Silence. It can be empty or full.
Consider the void of space before time. Empty. Null. Dark. Yet, God spoke in the silence All that is, became.
We are threatened by silence because it is beyond us. We cannot make it speak or dance. Only God can turn that which is not into something that is. Continue reading Thoughts on Silence
I do not think humanity is living in a whole-world simulation. But because the simulation argument seems to work, what it seems to do is to uncover deep discrepancies . . . in how people think about deep reality — about this universe, multiple universes, consciousness, inferences for and against theism. (From the article)
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I have not carefully read the article I’m linking to. I’m including it here, though, because it makes a point I’ve made before (Cosmology, Culture and the Multiverse, May 2012). Scientists and cosmologists, in grappling with the questions of existence, tend to leave room for the possibility of God in their considerations whether they recognize it or not. The point is simply this: atheism is to disregard real possibilities — as closed-minded as any religious zealot. To say one is agnostic is a more honest position.
What interests me when I hear about learned men and women exploring the possibilities as Carl Sagan did in his book, Contact (later to become a movie starring Jody Foster) is that they must dodge the God solution. They have an easier time attributing the vexing mysteries of the universe to advanced civilizations, not unlike ourselves but for their evolutionary superiority, than to attribute it to an infinite, personal consciousness — Schaeffer’s “God who is there.”
Here’s the link: Is Our Universe a Fake?
Bertrand Russel was a celebrated 20th century intellectual, philosopher and atheist. He was a social critic and anti-war activist, believing on moral grounds that war was inconsistent with human goals and ideals. In 1927 he wrote, “Why I am Not a Christian,” which proved to be highly influential in a dawning age of skepticism. I must admire his candor as he followed the logical trail of his worldview. Once having excised a Creator from the body of humanity he was left with the inescapable conclusion that meaning and purpose were impossible without some way of enlivening the corpse. Continue reading A Firm Foundation of Unyielding Despair?
The problem with Christians (we who follow Jesus of Nazareth) is that we behave like we have the answers. This makes us look proud and foolish. We don’t have the answers, we have Jesus.
Because of Him we can live with the questions.
I was pondering over the first four verses in 1 John (1 John 1:1-4).
Jesus is what eternal life looks like (v. 2) as it is being lived. To bring others to the experience of Jesus is to complete the joy of faith (v. 4) and to taste eternal life now.
This kind of life is not jut a matter of duration, but a matter of quality and content. Life that goes on forever — is allowed to go on — has certain qualities like righteousness, compassion, justice and love. Lives of selfishness, malice, cruelty and hatred — that kind of life is not eternal but temporal, temporary. Moreover, it leads to eternal death.
George Bernard Shaw wrote:
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
Shaw was no Christian, yet he has observed something about the creative process that has implications for our understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God, the ultimate and preeminent Creator. That human beings have the ability to create, to imagine and to express that imagination in time and space, is at least in part, what it means to be made in His image.