove anything? Science is testable and we trust science based on evidence not personal belief. Evolution is not innate, it is tested by experiments. Evolution is not a belief, it is a principle developed to explain the natural world. Inquisitive nature and reason have helped us to survive. Science is a useful meme.
Creation:
Can we trust our subjective self and our opinions on the world? How can we know anything? Logic is limited if it is a product of evolution. If we were born to believe in God, could we reflect a higher being?
Q) Did belief in a God prolong our survival? We seem to be pretty good at killing ourselves.
5) The Clue-Killer
If you do not believe in a God, can you experience beauty and love? Is explaining the world in purely physical terms bad? If love is purely a physical experience does it lessen or cheapen it?
"If there is no God, we should not trust our cognitive faculties at all." Keller, pg 145
1) Ex. When we grow up and find out that there is no Santa, do we then discount everything our parents told us?
2) Can we trust our senses? Science is based on objective processes but how do we know those processes are accurate? Can we trust our senses? If we are testing one of our cognitive faculties, do we need to discount them all?
No comments:
Post a Comment