Skilled in the word of righteousness (Hebrews 5:13) Part 5
Written by: Yeow Chin Kiong
At the core of the belief that the Bible is the authoritative word of God is an unwavering belief that there exists in reality an all-knowing and all-powerful God.
The necessary platform for this core belief is the firm belief that there exists reality which can be known or perceived by human beings like us. When this reality is sensed or understood by us, its “truth” is perceived. We cannot live life being in constant doubt about whether we can know truth,- what is real and what is not! To assert that “There is no truth” is to be self-contradictory; if that affirmation were true, it would be false, as “There is no truth” would itself be not true! Nor would dismissing the question, “What is truth?” as unanswerable, as Pontius Pilate did (John 18:38), be fair! As the 17th century French philosopher Rene Drscartes surmised, “Cognito ergo sum” (Latin for “I think, therefore I am”). We simply cannot doubt our own existence in our act of doubting, without self-contradition. In short, truth about reality IS attainable, including truth about God’s existence.
Of the various methods for proving the existence of God as all-knowing and all-powerful creator and sustainer of everything that exists, including life, the COSMOLOGICAL approach clearly has Biblical support. It is based upon the use of reason and observation to deduce the existence of an as-yet invisible original creator and continuing sustainer of all that exists. The Bible admits that God is as yet invisible to man (John 1:18; Colossians 1:15) but that “… what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God had shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,…” (Romans 1:19-20). The fundamental principle of material existence is that all effects must have a cause, as affirmed by Hebrews 3:4, “For every house is built by someone, but He who built all things is God.”
In the majestic language of Psalm 19:1-4, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world…...” Today, mankind’s store of knowledge about his world and everything in and about it is immense,- and he is still discovering more. Its ironic that mankind knows the depth of human knowledge needed to create Artificial Intelligence but assumes that his naturally-acquired intelligemce to create Artificial Intelligence is merely a product of undirected chance and not a super-intelligent creator! He prides himself as having the knowledge to creat robotic mechanisms but will not aknowledge the vastly superior lnowledge of the one who brought about his life and sustains it. The very laws of physics which result in the sub-atomic nature of the known elements and the substance of life derived from those elements are but effects caused by a singular creator.
If we shift our attention on the ordered micro world revealed to us by electron microscopes and particle colliders,- machines invented by human intelligence, one should add,- and look at the bewildering immensity of the universe of galaxies of stars and their planets and the dark matter separating them, these too are effects requiring a cause existing beyond themselve and necessarily of vastly superior knowledge and power.
We need a Creator and Sustainor of the existence we experience first-hand and the existence of things all around us. Effects require causes and any attempt to explain the complexity of life in our existing universe as a mere accident is ludicrous. Even if it is insisted that evolution brought everything, including life, into existence, we need to account for what CAUSED existence to come about from non-existence in the first place and for that primeval or primordial existence to change in the direction it did (by evolving into complexity instead of degenerating into the non-existence from which it supposedly came). This consideration leads us to the second method of proving God’s existence, the TELEOLOGICAL. approach, the argument from purposeful design or the so-called Watchmaker argument.