[5a] There is a God - his name is something like 'Yehovah'

This section is covered in more detail in I1.

'Newton showed his Orrery to Halley the atheist, who was charmed with the contrivance, and asked the name of the maker: Nobody, was the ad hominem retort'

And perhaps now the reader can truly understand the meaning of the famous words of Jesus Christ:

8 Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8).

The existence of order in the universe implies the existence of an orderer. Random chance cannot create sustained order. An orderer is an intelligence with power. We know that mankind did not create the ordered universe. So we can deduce that there is a powerful non human intelligence that created it. This is a matter of logic. So we know that there is a creator. In fact the second law of thermodynamics which basically states that whatever you do you create more chaos, or that chaos always increases, proves that there was an orderer to start with. Which means there was a creator, a God, this orderer. The big bang was perfect order in some sense, it must have been a seed with all of the information necessary for the entire universe, the most ordered creation ever. 

Descartes said: I think therefore I am

The intelligent man says: I think therefore I was created by an intelligence

How many computers, devices with some limited intelligence, did random chance ever create?

There was a BBC2 Learning Zone program on mapping the whole human genome, shown on Friday 24th October 2:00 am (2003?), wherein a Professor from a London university said that knowing the whole genome is like knowing every word in a Shakespearian sonnet, but the trouble he had was that he did not know the grammar of the genome which gives him the order of the words, so he could not read or write the sonnet of life. But his very words show that there must be a genetic poet, a greater Shakespeare, whose poetry we are. 

In fact modern genetics acknowledges that there is a grammar to the genetic code with certain genes controlling macro body part positioning etc. So much so that humans have over 50% of the genetic material of a Banana, and the same genes control the same thing in entirely different animals. Geneticists describe this phenomenon as nature being 'lazy'. But it is nothing of the sort, a random process cannot possibly be lazy, it has to try every possible combination all the time. Evolution cannot have a grammar, and can never be lazy, it is merely the application of random chance to a vocabulary and the discarding of all the failures. So the existence of a universal genetic grammar of life that defines the way the genetic vocabulary is always put together necessitates an intelligent poet or a creator. Random processes cannot have grammar which is structure. 

The other obvious clue is that the Genetic Code is digital and mankind now processes nearly all information digitally. So we are using the same techniques as nature. But mankind did not stumble across the digital age by random chance, we invented it using our intelligence. So how can we believe that nature has no designer? 

Signs in the heavens and on the earth

The Sun is 400x larger than the moon and is 400x further away from the earth than the moon. This is the statistically incedible coincidence that causes a lunar and solar eclipse. Why do these two critical heavenly bodies fit over each other from our standpoint?

Galileo Galilei first discovered and proposed that the earth revolved around the sun, so that the sun was the centre of the solar system rather than the earth. He was of course condemned by the pope for being a heretic. But how amazing is it that the word 'Galilee' in Hebrew means a circuit of an orbit? How did his father know, when he named his son that he would discover something that was unknown to man at the time of his birth? This must be a heavenly sign. Of course Jesus represents the light of the world, the sun and we revolve around him, he does not revolved around us. We look to him for light and life he does not look to us to anything other than to help us and to love us.

Every animal with a heart has a lifespan of near enough 1 billions beats, no matter how fast thier heart beats. So much so that biologists have incorporated this feature in a formula...

Life expectancy =  1902.6 / heart rate (beat per minute)

Here are some well known examples...

Evolution vs. creation

This debate is covered more fully in section [221].

Who created Jehovah?

This begs the question: Who created God? a question of the type: who baptised John the baptist? The bible ' answers' as follows:

10 You are my witnesses, is the utterance of Jehovah: even my servant whom I have chosen, in order that you may know and have faith in me, and that you may understand that I am the same One. Before me there was no God formed, and after me there continued to be none (Isaiah 43).

So he had no divine father. 

9 Remember the first things of a long time ago, that I am the Divine One and there is no other God, nor anyone like me (Isaiah 46).

He was alone in divinity from the beginning to the days of Isaiah.

What does God's name hwhy mean? How is it pronounced?

God name is written in the scriptures as the 4 Hebrew Consonants hwhy. It comes from the root hwh , meaning 'to be', to exist. The name itself means he who causes to become according to some translators. And According to Ben Davidson (AHCL) it combines the present and the future form of the verb 'to be' and so means 'I am and I will be', or 'he that is and will be'. So perhaps the best way to translate it is an eternally present creator. Seems like a good name for God!

That was the relatively easy part. The pronunciation of his name is more difficult. The most widely accepted form of God's name is Jehovah. This was even used in the Indiana Jones movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. It is an Germanicisation of Yehowah, which is formed by giving the 4 Hebrew consonants hwhy, which are known as the tetragrammaton, the vowels of the Hebrew word for Lord, which is ynd), a word which also has 4 consonants. This fix was invented by early bible copiers to avoid correct pronunciation of the divine name. The biblical names such as Jehoram, Jehoshaphat, Jehonadab and Jehoshua (Joshua) are all subject to this accepted euphemism for God's name. So one cannot deduce the correct vowels in God's name from their names. The same even is true of Elijah and Hallelujah. There would be little point in changing the divine name to that it was pronounced incorrectly and then writing names of kings which included parts of that name correctly pronounced. So Jehovah cannot be the answer since the particular vowels used in that pronunciation were invented in order to obscure the true pronunciation.

Now Josephus, the first century Jewish Historian wrote in Book 5 Chapter 5 of the Wars of the Jews, that the high priest had God's name on his turban, 'it consists of 4 vowels' (not 4 consonants). Furthermore he wrote that the Jews called on God's name when they were being attacked by the Romans, and he was a powerful Jew, being the head of the army of Israel after Cestius' defeat until he surrendered to Vespasian at Gamala. So he would most likely have known the correct pronunciation of God's name, From this one can assign vowel sounds to the 4 letters YHWH, the english equivalents of the 4 consonants (Hebrew words read right to left - backwards). This would give ee - aa - oo - eh according to some sources. This gives rise to the Yahweh used by some religious groups.

This solution seems to be far neater. But then going back to the true construction of hwhy, which Ben Davidson has as a concatenation and condensation of why and hw, the vowel pointing of Jehovah would appear to be correct. So having gone round in a great big circle we appear to be back at Yehowah, or in English, Jehovah. Ben Davidson believed that to be correct, from these types of arguments. 

Both the old and the new testaments bear witness to making God's name, Jehovah, known...

2 And God went on to speak to Moses and to say to him: I am Jehovah.
3 And I used to appear to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty, but as respects my name, Jehovah, I did not make myself known to them.
4 And I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their alien residences in which they resided as aliens.
5 And I, even I, have heard the groaning of the sons of Israel, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I remember my covenant (Exodus 6).

25 Righteous Father, the world has, indeed, not come to know you; but I have come to know you, and these have come to know that you sent me forth.
26 And I have made your name known to them and will make it known, in order that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in union with them (John 17).

Metaphorically God's name stand for his character, his authority etc. It is apparent that Moses did not know God's name at first since he said...

13 Nevertheless, Moses said to the [true] God: Suppose I am now come to the sons of Israel and I do say to them, 'The God of your forefathers has sent me to you,' and they do say to me, 'What is his name?' What shall I say to them?
14 At this God said to Moses: "I shall prove to be what I shall prove to be' (or I am what I am). And he added: This is what you are to say to the
sons of Israel, 'I shall prove to be' (or I am) has sent me to you (Exodus 3).

So the physical sons of Israel got to know a physical pronunciation of God's name. But the spiritual sons of Israel, the sons of the JAC, the sons by covenant of Jacob, the saints, might get to know his love and his real character more than just a pronunciation of some letters. That would be of a far greater value.

What is God like? 

24 God is a Spirit, and those worshipping him must worship with spirit and truth (John 4).

God is a spirit, but not necessarily a spirit creature, for he was not necessarily created. The above scripture implies that God's will existed before all creation occurred, which could logically imply that God himself was not created, we ourselves do not know. But what we do know is that God created space and time. He is the creator of everything:

11 You are worthy, Lord, even our God, to receive the glory and the honour and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they existed and were created (Revelation 4). 

He has a character like the angels do and like humans do, he gets happy and sad, angry and relaxed:

11 According to the glorious good news of the happy God, with which I was entrusted (1 Timothy 1).

6 And Jehovah felt regrets that he had made men in the earth, and he felt hurt at his heart (Genesis 6).

13 Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said: I will also cause a blast of windstorms to burst forth in my rage, and in my anger there will occur a flooding downpour, and in rage there will be hailstones for an extermination (Ezekiel 13).

21 And Jehovah began to smell a restful odor, and so Jehovah said in his heart: Never again shall I call down evil upon the ground on man's account, because the inclination of the heart of man is bad from his youth up; and never again shall I deal every living thing a blow just as I have done (Genesis 8).

He has a character like ours, like that of Jesus to be precise, this is a meaning of:

26 Let us make man in our image according to our likeness (Genesis 1).

We do not want to oversimplify things here. If God was not created then how did he come into existence? Well one answer is that he has always been in existence. The sense in which this is meant is not that given any amount of time in the past he was always around before that time. It is rather that he himself created time. So the question: Was there anything before God? has the answer: No, because there was actually no 'before', since God created time. We cannot pretend to understand this very much but it is the best we can do right now.

This much we do know: Humans are limited both by space and by time. Angels are limited by time alone and not by space, and God is limited by neither. All humans who are saved by God, through Jesus, will eventually become angels and escape the confines of space. It is conceivable that some or all of us may also escape the confines of time at some point. This could only happen if we had developed a character good enough for this purpose, and perhaps we can never do this, we do not know. Actually it is more likely that we will always need God so we will never get such a character. Perhaps being outside time defines God in some way?

Bible Prophecy

One can also deduce the existence of God from knowledge that appears in the bible that no human could have had at the time:

22 There is one who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers, the one who is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell (Isaiah 40).

7 He is stretching out the north over the empty place, Hanging the earth upon nothing (Job 26).

So we have a circle of the earth hung upon nothing. Pretty good seeing as the earth was believed flat for 2,000 years after Isaiah and gravity was discovered 3,000 years after Job.

One can also deduce his existence, or at least the existence of non human intelligence, from the prophecies and fulfillments in the bible. For example:

[a] Daniel 8 prophesied the rise of the Greek world power through Alexander the Great (see Daniel 8)

[b] Both Revelation and Daniel prophesy that the UN will have world wide power in the last ten years of this system, from 1998 to 2008 ( see Daniel 7, Daniel 8, Revelation 13, Revelation 14). This is already fulfilled. 

[c] Jeremiah in chapter 51 prophesied before 586AD when Jerusalem fell, how the city of Babylon would fall to the Medes, who would damn up the rivers to gain access to the city. They did this in 539AD. He also prophesied that it would eventually become piles of stones which would never be inhabited again, which it is today.

38 There is a devastation upon her waters and they must be dried up (Jeremiah 50).

39 Therefore the haunters of the waterless regions will dwell with the howling animals, and in her ostriches must dwell. And she will never more be dwelt in, nor will she reside for generation after generation (Jeremiah 50).

11 Jehovah has aroused the spirit of the kings of the Medes, because it is against Babylon that his idea is, in order to bring her to ruin (Jeremiah 51).

7 And Babylon must become piles of stones (Jeremiah 51).

Saddam Hussein was reported to have desired to rebuild Babylon, which is in modern Iraq, just before the Gulf War. He was stopped from doing this fairly comprehensively.

[d] Jesus prophesied in 33 AD about the temple in Jerusalem that not a stone would be left upon a stone. This is precisely the destruction that occurred in 70 AD under the Roman general Titus.

2 However, Jesus said to him: Do you behold these great buildings? By no means will a stone be left here upon a stone and not be thrown down (Mark 13).

There are around 300 prophecies which Jesus fulfilled personally as a human in his first century ministry. Someone somewhere has calculated that the chances of his doing this if there were no God are basically zero. Here are a few of the more famous ones with their fulfillments:

Prophecy: My God, my God, why have you left me? [Why are you] far from saving me, [From] the words of my roaring? (Psalm 22:1).
Fulfillment: About the ninth hour Jesus called out with a loud voice, saying: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). 

Prophecy: He committed himself to Jehovah. Let him provide him with escape! Let him deliver him, since he has taken delight in him! (Psalm 22:8)
Fulfillment: He has put his trust in God; let him now rescue him if he wants him, for he said: I am God's Son (Matthew 27:43).

Prophecy: They apportion my garments among themselves, And upon my clothing they cast lots (Psalm 22:18).
Fulfillment: Therefore they said to one another: Let us not tear it, but let us determine by lots over it whose it will be. This was that the scripture might be fulfilled: They apportioned my outer garments among themselves, and upon my apparel they cast lots. And so the soldiers really did these things (John 19:24).

Prophecy: And you, O Bethlehem of Ephrata, the one too little to get to be among the thousands of Judah, from you there will come out to me the one who is to become ruler in Israel, whose origin is from early times, from the days of time indefinite (Micah 5:2).
Fulfillment: After Jesus had been born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, look! astrologers from eastern parts came to Jerusalem (Matthew 2:1).

Prophecy: Therefore Jehovah himself will give you men a sign: Look! The maiden (virgin/unmarried woman) herself will actually become pregnant, and she is giving birth to a son, and she will certainly call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).
Fulfillment: But after he had thought these things over, look! Jehovah's angel appeared to him in a dream, saying: Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife home, for that which has been begotten in her is by holy spirit.
She will give birth to a son, and you must call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
All this actually came about for that to be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through his prophet, saying:
Look! The virgin will become pregnant and will give birth to a son, and they will call his name Immanuel, which means, when translated, 'With Us Is God' (Matthew 1:20-23).