| The two most common objections to the reality
of God, that seem to the skeptic so logical and historically irrefutable,
are generally -
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| 1. Injustice ... | the unending suffering of the innocent | |
| In
this regard the Skeptic says -
'God
is either good OR all-powerful,
but He CANNOT reasonably be BOTH!' |
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| Voltaire (Arouet) expressed this objection
in his rejection of the God of the Bible; believing that history and
the human condition show that either -
but that He simply cannot reasonably be both.
That is, if God is - He either won't or can't help our world, and He is therefore not the God of the Bible! |
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This deserves an answer, and every Christian
ought to understand what the Bible has to say on this issue.
The Bible itself echoes the humanitarian concerns of the skeptic in the words of suffering Job:
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(Job 24:12). |
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The suffering of innocents is a characteristically
sad feature of history and of our human condition. The primary agent
of this suffering is humanity itself, both directly and indirectly. |
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CS Lewis wrote - "Try to exclude the possibility
of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills
involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself." |
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| The Bible's answer to this desperate tragedy,
and why God doesn't just stop it all, begins at the Bible's own beginning
- in the very first chapter of its first book - Genesis One. |
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| 1.1. Authority | ||||||
| Essentially, and to put it very crudely, humanity was designed to 'play God' within its natural environment. The Bible gives this unique perspective on humanity's critical and key influence upon the totality of this planet and its environs: God's intrinsic design of humanity was to represent Him, to rule on-His-behalf! |
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It is only within this perspective that the act
of making humanity in God's 'image' is to be understood. This has
nothing to do with 'spirituality' or 'morality', and even less to
do with the shape of the human anatomy. |
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This Bible-perspective is introduced in Genesis with a statement:
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| In reverse order, then - | ||||||
The Scope of the Mandate of Human Authority (1:28)
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| This authority-over-all, which the human race
was instructed/designed by God to exercise, was not the crass brutality
that the armies of history have tragically demonstrated, or the commercial
plundering of natural resources that blights our planet. This authority
was to be representative of the Creator Himself,
a creator whose character is expressed in the design of that creation
- in all its rich beauty and wisdom. |
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The Delegated Character of Human Authority (1:27)
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This authority and the responsibility that results
from it is not based on any religious notion and even less on any
social structure. It is intrinsic to the design of creation itself
from the hand of its Creator. |
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For this reason the abuse of the authority naturally
brings sad consequences in human experience and the world around us.
The level of human corruption and abuse sometimes cries out from its
victims for redress (whether the victims be human, animal or even
the plants and stones around us, Hab.2:1; Jon.4:11), for God to intervene
in His justice and mercy. |
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| 1.2. Intervention by Invitation – Only! | ||||||
God does not go back on His word. To intervene
uninvited is to contradict the delegation of human responsibility
described above! There can be no divine intervention therefore, except
by human invitation (prayer) alone, or else it is to close
this chapter of human history and end human rule. |
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This finality is what the Bible anticipates as
the end of human history in the return of Jesus Christ to rule (the
only man to have fully carried out this Genesis mandate). Thus, every
judgment of God recorded in Bible history is a preview or sample of
the judgment to come; whether that be of cities such as Sodom an Gomorrah,
or of empires such as the Babylonian. |
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The delegated nature of human authority with
its responsibility means that there is a built-in entitlement to appeal
to the Source of that authority by those who carry its responsibility. |
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Thus, communion with the Creator, or prayer as
it became, is intrinsic to the very design of human authority. God's
intervention in answer to this is the record of the subsequent history
reflected in our Bible. |
| 2. Purposelessness ... |
the
lack of ultimate purpose for our existence
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In
this regard the Skeptic says - 'If God really made us to know
him, her, or it, that is, to be appreciated, then all of this [the whole universe] was just to have our APPLAUSE. What an egocentric waste!' |
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Or else, perhaps
put more rationally: at best, God is simply the totality of everything
- so we also are God!
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| So . . . | Of the fossil record's
apparent lack of evidence for purposeful design: |
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"Science does
not do very well when trying to deal with topics like justice, hope
and love. Any arguments that they can all be reduced to some sort of biochemical determinism have the same ring of trying to make the facts fit the theory that the arguments trotted out by literal creationists do when confronted by the fossil record." (Janet Ralph in CBC News Viewpoint, February 1, 2005). |
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The human need to see 'meaning' in the events
and situations of life is well known. People do need hope that everything
is not meaningless. But that does not mean that meaning must therefore
be defined within the parameters of our human understanding. That
would be an unwarranted leap of logic. |
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Job's 'comforters' assumed this, and pointed fingers
at Job accordingly. If God is just, Job then had somehow to deserve
the tragic situation which he found himself in. This presumption the
Bible rejects!
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For this reason also Hinduism falls back on the
idea of previous existences to explain undeserved benefits or burdens, if justice is real.
'Karma' caused it: undefined injustice or merit out of sight of our
present life.
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Jesus confronted this human need to rationalize
purpose and meaning to fit within the human framework of understanding
when his disciples passed a comment on a man who was born blind.
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That is - why was he born blind?
If God is good and in charge - what justice is served by this tragic
situation? Note how Jesus answered: |
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| "As He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His
disciples asked Him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that
he was born blind?' Jesus answered,'It was not
that this man sinned, or his parents,
but that the works of God might be displayed in
him.
We must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.'" |
(John 9:1-5). | |
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What "works of God"?
Jesus was demonstrating it - that which expresses God's character in human relationships: primarily, compassion and all that flows from it! |
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The building of this attitude, and the character
it forms, changes people - changes society - and begins a process
that leads to a reversal of all that distresses the history of humanity.
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Christ came to take our blame before God (so 'blame' is not relevant)
and open the way as a light for us to follow.
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Jesus Himself is the standard for all future
existence, the 'image' of God, that is - authority to represent the
Creator in all His creation: |
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"...because whom He did foreknow,
He also did fore-appoint, to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He [Jesus] might be first-born among many brethren ..." |
(Romans 8:29) | |
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Strangely, many apparently
intelligent atheists such as Richard Dawkins betray a surprising ignorance
in their passionate refutation of faith in God. For instance Dawkins'
rebuttal of Pascal's faith assumes that one cannot choose to believe.
Whereas the ability to choose faith/trust toward God by a decision
of the will, rather than as an emotion (produced by religious background
or environment), is the very basis of the moral accountability of humanity
toward God. At least, so says the Bible, which is the basis of Christianity.
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Dawkin's presumptious error |
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| As Prof. C.S. Lewis said: | "Man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." | |
| And for those who are not in that 'cell', Lewis also wrote - | ||
| "If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy - are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset." | ||
| Finally from Lewis: | "We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." | |