Dawkins keeps coming up on my You Tube page, which makes sense of course since it keeps finding more of the same of whatever it is you spend time on, and it is tempting to listen to some of it and when I do I usually get provijed into saying something about it. So an interview he had with one Alister McGraw came up and they are discussing hte probability of the existence of God and what faith is and that'sa as far as I've gonve to this point.
I long ago got tired of arguments for the existence of God based on mere reasoning because none of it proves anything in either direction. The onlyu argument tht convinces me is the one from scripture, The Bible of course not any other scripture. Christian theology it seems to me answers all the relevant questions and nothing else does. I don't care if God seems provable or improbable to the antheists I think you have to have a proposition about the existence of God directly experiencesd by people which is what is found in the Bible. Personal testimomnies on top of that may help but personal testimonies without that are of no use iether. If or course you've found the Bible so odious you couldn't believe it for that reason alone, which is apparently Dawkins' position, then there is no place to go from there. But his rejection of it on those tgrounds is misguided as he just has no feeling for the context of the actions he is vilifying, as I discuss in a post a few days ago.
It is only the Bible that gives us a n explanation for our common experience of a sort of blankness when we think of God, hwe have no experience,k ono eability to recognize a God, it's not in us you wcould say. That is true for the entire human race as we find ourselves in this world. And it's only the bible that gives us the explanation of the Fall or Original Sin as havigng deprived us for the ability to sense the presence of God. Dawkins mocks tht idea too of course, but as with the rest of his mockerings it's just hthat he has no rael understanding of the meaning of "total depravity" as it is put in the arguments about Calvin's theology. Tottal depravity does not rmean we are wholly evil as so many seem to think, it means we are cut off from the highest good at the very least and cannot make a right judgment or right decision about God and His moral Law because of our deficiency or depravity.
Of course he have some sort of moral sense. We have a conscience. We are all made in the image of God, Christians don't deny that. There is a goodness in us considering the depravity and so on. Howeverk, if the claim is that we don't need God to make right judgments accurtely all the time that is wrong. Huamnity without God thinks abortion is just fine for instance, or pornography, or divorce, and has no problem with covetousness which is one of the vforbidden ten of the ten commandments. Most would accept murder and lying and stealing as sins or moral failures or whateve they want to scall them, maybe not so much adultery and as I said not covetousness, and certainly nothe five commancments of the first table, loving God above all others, having no other gods, not taking His name in vain, honoring the Sabbath and always honoring parents. All that is problematic to one degree or another to humanity without God. So while we have some moral sense it's not the same as the one we'd have through the Biblical God.But then they just say they are right and the Bible is wrong and so what.
When I first understood the idea of Original Sin during the years when I was reading my way to God as it were, I was thrilled because it seemed to me to answer a million questions I hadn't even formulated clearly. Why there is evil in the world at all for instance, why there is war, why there is so much hatred and so on. Why there is murder, how there could be a Ted Bundy or a Stalin and so on. Finally getting a sense of iroriginal sin added to the faith in God that was started to grow although I didn't yet grasp much about the role Christ played, what the cross had to do with any of it and so on. I wasn't reading the bible, thoughj I was getting quotes from it in many of the books I was reading.
I don't think you can conclude much of anything about ehe existence of God without the Bigle, and apparently that doesn't do it for a Dawkins either though for me it makes all the difference.
Fatih is the substance of things hoped for, tevidence of things unseen. Well, yes, God is Spirit, we can't see Him. If we are born again we have a sense of HIs presence at times but He's not physical and we can know Him only through faith. Christ once walked the earth and was a real physical presence for those who knew HIm but we have to know Him by faith now. And we know all the tenets of the religion by faith, that we are saived by belief in His death of r us on the cross and so on. That's what faith is. I tdon't think other realigions have faith in the true sense of the term. People seem to think it merely means you believe there is a God. Pretty minimal idea though. Faith in the biblical sense tells us a lot about God and allows us to grow in knowledge of Him. That can't happen in a religion that doesn't even describe God as the Bible does. The bible shows us God in many diffedrent contexts so we accumulate a sense of Him far beyond the notionj of some vauge entityu.
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