Can you answer the question: “Is there a God?” in about 775 words?Is this perhaps the simplest task Tabletalk has ever asked for, because the answer is so clear?There are no coherent atheists, only people who hide from God. “Do the heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament proclaim the works of his hands?(Salt 19,1) God is the inescapable fact that sustains all things.
Or is it the hardest task Tabletalk has ever asked for?A complete answer can fill an entire library. Therefore, what follows is just a lost fragment of a chapter in a book in this library.
- Ex nihilo nihil fit?” Nothing comes out of nowhere.
- ” Note that nothing is not a “pre-something”; it’s not ‘something to a minimum’.
- Nothing is NOTHING.
- NOTHING.
- Nothing.
- An impossible concept to understand for the mind precisely because nothing lacks “reality” in the first place.
- To transform the famous saying of René Descartes.
- Cogito.
- Ergo sum (I think.
- So I am) you can say.
- Quod cogito.
- Non cogito de nihilo (Because I am.
- I can not conceive anything).
- This leads to another Cartesian thought: Quod cogito.
- Ergo non possibile Deus non (Because I think.
- Therefore.
- It is impossible for God not to exist).
- The cosmos.
- My existence.
- And my ability to reason depend on the fact that life has not come and cannot come from nothing.
- But requires a reasonable and rational origin.
- The opposite (random time – reality) is impossible.
- Neither time nor chance are precosmic phenomena.
I recently tried a simple but disturbing experiment, directing my mind to think about the assumption that God does not exist and then explore the implications. I strongly discourage the realization of this mental experience, as it inexorably leads to a dark place, a mental abyss. where nothing in life makes sense, in fact, where there is no possibility of “sense. ” Finally, here, everything we consider good, true, rational, intelligible and beautiful does not have a substructure that gives consistency to these concepts. the nature of everything I am and experiences is radically deconstructed and disconnected from my consciousness from them. Consciousness? What seems intelligible is then an unjustifiable fabrication of my own imagination. And then this imagination is no longer coherent in itself. In essence, my very complex consciousness thus simply becomes an inexplicable series of complex chemical reactions based on non-rationality and without inherent sense. ?Meaning? In itself, in a truly transcendent sense, it is in itself a meaningless concept.
As experimenters in the pilgrimage of coherent atheism, we will conclude then that they are the desperate “atheists”, while yielding to the unbearable conclusions of their premises, which are the only atheistic thinkers compatible with the audacity of their convictions. Are those who calmly claim to be unmasked atheists as people who really refuse to conclude the beliefs they profess, suppressing what they know to be true (that God exists)?Exactly the argument Paul makes in Romans 1:18-25.
The novelist Martin Amis recounted a question that the Russian writer Yevgeni Yevtushenko asked Sir Kingsley Amis: “Is it true that you are an atheist?”Friends replied, “Yes, but it’s more than that. You see, do I hate him? Far from denying God’s existence, he confessed both God’s existence and his own antagonism toward God. “
Friends wasn’t alone. Neither a knight of the Kingdom, nor any of us, can escape the Imago Dei (as mutilated as him). Therefore, we can never deny the God of who we are the imago. For God placed a burden upon us: “He put eternity in the heart of man?(Ec 3:11) As Augustine said, our hearts are restless until we find rest in God.
So why doesn’t the Bible ask the question, “Is there a God?”Because your first prayer already has the answer: “In the beginning, God. “