I know, I am as surprised as you may be that I am still alive. The nurse last week predicted I’d be dead by Sunday, July 2, 2017. So where have I been? Sleeping up to 20 hours a day. The cancer will take me, nobody knows when. (I seem to be the most alert at midnight, which it is now.)
But that is not the only reason I write. Recently, appearing on patheos.com, was an article titled “’Amish Atheist’ Began Doubting His Faith After a Friend Asked a Simple Question”. The man in question had gone from Pentecostal before joining the Mennonite and Amish communities for several decades. So what was the all-devastating question? “Who created the creator?”
For some reason, Mr. Copp, the stumped Mennonite, had never actually learned to reason beyond what scripture says. Reading the definition of a progenitor, never crossed his mind. Yet, even so, I can understand the confusion because being the beginning of something that had no prior and being God are two different things. (The very reason I mention "progenitor" is to drive home the point that it is very possible to reach the beginning of something so that nothing else existed before it. Artists are cited in the link. Jehovah himself I an artist par none.)
In contrast, Jehovah’s Witnesses have long been given a logical answer for this question. It is both learning to reflect and learn to put the puzzle pieces together that such as the foregoing link that demonstrates the shallow convictions other religions who so easily lose members. Really, there has to be starting a point. One cannot go off ad-infinitum without coming to realize there had to be a beginning. The Bible says that beginning is Jehovah God.
Moreover, the answer is not merely logically consistent, but true - and necessarily so. Everything can't be contingent, since everything contingent is contingent upon something. There must be something whose existence is grounded in itself and who is the source of all other things, and this is God, in whom 'we move and have our being.'
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the 'friendly atheist' is also thinks that the who created the Creator argument is lame. He writes, "Seriously. Someone asking Copp “Who created God?” and that was his tipping point." Or does he think that it's a fine argument, but that there are other, more obvious or persuasive ones. I hope the former, but I suspect the latter. Either way, its a terrible argument, and aside from the problem of evil, there really aren't any arguments for atheism; and that, at best, only makes God's existence less likely. All things considered, even if we were to grant the atheist's argument from pain, God's existence is still much more probable than not. (Moreover, there are certain arguments that demonstrate God's existence, rather than these more evidentialist type arguments, which only establish probabilities.)
ReplyDeleteBut I mean, seriously, that question is like asking, 'Who brought into being the beginningless, necessarily existent (a se, essentially immortal) God, who is the source of all things.' Once you flesh the question out, it makes no sense - its kind of like asking 'Can God create a stone so large that he can't move it?' Such a stone is a logical impossibility, and it is no slight to God to say that he can't do the logically impossible!
ReplyDeleteThat guy should have listened to more Amish Paradise by Weird Al, he wouldn't have lost his faith.
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