The Existence of God

Hayd, I tried to contact you be email to tell you that the server has been down and I've been locked out of the system for days. You can call that a forfeit if you want but it would be a bit dishonest. God is the creator of all material and spiritual existence. God is the being who is eternal, all mighty, and all knowing. Another attribute of the being God is that He exists as three persons. The one being God exists in an eternal relationship. One of the essences of God and this relationship is love. (1 John 4:8 "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.") When God made people; He wanted people who could be free to choose Him and enter into a loving relationship with Him. This implies that they can reject him and go their own way. Goodness (Morality) is whatever is consistent with God's will. God is the source of all existence and this would include parameters like goodness. God is incapable of doing something immoral because God is incapable of acting against His own will. The moment He tries to act against His own will, that is His will. God is the owner of all things in a very complete sense. If God destroys something or allows it to be destroyed it cannot be said that God is doing something wrong. Isn't God free to do what He wants with His own things? God's parameters for goodness need not be feared. They are controlled as it were by God's nature. They come out a certain way because of who He is. God is love. We can know that God doesn't have bad intentions in what He does or allows. Modern scientific thought tells us that it appears that some 13.8 billion years ago, all of time, space, and energy, which then led to matter, erupted into existence at a single point. (http://www.space.com...) The source of this ultimately would seem to have to be a source that is not constrained by time and space. It also seems that it has to be a personal agent or you go backwards into a chain of infinite regress. If it's a impersonal force then it would be a repeating one. How do you get a universe that has an arrow to time coming from an impersonal source that doesn't have one. Further observation of the Universe shows us that many properties of the Universe are "Fine tuned".(www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpIiIaC4kRA) Upon investigation it seems that a Creator was involved in the mechanics of the Universe. This implies a mind behind the Universe. This supports the idea of a personal Creator of the Universe and not merely an impersonal source. I warned Hayd not to base arguments off of semantics. The danger is that all someone has to do is undermine your definition of a word and your argument collapses. Hayd wants to use his own definition of omnipotent and ignore how it's actually used in theology. Building an argument based on a caricature of someone's beliefs is called a "Straw man argument". Here is how the word "Omnipotent" is actually used in theology: "God is all-powerful and able to do whatever he wills. Since his will is limited by his nature, God can do everything that is in harmony with his perfections." ((Thiessen, Henry, Lectures in Systematic Theology. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), p. 82.) Contradiction would be, by definition, not in harmony with God's perfections. Thus Hayd's argument fails. People commuting acts of evil is not evidence of God being less than morally perfect. It is only evidence that God let's people make choices and doesn't generally interfere with them. I believe that the greatest good from God's perspective is not that there above all be minimal suffering. I believe that God's first principle of greatest good is that there be maximum possible freedom. Minimal suffering is good but it isn't ultimate. This being the case, God will allow moral evil in order to respect human freedom. If the reader has watched Star Trek at all he or she has heard of the "Prime Directive" this is the Star Fleet principle that they should not interfere the affairs of civilizations or in the internal affairs of non member worlds. Star Fleet believes this because greater harm is done by interfering and disrupting the natural evolution of a society. God wants free relationships with His created beings. This requires that He respects our choices. Generally He does. Finally, the passage in Genesis that Hayd criticizes is another example of basing an argument on semantics as you will see. Hayd uses the King James Bible. The trouble with this is that the usage of various words has changed in nuance since the 17th century. This is a modern rendering of the relevant portion of the passage: NASB Genesis 6:6 "6 The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved [a]in His heart." Hayd stresses the word "Repent" in the KJV which is here rendered "Sorry". Hayd wished to say that the word means to make a mistake but that's not the Hebrew word used here. The Hebrew word for mistake is "The Biblical Hebrew word for mistake is: shagag and it means: error (5), mistake (1), unintentionally (14). http://biblehub.com... The Hebrew word in the text is: nacham and it means: to be sorry, console oneself. http://biblehub.com... This passage can equally, in my opinion, be understood to mean that while God was fully aware that free people would make these choices and end up in this state, the time had arrived that God's heart was fully broken by it and it was now the appropriate time to carry out judgement. God did not make a mistake; nor was He caught by surprise. It's also important to realize the language is used about God that is not always philosophically and theologically correct. Here are two examples. Genesis 11:5 The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. Genesis 18:21 "I will go down now, and see if they have done entirely according to its outcry, which has come to Me; and if not, I will know." Does God actually need to go and see something? No. These things are stated this way for cultural and figurative purposes.