Faith Well Grounded

Things are looking bleak in America, and all indications are that it will only get worse. The economy is broken and breaking, people are losing their houses, it's becoming almost too expensive even to drive to work. It's getting scary.

But glory to God that He has provided us His Word, which gives us the answers to all of our problems. Praise Him, that He loves us enough to have given us the framework for successfully living this life He's gifted to us.

...or just a more consistent atheist?

Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through with the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there were some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

-Death

"In the beginning, God…” Genesis 1:1, excerpt.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…” John 1:1

I love these verses, great beginnings to the stories of beginnings. Both start with the utmost central subject of our existence: God. Both begin the Creation story, in which God creates with Word as deed. By Word alone, He creates from nothing. In Him is existence with such perfection that He can give existence as gift.

I’m thinking lately on the problem of pain-- that of evil, that of misery, that of the overarching “wrongness” of the human condition. I’m tending to agree with C.S. Lewis that the problem of pain is a problem strictly for the Christian (in the philosophical sense, anyway).

“Pain” is not a problem for the naturalist/atheist, since it could not be expected that a random, self-created, amoral Universe would be mindful of its product. It shouldn’t be expected to care for its creation, or provide comfort as such. It can’t be expected to be mindful of us at all.

e-dogg raised two very good and important questions in one of the Miracles threads. I'll summarize them in this and the next blog. (e-dogg, if I have missed your points please chime in and clarify).

I'll try to provide the theology based on sound scripture. Since this is such a deep and profound doctrine, please don't expect my initial responses to be all-encompassing. I'm looking at this as an overview that should act as the springboard into a discussion that will hopefully get us to the sweet center of the gospel and God's immense love for us.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. Albert Einstein

I was dealing with a supposed Biblical contradiction recently. It turned out not to be so much a contradiction as a misunderstanding, but I think it's actually more an intro into the beauty of our Creator.

Genesis 1:31 says that God called His creation good. By Genesis 6:6, He was grieved by sinful man on Earth. Now, it's obvious that these are descriptions of God's feelings at different times. But if God is eternal, infinite and not bound by time, then how can this be explained.

CS Lewis, in "Miracles", proposed that we can not trust our rationale if it is the result of mindless, unplanned, irrational causes. In other words, if the string of rationality is broken in the cause-effect string going back, then there is no rationality.

The implication is that if our logic and rationality is the result of naturalistic evolution, then we can't trust that logic and rationality. If our rationality is thus caused, then the rationality of naturalism has no basis and is self-defeating and internally inconsistent.

1Jo 3:18 Little children, we must stop loving in word and in tongue, but instead love in action and in truth.

Some of my most prized possessions are the pretty pictures that my kids have drawn for me. My son draws pictures of us on the golf course or a picture of himself on the ball field. They all end up on my wall even though none of them look exactly like their objects—at least I hope not. (If they do, then I am extremely overweight, have a tiny head, and only three fingers per hand.)

What makes them important is two-fold. He cares enough to want me to have them, and he cares enough about the object (us together, playing golf) to memorialize them.