14 The story of reality – part 1, Creation

“In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth”. These are the first words in the Bible.

God has always existed, but the universe has not. It was brought into being by God, who is greater than his creation and separate from it. It was not a cosmic accident, as atheists are forced to conclude. It is not one with its creator, as believed by followers of Eastern religions.

God made the universe out of nothing, by the power of his word. It was designed for his purpose. It was well made, it was very good. God made the world and placed it in its orbit. He caused the separation of dry land from water. He formed the atmosphere and the seasons. He made the plants and animals, each after their own kind.

God made the first humans in his own image, thus we are very different from the rest of his creatures. God is a spirit, so it was not God’s physical image. We are like God but different from animals in our spiritual and mental abilities.

God made our world, so it is his. God has not left us to our own devices. He loves us and made us with the capacity to love him. Humans are the peak of God’s creation but we don’t have the right to do what we want. We are only managers and we are accountable to God for the way we use or abuse his world.

We are not part of God but we are like God.  We have a moral conscience, and we are able to relate to God in a much greater and more personal way than any other creature. Human life and death is in God’s hands, and we should not usurp his authority.

God gave the first humans free will, because he wanted them to freely choose to follow him. He designed humans to be happiest when they trusted his moral judgements. But something went wrong. The next article describes the fall of humanity.

13 The story of reality

Common sense tells us that our world is a mixture of good and bad. It is an amazing place. Humans have amazing abilities and do many good things. But our nightly news shows us the world is also full of disasters and wickedness. Good news items are rare. Nobody can argue that we live in a perfect world.

Why is the world like this? It is the role of a worldview to answer this question – to explain reality, warts and all.

A worldview can be likened to a story of the way the world is, the way it was and the way we believe it can become. Every good story has four parts. It has a beginning (part 1), and then something goes wrong (part 2). The longest part of most stories tells how the wrong gets fixed (part 3) and that brings a final resolution (part 4).

All these characteristics determine how the rest of the story unfolds. The Christian worldview fits this four part model; its four parts are creation, fall, redemption and restoration

Islam is a 2 part story: of creation and a final accounting, It explains evil as a failure to obey God’s will and considers not being a Muslim the greatest evil. Some adherents to Islam therefore argue that killing non-Muslims is a good thing. We can know God’s will through the Koran but little of His character apart from His greatness and compassionate.

Atheism is a 1 part story. There is no eternal creator, so we really are quite alone in the universe without any sense of purpose (no redemption or restoration). Atheists cannot explain how something goes wrong when there is no designer and therefore no right way in the first place (no fall).

The Eastern way of thinking is also a 1 part story, though some forms teach reincarnation as a kind of second part. Most say we are all part of the divine, equally with the rest of nature. All of nature should be worshipped as such. This is also at the heart of the western green movement. Most forms see matter as evil and non-material reality as good.

In the Christian story, the universe was made by a person who always existed. It was designed for his purpose. The universe is not eternal but God is. Therefore the world does not revolve around humans, God is the main actor. This has implications, we fit into God’s plan or we become awkward misfits. God made it, so it is his. Humans don’t have the right to do what they want. God made us to love him. But God is distinct and separate from his creation.

The wonderful truth of this is that the universe continues to be controlled by some One, not some thing. We are not abandoned to the fates or to the blind and brutal forces of the natural world. Instead, we have a powerful King carefully watching over us.

12 God has a claim on our lives

Here is a summary of these articles so far.

There is overwhelming evidence that our universe and everything in it were created by God. It is not just a random accident as many would claim. The evidence clearly shows that the universe had a definite beginning, so needed a cause beyond itself. The conditions required for life are so fine tuned as to require an intelligent designer outside of space and time. I am convinced that that designer is the God of the Bible.

Science can explain how many things work, but it cannot explain why we are here and what we ought to do (our moral choices). Without God, attempts to decide morality just become personal preferences of the strongest and the loudest voices, and can be very dangerous. This is happening right now in our country.

Historians now agree that Jesus really did live as a human on earth and the Gospels, which tell us about his life, are valid history.

Humans have a deep seated belief in life after death. Jesus rose from the dead and spent time with his followers afterwards. This is the clearest evidence we have of life after death, so we should listen to what Jesus tells us about life and death and what happens afterwards.

What are Hay people saying about these articles?  Most agree that there is a God. This is good but the really important question is whether this belief affects our lives. Is belief in God something that guides your everyday decisions, the way you see things and the way you act?

Each of us has developed our own built-in guidance system, or set of glasses through which we see the world. Many Australians believe in horoscopes and fortune telling, Christians believe God hears our prayers, atheists say it is all nonsense because the only reality is what we can see, feel, taste, smell and hear, physical realities. These are examples to show some of the very different frameworks, or worldviews, through which people see reality.

But it is more complex than that. Most Australians do not have one consistent worldview, they see life as a smorgasbord of ideas, and they pick and choose at random. So most people may say they believe in God but don’t acknowledge God’s claim on our lives.  They base many life decisions on what suits them best at the time or some competing value.

In the next few articles, I want to explain the basic ideas of the Christian worldview, the way I see it. Now you can see what I had in mind when I chose the title for these articles.  

11 Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

If Jesus really did rise from the dead that first Easter Sunday, then people everywhere must take his claims to be God very seriously.

The following four facts of history are accepted by the majority of scholars, both religious and secular.

First, Jesus died on a Roman cross on Friday and was buried in a tomb. There can be no doubt, the Roman soldiers were good at their job and they had to confirm Jesus was dead before their boss would release the body. His enemies, the Jewish leaders confirmed he was buried in the tomb of a wealthy man named Joseph.

Second, that tomb was empty on Sunday morning. When Jesus’ enemies wanted to stop people believing he was alive, all they had to do was produce his dead body. They couldn’t. Some argued his followers had stolen his body, but that required getting past the Roman guards, a virtually impossible task. Other ideas have been proposed, but they really don’t stand up to the evidence.

Third, numerous witnesses testified—at great peril to themselves—that they saw Jesus alive multiple times after he had died, that they met with him and even ate with him. Even the most sceptical scholar today accepts that Jesus’ followers really did believe he was alive. One theory said they were having hallucinations, but that doesn’t hold true, because it is hard to believe that over 500 different people, over more than a month, could have had the same hallucination about the same person who they all were quite certain (for good reason) had been killed and buried just days or weeks before.

Fourth, the group of timid followers changed into fearless advocates. One of these, Thomas, was a sceptic, yet he is recorded as travelling to India to tell people about Jesus. Another man, the mortal enemy of Christians, Saul of Tarsus, was convinced he had seen Jesus risen from the dead, and spent the rest of his life travelling through Asia, Greece and Rome, arguing the case for Jesus. Both these men, and many others, were killed because they refused to stop talking about Jesus.

But this leaves open the question, “Why did Jesus have to die and rise again from the dead?” That is the big question we will look at next.

I have relied heavily for the comments above on a book written earlier this year, called “The Story of Reality” by Gregory Koukl. It is available from Amazon in a print or digital edition. There are many similar books but this one is very logical and very easy to read.

10 Who did Jesus say he was?

Jesus really got up the noses of the politicians. He was very popular with the ordinary people, which caused the main group of political/religious leaders (Pharisees) to quickly see him as a big threat to their power base. His words and his actions undermined their authority. Have a look for yourself, read one of the Gospels, particularly Matthew or Luke.

The leaders tried to trick Jesus with loaded questions but every time he saw through their agenda and outsmarted them. They eventually grew so worried that they arrested him on a false charge and even paid people to lie about him in court.

At his trial, the leaders accused Jesus of claiming he was the Son of God. He acknowledged their charge. This was the most serious charge they could make against any man. To the Jews the name of God was holy. To claim equality with God was blasphemy, punishable by death.

Why did the Jewish leaders accuse Jesus of this? Because that is what he had claimed for himself all along. The Gospels tell us that Jesus said he was the Son of God, the giver of eternal life, one who forgives sins, the future judge, the saviour, and much more.

To people today, Jesus’ most controversial statement would be his claim to be the only way to God. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me" (John 14:6).

How should we take these claims of Jesus? We have already shown that experts today accept Jesus as a real historic person. He is also acknowledged as a great moral teacher and an example to follow. He cared for the poor and needy and he was very critical of those who took advantage of them. His life has inspired millions of people through the ages. But when Jesus claims to be God, is a step too far?

C S Lewis answered this question in the following way;

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis’ logic is watertight. If Jesus was who he claimed to be, then he is Lord and God, and that has huge implications for all of us today. Read one of the Gospels, ask me for a free copy or find one online, there are several websites.  You can download the Bible for free here  

09 Is Jesus more than just a swear word?

Was Jesus a real person? If so, was he just a man, or was he God in human form? Was he put to death on a Roman cross? Was he buried in a tomb?  Did he come back from the dead?

We need to carefully consider each of these questions because much more hangs on them than we are inclined to think, particularly the last.

Many people dismiss Jesus as a fairy story; they say that he never really lived on this earth. Authorities in Ancient History no longer think that way. Professor Edwin Judge, from Macquarie University in Sydney, is accepted as a world expert in this field. He said in a recent interview;

Ancient historians take for granted the historic existence of Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are accepted as good reliable history sources.

Some people once believed Jesus was a figure of the imagination. Nobody argues that now, certainly no historians do.

Strangely, many of the same people who deny Jesus existed never question the existence of Plato or Julius Caesar, despite the fact there is far more written evidence, for Jesus than for either of these historic figures, or for any other figure of ancient history for that matter. These pieces of evidence for Jesus are also from copies of manuscripts dated a lot closer in time to the actual events, than evidence for other figures in ancient history.

Jesus is mentioned as a real person in the writings of at least two reputable historians of that time, Josephus (37 to 100 AD) and Tacitus (56 to 120 AD).

The main historic evidence for Jesus life is in the four Bible books mentioned by Professor Judge, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Despite what you may read or see in the media, these four Gospels are reliable history. That is Professor Judge’s point.

They were separate records, written by different people for different audiences, comparatively soon after the events they portray. It was many years later that these books were collected together to become part of the Bible.

The four Gospels are not just biographies. They were written to explain the purpose of Jesus’ life, of his death and his resurrection. Read them and you will see exactly who Jesus claimed to be. Read them to find hope, to help you answer your questions about life after death.

08 Believing in life after death

We were all shocked a few years ago when the cricketer Phillip Hughes was hit in the neck by a ball and later died. Following that tragic event, several Australian cricketers developed a habit of raising their bats and looking up. This gesture was accepted as their way of saying that Hughes was looking down on them from “up there”. Is there any basis for this very common belief?

Until they are faced with the reality of death, most people don’t seriously consider if there is something beyond. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers, the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and of Pixar Animation Studios, didn’t think there was when he gave a speech at Harvard University in 2005. He said;

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Steve Jobs was saying that we should live a useful life for a few years, and then get out of the way, because there is nothing after you die.

Five years later, talking to his biographer shortly before he died of cancer, he had mixed feelings. Facing the threat of impending death he could no longer be so glib about it.

Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe it's because I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

Then he paused for a second and he said, 'Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone.' He paused again, and he said, 'And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.’

What decision he came to in the end we will never know in this life but it is clear that the prospect of death prompted him to question his former beliefs. This too is evidence that continued life beyond the grave is a deep-seated longing of the human heart; a hunger for something that really exists.

When we face death, many of us wonder to ourselves if there is something more.

But we don’t have to wonder. There is good evidence for life after death; it is found in the historic, bodily resurrection of Jesus. His resurrection was proof that death no longer has the last word. This is really what Christianity is all about.

07 We all believe in God but we refuse to believe.

Belief in God is part of our make-up, but most of us choose to reject it. How can I make such a statement?

We all have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong. Our conscience is indirect evidence for the existence of God because we cannot explain where our knowledge of good and evil comes from without accepting that it came from God.

C. S. Lewis explained this well. He was a very famous scholar and the author of many books, including the Narnia series.

Lewis was an atheist. In his book, “Mere Christianity”, Lewis explains his change to belief in God.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

Lewis realised he had a built-in moral framework, which did not come from the world of nature. We don’t blame a cat for killing a bird; it is in its nature. But we call a boy cruel if he starts killing birds for fun. Where does our sense of right and wrong, of justice, come from? There is no evidence to suggest that it somehow evolved.

“Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies”.

“Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple”.

Much against his will, Lewis had to admit that his moral sense came from outside of himself. The core of it was common to all of humanity but was not found in any other creatures. It had to come from the creator of humanity; it had to be God-given. So Lewis reluctantly believed that God was God, and he became a Christian.

We may not be able to think as clearly as Lewis but we can all think well enough to see that reason and conscience are consistent with a belief in God and cannot be explained without him. 

06 What next?

This series of opinion pieces has been running in the Grazier since mid September. It began by making the point that believing in God is quite a reasonable thing to do, in fact more reasonable than believing the universe came into being by chance.

Belief in God is at the foundation of many values we have traditionally held, values which are under increasing attack.

My motivation to write these articles was a book, “Practical Ethics” 2^nd edition, which I read recently. The author is Professor Peter Singer, a well known atheist, listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world today. Professor Singer sometimes appears on ABC’s Q&A.

In the preface to his book, Singer says that he approaches issues such as human equality, abortion, euthanasia, and the environment on the basis that humans do not have “any distinctive worth or inherent value that puts them above members of other species”.  Singer denies any need to believe in God.

He believes rational and self-conscious animals (and he believes many animals are) can be defined as persons. Conversely he believes newborn infants and severely disabled people may not be persons, if they are not rational and self-conscious. If you read his book, you can see where this takes him on issues such as abortion and euthanasia. He also believes that sexual relations raise no unique moral issues at all; he is on the record as saying he sees no inherent problem with bestiality (human-animal relations).

These types of beliefs represent a huge shift from Christian values. Christians believe that God created humans in His image. We are distinct from all other animals. God gives life and humans must always respect this in decisions about life and death.

Things change dramatically when you begin to leave God out of the equation, and things are changing rapidly in Australia at present. Proposals for change such as same sex marriage are not one-off decisions. They are part of a flood of change bearing down on us, and we must be aware of these things. If this trend continues, it will have far reaching consequences, inevitably moving to the whole range of values espoused by Peter Singer.

Peter.

05 The limits of Science.

Imagine you walk into your kitchen and you see a freshly baked cake, just out of the oven. It looks and smells very nice. If you think in a scientific way, you may ask yourself questions like “what sort of cake is it?”, “what ingredients and how long did it take to cook?”, or even “what are the chemical processes involved in producing that lovely aroma?”.

But you are more likely to ask two questions that science can’t answer, “Why has that cake been cooked?” and  “Ought I cut myself a piece?” Science just cannot answer questions of “why” and “ought”.

Some people argue that scientific knowledge has advanced so much that religion is now completely unnecessary. It is out of date in our modern world.

People who make this claim are going well beyond the limits of science. They are actually turning science into a religion. This religion can be called Scientism.

In Scientism, there is nothing beyond the material (what you can see, taste, feel, smell or touch), or at least nothing worth knowing in comparison with what you can know from science.

But, science cannot tell us why mum baked the cake (to give it to a new neighbour), or why we better not touch it (it is not our cake and stealing is wrong). These things surely are worth knowing.

Questions about why we ought to do this and not do that (moral values) are very important. Consistent followers of Scientism have no answers because they believe we are the result of time and random chance, and moral values are just personal preferences. They say that we are just like the rest of the animal kingdom and we can follow our own natural urges, knowing nothing of right and wrong. Such a view is extremely dangerous and depressing.

Science is limited to questions about how matter works and has nothing to say about other questions that are most important to us as human beings. Science is completely silent on questions of God’s existence. So when the Bible says that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, science cannot contradict it.

If you want to read all issues so far of “The way I see it” you can find the complete series to date on the web site https://thewayhay.blogspot.com.au

Peter

04 Argument from design, the Fine Tuning of the Universe

If you have ever attended a symphony concert, you will remember the orchestra tuning up at the beginning. The individual instruments are already kept in perfect condition, but they have to be tuned to each other. The first violin plays a chord and everybody else tunes to it. If this important step were neglected, the orchestra wouldn’t sound as good.

Our universe is fine tuned to a much greater degree than any orchestra. Constants, such as gravity, magnetic force, speed of light and many others, have to be tuned to an amazing degree or life on earth would not be possible.

For example if the gravitational constant was a bit stronger, by a value of 1 divided by 10 with 60 zeroes after it (an extremely small fraction) the big bang would have pulled all atoms together into a big crunch. If it was weaker by a similar amount, it would have spread the atoms out so widely that they never would have gathered into stars and galaxies.

The other constants of nature possess this same feature. Change any of them, and the resulting universe becomes very different. And remarkably, every one of these different values leads to a universe without life in it.

Which makes us ask the question, Is this universe the result of chance? It is much more reasonable to see this as evidence for the existence of a designer.

Imagine you lived on the edge of town, with a large vacant paddock next door, and you went away for a few years.  When you returned, you saw several new houses, one house under construction and foundations for others. There were frames stacked up, and trenches for plumbing. Would you say this was randomly produced by blind chance, or evidence for a designer and a builder? The evidence for design in our universe is much stronger than for the construction of a new housing estate.

The fine tuning argument may be new to you. I recommend you look at a short video online.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/transcript-fine-tuning-argument

03 Who made God?

 Ïf God made everything, then who made God”. This is a question often asked by the students in my scripture classes at school. Let me give you two statements, one is logically true and one is not.

1. Everything needs a maker
2. Everything that is made needs a maker.

The first statement can’t be true because you can keep pushing the question back one step and you get to the place of my students. Logically, there has to be what we can term an uncaused cause at the beginning of everything. So the second statement has to be true.

Scientists used to believe the Universe always existed in a steady state, neither expanding nor contracting. Therefore they believed the universe was the uncaused cause of everything.

But now the accepted belief of most scientists is that the Universe is expanding and it began as a single point, infinitely heavy infinitely small and infinitely powerful, about 13.7 billion years ago. They call this the Big Bang (not the TV show) and it marks the beginning of the universe, the beginning of space and time.

Which leaves the big question, what is the uncaused cause of the Universe? Where did the mass and energy and the intelligence for the big bang come from. It must have come from somewhere, because the Universe was made and everything that is made needs a maker. It is perfectly reasonable to call this uncaused cause God, and therefore to accept that God has always existed.

I am very happy for feedback, through this Blog, thee pages of the Grazier or catch up personally.

Here is a short video explaining this argument in slightly more detail.

http://fervr.net/videos/does-god-exist

Peter. 

02 The Laws of our Universe

The movie Groundhog Day is about a man re-living the same day over and over and over. Every time he wakes up it's Groundhog Day again, and people always say the same things and do the same things over and over.

Groundhog Day is obviously fiction. Things just don’t happen like that. The sun comes up every morning and it really is a brand new day. This is what we expect; it is a law of nature. We just take the laws of nature for granted.

It is the same with our machinery. When things go wrong, we look for a logical cause. We expect things to behave according to proven laws. Sometimes we think our computers are doing random things and they have minds of their own, but the experts always reassure us there is a sensible reason when our equipment fails.

We live in a universe governed by a particular set of laws. Should we expect this? Albert Einstein said “The most incomprehensible thing about our universe is that it is comprehensible”. In other words, it is beyond understanding that the universe is governed by fixed laws and equally baffling that our human minds can understand and apply these laws.

We could be living in a universe where random things like Groundhog Day happen all the time. But we aren’t. Where did the laws governing our Universe come from?

Could our Universe be the result of pure chance and a very large passage of time? Yes but this is such a remote possibility that we should look for a better explanation. The simplest and best conclusion is that there was a creative mind behind the universe.

Charles Darwin was not sure what he believed. He wrote in a letter to a young admirer, “… the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide.”

Johannes Kepler was a brilliant early astronomer. Of his discoveries in astronomy, he said "I was merely thinking God's thoughts after him”. He was discovering the laws of the universe that God had designed.

There is no direct scientific evidence that can be used to prove either that God exists or that he doesn’t. An America study in 2009 indicated 51% of scientists believed in some form of deity or higher power. It is definitely not unscientific to believe in God.

I am very happy for feedback, comment on this blog, through the pages of the Riverine Grazier or catch me down the street and have a coffee and a chat.

Peter. 

01 Belief in God

This blog first appeared in the Riverine Grazier, Hay on 20 Sept 2017

Have you noticed how hard it is to get volunteers for community groups? Even in the six years I have lived in Hay, some groups have closed, some have got smaller. There are some that have started up, but all seem to struggle to attract members.

Community groups are very important in towns like Hay, they provide valuable support, they give people a reason to look forward to the day, they develop friendships, and they provide a positive outlet for people’s energy. You can probably think of other benefits.

Churches are one set of community groups that are struggling more than most. Some may say they have passed their use-by-date and it would be good to see them all close. More common is the view that “church is not my thing”, I have no need for that.

But I wonder if something important has been missed. In 2013, Mccrindle Research reported 43% of those surveyed said church was beneficial for themselves and 88% said they were beneficial for the community. Churches must have some community value.

Church attendance is linked to whether we believe in God, and that has declined.

In 1949, a Gallup Poll reported that 95 per cent of Australians believed in God.

In 2016, according to Mccrindle, more than half (55%) of the population believes in God, defined as the Creator of the universe, the Supreme Being.

If God really does exist, if God made the universe and he made you and me, then it is important to take his presence seriously. Over the next few weeks, I want to give you some strong evidence that God really does exist, and explore the consequences.

I am very happy for feedback, on this blog, through the Riverine Grazier or catch me down the street and have a coffee and a chat.

Peter.