I truly believe you can prove God exists in multiple ways, but the best is in firstly accepting that the Bible is His Word to His creation, and thus obviously He will reveal Himself through it. But aside from the obvious texts where God just states who He is, He has placed a lot of material in there to prove Himself to a sceptical world, and to those who at the very least, are willing to consider it.
The most important proof is still Creation. I know many of you who read this blog subscribe to Darwin’s theories, but just stop and think laterally for once. Aside from the unbelievable twists you have to take to provide any mechanism for getting from goo to a zoo let alone mankind, think about this. If man had evolved from an ape no matter how many years it might have taken him to get intelligence (personally I think he’d have become extinct before it could have ever been a reality but anyway), after all that hard work and billions of years of evolving why, but why would he then have determined he needed to create a god in any sense? Would he not have figured he was a god to have come so far in his own journey of evolution - it would have been a backward step to consider having any Being above him, let alone a God who would demand so much!???
And if you were that first breed of new intelligent thinking (wo)men, would you have created a god who demanded as much from you as the JudeoChristian God did of the Jewish people (one of the oldest races still existing on the face of the earth today!), and a Patriarchal God at that? Wouldn’t you more likely have created a lovely wishy-washy god of certainly superior intelligence but not too much perhaps, and one that you could understand or even manipulate? A god who indeed did love everybody without exception and who would never even consider the notion of hell? And wouldn’t you also create a god who would have provided for creation (if you wished to consider creationism) in a heartbeat and not 6 days? Why would anyone try to create the tough love JudeoChristian God we as Christians now worship? How could man even at his best imagination in the 1st century BC conceive the notion of a God who would become His creation and allow His creation to kill him in order to appease His own requirement for a payment to be made for sin?? Come to that – how would you ever recognise that anything you ever did was wrong – why and how would you develop a conscience if you had evolved from goo, and thus had no awareness of a “Higher Power” to quote a New Age term who could show you the purpose of a conscience?? There’s just seriously no rationale for adhering to the evolutionary concept for humans in any sense (except to try to deny God’s existence and thus your responsiblity to obey Him).
Have you understood the breadth of the earth? Tell, if you know it all! Where is the way where light dwells? And where is the place of darkness, that you should take it to its boundary, and that you should know the paths to its house? Job 38:18
But more solid proof yet for God’s existence lies in prophecy. Scattered throughout scripture are multiple predictions of the future couched in language that can certainly take some fairly disciplined study but some of which are blatantly obvious. The volume of prophecies written about Jesus are overwhelming, and all came true, but the more interesting ones are those for this time which speak volumes to us now and are incredible because the implications are staggering.
Here’s some of the ones already fulfilled:
The Messiah will be the Son of God – Psalm 2:7 & Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22
The Messiah crucifixion experience – Psalm 22 (contains 11 prophecies) & Matthew 27:34-50 and John 19:17-30
The Messiah will be killed – Isaiah 53:5-9 & Matthew 27:50; Mark 15:37-39; Luke 23:46; John 19:30
The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem – Micah 5:2 & Matthew 2:1 and Luke 2:4-7
Israel once again to become a nation – Ezekiel 36: 24-28, Isaiah 11:11, Deut 30: 1-6
Gentiles would enable and support this – Isaiah 49: 22-23, Jer 16:16.
And some of the future ones including those right on the doorstep:
Damascus destroyed – Isaiah 17: 1
One World Currency & Government (literally being discussed now) – Revelation 13 (various verses)
One Word Religion – also Revelation 13 (The AntiChrist requires to be a singular world leader to dominate and control).
Russia will come against Israel in the Gog/Magog war – Ezekiel 38-39
Babylon (Iraq) will be rebuilt and become a world trade centre before being utterly destroyed forever – Rev 18 (happening now!!)
There are literally dozens more relating to both Israel and Christians alike that I believe God will fulfill in very rapid order shortly before the awesome Day of the Lord comes upon the earth. Check out Prophecy Today for more info and to be kept updated if you’re interested.
And finally for those who want to determine whether God exists or not – look to Jesus. Seriously research his life, death and resurrection and do as many before you have – try to prove any of it is false and see what answer you come up with. And if/when you finally accept that Jesus has to be who He says He is – therein is your proof of God’s existence in a nutshell, because Jesus said He IS God. You can only take this one of 3 ways – He was either a liar and knew he wasn’t God, but lied to gain a following, or He was a lunatic, because few rational people consider themselves to be any kind of god let alone the God of Israel (remember, blasphemy was a crime punishable by stoning then, and you can be institutionalised these days for saying anything similar!!), or else He was indeed God in human flesh! And if you consider that to be true, then you have to accept that He died for your sins as He said that was His mission to undertake (Matthew 16:21), and you need to reassess your life in the light of this information and deal with it. Time is running out my friend – today, your soul may be required of YOU, and it will be too late then to change your mind – there are no 2nd chances on the other side and you won’t have anyone to plead your case before the Judge of the Universe, because only those who’ve accepted Jesus as their Saviour can have Him as their Advocate before the Throne.
PLEASE consider becoming one of them!!
For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
John 3:16
May 04, 2011 @ 08:01:12
Ok, I’m honestly open to the idea of the existence of God, but I have not found any proof at this point that I find incontrovertible. I will now address the points you have made in this post.
Your point: 1. Through evolution, it would take too long for man to become intelligent before he became extinct.
This is not true, as if it were true the far less intelligent apes that still exist today would have died out by now according to this logic. Even the ones that are dying out now are doing so purely do to human expansion, not because they lack the ability to survive in their environment.
1b. Why would man, who had survived billions of years of evolution to come to this superior point, ever feel the need create a God instead of considering himself to be God.
Simply put, the theory of evolution is a very new theory. Ancients who had no idea that evolution had occurred would not base any of their beliefs on it. To these newly intelligent people who had just begun to think about the grandeur of the world and how it was created, the idea that they had once been apes when they were hundreds or thousands of years removed from that state (keep in mind that people could not write when they were apes or for a very, very long time after) would have been impossible to conceive of.
Also, these early people were in a constant struggle for survival against forces that killed many of them and often nearly killed all of them. It would be silly for them to think they were superior enough to this world that they were constantly at odds with to ever actually create it. Due to these to facts, at the time, creation of the world by a higher power (or higher powers, as these early people believed) would be the only possible conclusion these people could come to at the time.
2. Why would man create a god who was so far superior to him?
First of all, the first recorded religions were not monotheistic. They believed in powerful but imperfect gods (Nordic, Greek, Egyptian, Etc.) or held pagan beliefs in which they worshiped nature itself, time, or other ideas of this nature.
Secondly, god(s) would have to have more power and knowledge than people or people wouldn’t listen to the dogmas of their faiths, unless they happened to agree with them or they served their current purpose. In other words, they would ignore dogma unless it suited them.
3. Why would we create a tough love type of God when we could create a wishy washy God who loves everybody?
The idea behind punishment for wrong doing is that people are more likely to follow the rules if they think they will be punished for doing evil. A wishy washy loving God would be ignored by people with less of a moral compass because he wouldn’t end up punishing them anyway. Thus, there would be less point in creating an all loving God because people would be less likely to follow His teachings, and the creators of these rules very much wanted people to follow them for the good of society.
4. How would we evolve a conscience if there was no God for we could not perceive of what was “wrong” in the first place?
Morality is shown in history to be an ever evolving thing. People (like apes and a number of other animals) are social creatures, which means we live in groups. In order to defend yourself from people taking advantage of you, you must first show why it is good for other people not to take advantage of you. This is what the saying “do unto others as you would have done unto you” comes from: the idea that if you create a set of rules (moral rules, legal rules, etc) you wont harm other people so you wont constantly have to watch your back for them attempting to take advantage of and harm you. Further, people have empathy, which basically means we have the ability to put ourselves in each other’s shoes so to speak and understand what they are feeling, and thus have pity on them. So an empathic person takes no pleasure in the suffering of others, and even suffers for it, and therefore has a basic drive not cause suffering to others, and feels he has done “wrong” in doing so. Belief in God is one excellent way to explain this feeling of empathy, but it is not the only way. It is also necessary to the survival of the human race.
5. In order for Jesus to say he was God and not be God, he would have to be a liar or a lunatic, and he was clearly neither.
This is an excellent point and one I have made myself. Jesus was an incredible moral man and thinker, on par with the most advanced thinkers in history, such as Socrates, the Islamic prophet Mohammed, and more recently Gandhi. His teachings were startlingly ahead of his time, his ability to speak was legendary, and his ability to outwit people who questioned him were seemingly unconquerable. He was thus neither a liar, and to say he was God and not be would be a massive, life long, lie, nor was he a lunatic, as if he were than it seems unlikely that he would be so progressive, charismatic, and logical. (Although to this point I must say that Socrates himself is now suspected of being a schizophrenic.)
That being said, it is hard for me to completely believe that Jesus himself ever actually said he was the son of God. While this in no way proves that he didn’t say that, from what I have read, even the earliest writers of the bible actually began writing about him some 50 years after his death. This means that an entire generation (at the time average life span is contended to have been about 35) passed between the time when Jesus lived and when his teachings and sayings were written down, meaning that in that time they were passed along by word of mouth. This means that while people of the time may have gotten the correct ideas of his teachings (and they may not have even gotten all of those), it is unlikely that they ever got his exact words correct. So, while the bible may say that Jesus is the son of God, and even say that he himself said it, this may or may not be true. Once again, however, it would be easy to believe such things because his ideas were so revolutionary and impossible to dispute.
Next, when Catholicism was a budding religion, Catholics were persecuted by Romans horrendously, and they needed something to make their teachings a moral obligation. Saying Jesus was the son of God would be both believable because of his genius and would serve this purpose nicely, especially when paired with the idea that through him was a person’s only possible salvation from hell. After all, what logical person would ever choose an eternity in hell over a short life of persecution by the Romans?
Finally, there is one more way in which the bible of today may not contain, or at least portray, all of the actual teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, during the Medieval Age the Catholic Church was extremely corrupt (they offered salvation from hell for money, for instance) and priests were the only ones well schooled enough to speak and read Latin. Also, the bible was for hundreds of years not allowed to be written in any other languages. In other words, the Catholic Church during this time could have, and likely would have, changed the actual words in the bible without anyone ever knowing it to serve their own purposes, and it would be impossible for anyone to know the difference. How else could you explain Catholic dogma that says the Pope is infallible, while Popes continually contradicted each other throughout history, as well as ordering the assassination of numerous people and supporting the Crusades?
In my opinion, there is still no logical way to prove the existence of God, and certainly no way to prove that Jesus is God. I believe that Jesus was a great man with amazing moral character and also a man of almost unequaled genius, and I believe that anyone who tries hard to follow his teachings is probably living morally and well. I can tell you think critically about these things and have come to your conclusions based on years of thought and knowledge about your religion, so I would welcome continued discussion on any of my points. If you actually took the time to read this massive post, thank you.
May 15, 2011 @ 19:35:37
Forgive again, the delay in responding to your post – my life is just so full on at the moment it’s been hard to give your questions the proper consideration they are due and I didn’t want to just rush to write anything rather than nothing, for the sake of expediency. And equal apologies in that my response will probably be equally if not longer than your comment – please say if you would prefer to take this out to email instead? I hope you won’t feel I’m copping out in any way either if I say that, at this stage at least, I’m only going to deal with your last point, primarily because firstly time prevails for me, and secondly, this is the only point I can provide you with information of real value you may be more willing to review.
If I begin with your points on Jesus saying He was God; in order to better understand what the title “Son of God” means, you really have to work back through Jewish history and faith further again, to appreciate that it is not just sonship as we would view it i.e. James whose father is John and grandfather Simon etc. In Jewish culture the actual title “Son of” equally denoted position and lineage & being endowed with the parent’s ethos, community standing, & rights. Thus when Jesus states He is The Son of God, He’s saying He shares the attributes of the Father; He is like Him in powerful works and loving self-giving etc – this is what was so utterly blasphemous to the Jewish ultra-Orthodox/Pharisaic groups in His time. For them God is so Holy they won’t even dare to write His name in full, rendering it instead G-d so, to dare to consider yourself equal with God in any sense, let alone in the manner of which Jesus did, was a crime worthy of death, hence their constant efforts to kill him from that point on. You can explore through this further perhaps in your own research on this point –
Some sites to consider –
http://www.abrahamic-faith.com/Jesus-son-of-God.html
http://www.answering-islam.org/Hahn/son.html (Obviously Muslims have the same problem!)
While I understand your objections to the current day Bible and your reasons for not perhaps taking it as a fully valid text for confirmation of some things, one thing you may wish to take into consideration is how scriptures at the time of Jesus had been preserved. The Jewish people, as you’re no doubt aware took them very, very seriously – and still do in certain quarters. What was committed in writing in particular was so carefully preserved when copying that, if even the tiniest “jot” or “tittle” (similar to comma’s, apostrophes), let alone an actual word, wasn’t transcribed absolutely exactly, the ENTIRE scroll would have been destroyed as no longer acceptable, because they considered every single letter to hold a sacred meaning. So certainly at the time of Jesus you can be pretty sure scripture in the form of the Torah (Old Testament) at least was absolutely accurate. And, for me, because I do believe Jesus is THE Word (as John describes Him in John 1:1) and Jesus continually refers to the scriptures of His Day many times, I consider that if there was the slightest hint of errors at that time, He would have been the first to be castigating the scribes for their inability to do their job properly at the very least. (And if He had done, given the wealth of other more “damaging” information in the Gospels, you would expect such an admonishment would have certainly found its way into NT scripture).
And then in our generation, the Dead Sea Scrolls testify to the accuracy of at least the book of Isaiah and much of other older scriptures too so we have those to refer to also, and they do in essence confirm the ability of scribes to ensure copying accuracy. And what we have in our hands today as the Book of Isaiah when compared to the Isaiah scroll differs by only a handful of non-essential words which don’t alter the final meaning of the text: “Thus for the 66 chapters of Isaiah, only four changes occurred as a result of transmission of the text by hand over a period of 1000 years and none of these changes made any significant difference in our understanding of God’s will for mankind.” For full text see http://www.truthmagazine.com/archives/volume45/V4501040102.htm Since Jesus referred to this book in particular (Luke 4:18) it is a particularly good one to consider as a foundation for the rest to be equally accurate.
My reason for stating all of that is to say that if you are then willing to accept that to be the case, you can start to discover how Jesus is not just a figure of the New Testament, but rather Someone who is mentioned many times under many different Names in the Old. Although I appreciate this is much easier to accept as a believer than a non-believer perhaps, some key passages do stand out for me. Firstly, creation – where God says “Let US make man in our own image” (Genesis 1:26) Given that even the Jews don’t consider the Holy Spirit to be a Being of creation in Himself, they’ve little ability to know how to deal with this statement, but Christians consider it to be the Triune Godhead speaking, and thus Jesus, because again John in the NT speaks of Jesus stating He was in existence from before the foundation of the world and we certainly don’t consider Him to be a created Being otherwise He could never take a title of Saviour as He would be just as sinful as the rest of us. (John 17:24)
Other verses where Jesus is identified in His pre-incarnate form are Genesis 32:30, Psalm 2 in its entirety, Psalm 22: 1-22, Isaiah 6:5, Isaiah 48:12, Isaiah 53 in its entirety, Zechariah 12:10, and these are only a tiny number of them, and then you have the prophecies of His coming (wherein the timings shown in Daniel 9:24-26 have proven accurate to the very timing of the day of His death – http://www.aboutbibleprophecy.com/daniel_9_24b.htm ). But many of these again require you to accept scripture as valid.
The point of the Law (Commandments & rules etc in the OT) is that it was given to show us how Holy God is and how sinful we are by contrast – we can *never* be good enough to please Him. God says in Psalm 14:
1 “The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, They have done abominable works,
There is none who does good.
2 The LORD looks down from heaven upon the children of men,
To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.
3 They have all turned aside,
They have together become corrupt;
There is none who does good,
No, not one.”
Hence if you come before Him in judgement after you die, you will have no defence as your own inherent “goodness” means nothing to Him, thus only those who are covered in the goodness or righteousness of Jesus are acceptable because He took upon Himself God’s judgement against sin, in His death on the cross. Only a perfect sinless person could take the role of sin-bearer for the purposes of God’s judgement against sin. Thus all of us need a Saviour if we are to enter heaven for eternity.
But, coming back to your main point on whether Jesus being God can ever be proven – it firstly takes you, in my opinion, to accept the validity of scriptures to some degree at least. Don’t look to what Jesus said to prove His claims – look to what He did. While you mention other religious prophets, some of them may have made some of the claims of Jesus but none of them ever rose from the dead – this final point is the hinge on which Christianity lives or dies (pardon the pun). If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead as He said He would then He is indeed just a liar and Christianity should quit now and stop trying to promote Him as a Saviour. But if He did, then He truly is everything He said He is, He can be fully trusted along with everything He said, and He can absolutely provide salvation for those who seek it. And that is thus a greater claim I feel you need to spend some time once again investigating for yourself. There has to be a very valid reason why He split time & history and the Bible continues to exist into our generation in its original texts every bit as much as the heretical latter day paraphrases (not translations!).
Resources to consider:
http://www.garyhabermas.com/
http://realmessiah.com/answers_to_objections
And for ease of reading Bible passages listed here head to http://www.biblegateway.com/
In the meantime, I will continue to keep you in prayer as only God can open your eyes & heart to His Word and its Truth, and grant you the faith you need to be able to believe and then accept Jesus is indeed Who He says He is. But certainly please do continue this dialogue if you feel I’ve missed the point or otherwise not responded as you hoped.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16