God's Not Dead

Adding on to free-will . . . God allows the nonbeliever to express their beliefs. I am afraid you imagine God as a cruel dictator. In North Korea (where a true dictator actually rules), such an opinion would not even be allowed to be voiced. In God's world, you have that free choice to speak your belief. God did not create a species of robots that are forced to blindly obey Him because this would undermine the privilege we have to make free choices. God created a world that runs by laws, and in that world, free choices are allowed. He gave us moral laws to reveal His completely pure nature. These laws were designed so we could function properly and minimize damage in our lives. They are completely for our benefit, so breaking those laws result in natural consequences. We live in the best possible world, but it is not a perfect world because Adam/Eve forfeited its perfection. The imperfections in the universe do not point to the absence of an intelligent designer or poor engineering, but they rather point to the fallible nature of its inhabitants. Anything created that is finite is subject to death and deterioration. We are spiritual beings who live in physical bodies. Though the bodies decay, the spirits will live forever: Heaven or hell! The short lives we live here on Earth are by no means significant if this is all there is. God had three types of worlds he could have created: 1) No Free-Will/Choices; Automated (Robotic) Programmed Goodness 2) No Divine Intervention; Let Creation Take Its Own Course; No Natural Consequences; Survival-of-the-Fittest 3) Free-Will; Real Choices; God Enters People's Lives With Permission // Forms Personal-Intimate Relationship W/ Humans We demand our freedom and then curse the fact that we have freedom so we can turn it around to blame everything on God. He is still in control, but allows real choices with real consequences. God is an actor in His own story. "God created things which had free-will. That means creatures which can go right or wrong. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free-will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free-will? Because free-will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata - of creatures that worked like machines - would hardly be worth creating." ~C.S. Lewis~ There could be no knowledge of what good is without the contrast of evil. Would you know what light was if darkness did not exist? Hot without cold? By creating purely spiritual beings (angels, some rebelling and becoming demons) with free-will, they can and have inserted harm (disease) into humanity. But God has given us spiritual weapons (His Word and prayer) to combat these forces. God has defined evil for us in His Word. His commandments are not burdens, but rather merciful protectors of our well-being. And God has already defeated evil by becoming a man in Jesus Christ, living the perfect life we were supposed to live, and dying the agonizing death we deserve to die, absorbing our punishment, and providing full atonement and freedom from sin. And finally, evil, as a whole, will have an ultimate end. Out of His infinite love for you and I, he created the universe the way He did to be able to eliminate evil one day, once-and-for-all. Atheism is such a bankrupt worldview because it fails to deal with the true human condition: fallen and hopeless. God could get rid of all the evil in the world in a moment. All He would have to do is kill everybody. That is exactly why the flood of Noah's day took place, because there was not one mentally sane person other than Noah and his family. This story was not so much a story of judgment, but rather an expression of God's love for future generations such as ours. If God would have allowed this generation to multiply into our current spot in history, our lives would be nothing but a barren wasteland of dodging bullets. God has a plan to get rid of all the evil in the world without having to destroy us. He wants to remove all the evil in your heart. You and I both want to get rid of evil in the rest of the world, but we fail to look inward. We want God to stop evil consequences, but not our own evil actions. We want evil to stop happening to us, but not through us. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing on planet Earth that can tell someone what is truly wrong with them. The source of our pain is separation from God because of our sin. The only bridge to cross this gap is Jesus Christ. The universally true moral law is written on every human heart. Good and evil are very real and can only be truly understood in light of the existence of a transcendent authority. Naturalism fails to provide a sound foundation for objective morals. If God does not exist, objective morality is not possible. Moses knew something about the universe that Einstein did not: it simply began. The first verse in the Bible (Genesis 1:1 ~ In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth) was recorded over 3500 years ago. This claim is scientifically accurate, and would have been unknown to scientists a few centuries ago. From Aristotle to Einstein, the accepted view was that the universe had always existed. The notion that it is not necessary to look beyond nature itself for the answer to how everything began makes no sense. Our expanding universe, which explains the big-bang theory that all matter and energy once existed and exploded out of an infinitesimally small unit, demands that the Initiator of this event had no choice but to exist outside of time and space, which is exactly what is implied in Genesis. Many skeptics would rather downplay the idea of a definite beginning because of the extra scientific support this would give to back up the Bible. "At first sight one might think the strong anticlerical bias of modern science would be totally at odds with western religion. This is far from being so, however. The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the universe that openly invites the concept of creation, which so-called thermodynamic theories of the origin of life in the organic soup of biology are the contemporary equivalent of the voice in the burning bush and the tablets of Moses." ~Fred Hoyle, astronomer, coined term "big-bang"~ Attempting to conceive the existence of anything before this definite beginning is mind-bending. The logic of connecting the evidence for the universe's beginning to a Creator is too challenging to ignore. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe had a beginning. Therefore, the universe had a cause. God is eternal, which means He had no beginning. The concept of eternity is beyond the grasp of human comprehension. Therefore, questioning the creation of God is a flawed argument because that violates God's very nature: eternal. In this "ex nihilo" (out of nothing) origins model of the universe ("ex nihilo" is quoted in Genesis 1 by the way) it is false to say something physical existed prior to this initiation. The cause of the universe must be uncaused itself, must exist outside of space/time, and it must be eternal and nonmaterial. These prerequisites point directly to God. Why does the universe appear to have the purposeful intent of supporting human life? But what is amazing is that this Creator is personal. He answers prayer, judges sin, and we are responsible and accountable to Him. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here and why is anything else here? Either everything you see around you started itself, or it was started by something besides itself. This "why?" question drives many skeptical scientists, but when confronted with the question directly, they label it as silly. This is exactly what Richard Dawkins did in a public debate with John Lennox. When I ask a skeptic to define what "NOTHING" actually is prior to the big-bang, they describe nothing as something! These "nothings" can apparently do amazing things that still require God. How can order come out of chaos? There has to be some organizing principle. If everything that exists came from nothing, then the first trace of anything would have had to appear suddenly. "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing . . . Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." ~Stephen Hawking~ From the above quote, Hawking believes protons appear and disappear without cause. However, this belief contradicts Newton's laws of physics, which assert that objects were set in motion because they were influenced by other objects. Without the laws of nature, nothing would take place at all. Skeptics want me to ignore the natural laws behind the universe, simply accept they are there, and quit asking about where they came from. There is either an eternal set of natural laws or an eternal Lawgiver. The fine-tuning of our universe to permit life demands the need for an Intelligent Designer. Astrophysicists teach us that dozens of physical constants/quantities had to be carefully adjusted (fine-tuned) for the universe to produce and sustain life. Imagine a sound board with dozens of knobs ranging from one-to-one-trillion. If each knob is not precisely set, life cannot happen. To believe this happens by chance requires an enormous amount of faith. "Knobs" would include gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, etc. (the list never ends). This fine-tuning, in a tight 0.1% necessary range, prevents all the stars from collapsing into black holes. No amount of overwhelming evidence can overturn the predetermined mindset of a skeptic unless they open their heart and mind.