Thoughts With Dalt

Welcome back! I hope to make your “click” worth your time today. Today’s post dives into my thoughts and explanations of God’s existence. I am not forsaking my faith but am simply adding to it through this effort, and hope to do the same for you! Enjoy, and please share if you find helpful. Comments and conversation are always welcome as well.

In The Beginning…

Everything we can sense in any capacity has a definite beginning. Whether you view it in its current state as a finished product, or in its original state as a perishable/non-perishable resource, everything once was not, then it was. This sounds like an objective truth, but some in a religion of Jainism would say that all matter has always existed. Rather than an eternal God, they have eternal matter. (We will debunk that comprehensively later on). Some with no official stance on the issue unknowingly agree with this idea. Follow along as I take you through a quick journey through the irrationality of this concept.

“Nothing ever created anything, therefore everything now exists and has always existed”. This isn’t a quote I have heard, just a summation of what many believe. Crank your brain and think back to whatever you consider “the beginning”. What do you see? Something? Go further back. Something? Still not there. Go back until there is nothing. Why? Everything requires something else prior to it. That is no issue if you quit chasing that thought a few thousand years in the past. But what about a trillion years ago? At some point there has to be a first “thing” right? Logically, yes. The issue is everything we see and know is fully dependent on something else to exist.

Evolution falls apart when you realize this. It may read well in a book with pictures of half fish/ half monkey creatures, but what about inside those creatures? Was there a time that they existed without hearts? Did chewing muscles develop immediately so they wouldn’t starve as one creature was evolving into the human race? Are we to believe (through evolution) that everything this creature needed was available to sustain it? What about the things it needed to sustain itself? They also require things to sustain. Was this creature immediately capable of reproduction? If so, and if it was able to sustain and live 100 years, how was it successfully reproductive without a mate? It’s just ridiculous when you think on it. I could write for a year on the insanity of evolution, but I will move on for now.

Who Put That There?

I confess that it may sound hypocritical to follow that with an encouragement to believe in an uncreated Creator. Unfortunately, our mental ability does have limits. I don’t have a clever segway to get us from that sentence to a sentence about Bob ross, so look at this picture.

If you see a picture of Bob Ross in front of a painting, you will draw a few conclusions.

• Bob was present before the painting.
• Bob had the necessary tools to paint the painting.
• Bob painted the painting despite the lack of request from the painting to be painted.

What we don’t know is who took the picture of Bob and his painting. It isn’t a perfect example, but I think it gets the point across. Creation requires a creator, and the creator precedes creation. Accepting uncreated matter as the foundation of all we see is ludicrous at best.

The Bench Maker

One of my favorite college campus evangelists tackles Jainism by thinking of a park bench. The question is asked, “Do you see that bench? How did it get here?” A typical response is “Someone made it.” He responds, “Correct. If I see a bench, I know somewhere there is a bench factory with a bench-maker.” I have made a few benches in my work as a weekend woodworker. Every bench was made to fulfill a specific need. “I need a farm style bench, stained dark walnut that will seat 4 people”. That is a very typical request here in the South. In an effort to please the customer, I always provide exactly what they ask for. Their need is met, and they now have four more bottoms at their dinner table.

The idea here is that a bench is made to serve a purpose. Albeit a simple purpose, it is indeed a purpose. It provides an area for physical rest, conversation, or enjoying the surrounding views. Its purpose is so obvious, even squirrels and birds utilize it for such from time to time. As simple as it is, it did not just appear in eternity past. Our bench-maker saw the potential for a bench in this particular area, designed the bench, purchased the resources, used tools designed for their respective purposes, and produced a bench to fulfill said potential. Lo and behold, the bench does exactly what it was made to do. There was no chance involved in the arrival of the bench, only calculated decisions to meet an imaginative desire.

Obviously, the segway from this conversation is to ask, “If you see this planet, the people around you, trees, rivers, mountains, stars, etc. (we can sum these up into a single word, “creation” for sake of the term to follow), do we not have to assume a Creator?” Often students asked this question will fumble around and produce an open-ended rebuttal that only shows their brain is now spinning out of control, and rightfully so. The core belief that ultimately affects every other belief and area of their life has been shaken. 

Only One Real Beginning

The beliefs of the followers of Jainism and big-bang atheists differ for about the first second of history, but quickly merge into a common belief that there was no Creator. A common rebuttal of people that are passionately against a Creator is that faith is required to believe someone could create all of this. I argue, adamantly, that it takes a substantially greater amount of faith to believe that all of this always was, or that two molecules collided and overcame infinitely negative odds to get us to where we are today. Matter requires a creator. Our goal is to prove God logically, so we must apply the same standard to other origin beliefs as well. I can’t reason with a belief that says matter is eternal, it had to have a start. 

Once we accept that creation requires a creator, there is immediately another thought that creeps in. “Ok, so God created all of this….but WHERE did God come from??” This is a natural tendency, as we asked the same question about matter. Some religions attempt to solve this issue by claiming an infinite regression of Gods. One God created another, created another, created another. Chase that as far as you want, you still have to land on a “first” God. Isaiah 43:10 tells us there were no Gods before the God of the Bible, nor will there be any formed after. Infinite regression seems to me to be a coping mechanism to satisfy the mind in its dive into eternity past. Our minds can almost “understand” eternity future. I don’t know of anyone that will profess honestly to “understand” eternity past. It is outside of our comprehension that something could not have a beginning. The mind cannot grasp what it is not. 

So why try? Because God put it in our hearts. I’ll see you back next week, and we will “try” to understand how, as John 8:58 says, “before Abraham was, I (God) Am”.

A share, reaction, or comment can help spread this conversation if you please! Thanks for your time today, I will see you on the next post!

–Dalton

Job 38: 4-11