[5in] There is a God

'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'

The implication being that if Halley could believe that no one had made the Solar System, then why would he find it hard to believe that no one had made the Orrery, which was a poor model of the Solar System, vastly inferior in design? 

Putting this another way: If Halley the atheist, knew for a fact that someone had made the Orrery, the naive model of the universe in Isaac Newton's room, then why did he not know that someone had made the Solar System itself, something which was a lot more complicated and involved a lot more design work than the model?

The answer of course is that Halley would have known that someone had made the Solar System if his heart had allowed his brain to think as freely in the case of the reality as it obviously did in the case of the model. 

But Halley's heart was not without fear of the implications and the ramifications that the existence of a God might have on him personally. For atheists do not allow themselves to think freely because they fear the consequences. And actually the same is true of many believers, who make themselves idolaters of their chosen belief system out of fear of the implications of what may be the truth. Mankind just throws his reason away when it comes to God and the bible. This book/website will hopefully show the reader what happens if one retains at least some of ones power of reason in these matters. Newton for his part very rarely threw away his reason. Perhaps he read and understood this verse of the bible:

30 You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind and with your whole strength (Mark 12:30).

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 neccessary 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?

Evolution vs. creation

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

The first thing to say is that evolution is not a fact. It is rather a theory, which was first postulated by Charles Darwin. He observed little birds, Finches, which 14 different types of beak on the Galapagos Islands. He then returned home in his ship called the Beagle and thought nothing much of it. However once he was back in Cambridge he spoke to John Gould, an ornithologist, a bird expert, who told him that these 14 differing beaked birds were in fact in 14 different species (breeding groups). This changed everything for Darwin. He then proposed that the differing environmental conditions on the different islands had lead to the changes in these Finches and to these 14 new species developing. He then generalised this to cover the origin of all species on the earth as a result of environmental pressure, a force which he termed natural selection. This was his theory on the 'Origin of the Species'.

The definition of 'Species' used in Darwin's day was: Breeding Group, a group of animals who could breed with each other. 

In this way these species were a partition of nature, dividing all living things into breeding groups. So John Gould was telling him that these 14 differing finches, with different beaks could not interbreed with each other.

The whole of Darwin's theory was based on this assertion from John Gould. But how would John Gould know whether these Finches could or could not breed with each other? We don't even know whether they can or cannot interbreed today !!

But we do know that Beagles and Poodles and Bull Terriers can breed with Alsatians and Great Danes and Labradors. And these dogs are animals which differ in a lot more than merely their mouths. In fact all dogs are known to be descended from the Wolf (Canis Lupus), because they are all in the same species and can all interbreed. This being the case we find it very hard to believe that these Finches cannot breed with each other - unless they breed with their beaks that is.

In fact if Darwin had only looked at the species which his ship was named after, he would surely have realised that John Gould was likely to have been mistaken !!

So Darwin's theory is based upon an unproved and probably false assertion from John Gould. When will someone put these 14 types of Finch together and see what chicks result? Why has this not occurred to date ??

We propose that Darwin was correct in his deduction that the different environments of the islands lead to the 14 different types of beak, but that Gould was guessing and he was wrong. All of these Finches were still your basic Finch species, not withstanding their finely tuned new beaks. We propose that the same enormous genetic flexibility built into the Wolf as is manifested in the various breeds of Dog, was also built into the Finch as is manifested in the various types of beak. In the case of Dogs the selection was human, by their breeders, in the case of Finches, the selection was natural, by their environments.

Who created God?

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

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 43:10).
The name 'Jehovah', is a best fit pronunciation from the 4 Hebrew letters:
hwhy. It means: 'He who causes to become', i.e. the creator. His name appears thousands of times in the Hebrew Scriptures.

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 4:11). 

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:

God is a Spirit, and those worshipping him must worship with spirit and truth (John 4:24).
He has a character like the angels do and like humans do, he gets happy and sad, angry and relaxed:

According to the glorious good news of the happy God, with which I was entrusted (1 Timothy 1:11)
And Jehovah felt regrets that he had made men in the earth, and he felt hurt at his heart (Genesis 6:6).
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 13:13).
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 8:21).

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

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

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:

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 40:22).

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

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

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 50:39).

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 51:11).

And Babylon must become piles of stones (Jeremiah 51:37).
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.

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 13:2).

[e] God said through Ezekiel over 600 years before Christ that the city of Tyre would become a shining crag and never be rebuilt:    

For this is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said: Here I am bringing against Tyre Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon from the north, a king of kings, with horses and war chariots and cavalrymen and a congregation, even a multitudinous people...And I will make you a shining, bare surface of a crag. A drying yard for dragnets is what you will become. Never will you be rebuilt; for I myself, Jehovah, have spoken, is the utterance of the Sovereign Lord Jehovah (Ezekiel 26:7..14).
Today it is a shining crag that has never been rebuilt.

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 fulfilments:

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).
Fulfilment: 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)
Fulfilment: 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).
Fulfilment: 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 Ephrath, 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).
Fulfilment: 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).
Fulfilment: 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).