Tag Archives: philosophy

Religion

Is God Silent? Why Belief in God Isn’t Obvious

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This month I’ve been editing the video lectures of a philosophy course in my day job, and I’ve gotten into discussions on God’s existence. There are a couple natural problems with knowing God. One is that he is a metaphysical being, who by nature transcends the senses. We cannot know and observe God the same way we would anything in the created world. He is beyond us. He is invisible and without form. We think of the Holy Spirit as a breath because we have few metaphors to go by. God as a being is hard to describe.

Because God is beyond us, because he is the creator and we the created, we have epistemic distance with him. There’s only so much we can know about him because we can’t comprehend him.

He is also a person, who may choose to go unseen. This is a simple point for any person. If our environment allows it, we can hide from each other. If our environment doesn’t allow it, we can choose to sit the corners of the room and not talk to each other. People are intelligent beings who choose to communicate or stay silent. Since God is not a force of nature but an eternal being, he could choose for his own reasons to remain unknown to his creation.

There are some who ask why God doesn’t make his presence obvious. Why are agnostics even given room to breathe? Wouldn’t it be better if we all knew there was a God and couldn’t doubt? Responding to this, some argue that God maintains a distance from us in order to allow for our free will. He wants us to love him freely, not under compulsion. I can understand the appeal of this argument; many people put a lot of stock in human free will, but does this argument fit with the world as the Bible describes it?

God created the first couple in a perfect garden and spoke to them personally. We don’t know what that looked like, but it seems to be as relational as two people talking—no distance maintained out of respect for the free will of the created. And Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over the divine being they spoke to earlier that day.

Jesus said, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:19 ESV).

This turns the question of God’s self-revelation back to us. It isn’t that he hasn’t done enough to reach us; it’s that we are running away. We stop our ears. We shut our eyes. We actively “suppress the truth” that we were created by God for his glory.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

(Romans 1:18–20 ESV)

It would be more correct to say that God isn’t holding back out of respect for our free will but that we love darkness.

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

Religion

If Sickness Is a Dream, Who Needs to Wake Up?

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Pro Tip: If you need to adjust your stove eye, do it while the eye is off. Turning it on before adjusting it will only complicate the task.

I was able to watch Inception recently, because it came on Netflix. I enjoy that kind of thing, a deep dive into a single sci-fi concept. Not that it was a deep film or that it even touched on a deep idea. It was just fun–a heist film set in the dream world.

I gather some people took it to be a thoughtful reflection on the possibility that what we call reality is merely a dream or some massive deception. Descartes rejected that idea, preferring to believe he existed and could actually know something. Actually knowing something is kind of a big deal.

In Inception, characters constantly reviewed the rules of how the dreamscape worked: paradoxes, mental defenses, and how to invoke a dreamer to dream a new and deeper dream. Our dreams aren’t made like that. When I realize I’m dreaming, I also realize I can control things. If I see that I’m out in public and have left something, I can decide that I have it and there it is. In the movie, if they imagined they have bigger guns, they could use them. But tell the target he’s dreaming, and he can’t just slip down a rabbit hole and sit by the river until he wakes up.

In a dream, only what I perceive exists, and then, of course, there’s you. How are we all dreaming coherently together? But let’s stick with perception for a moment; many unperceived, even imperceivable, things have rearranged our lives for centuries. Shall we just roll over and wonder how this dream will end? That’s all we’re left with, if everything is a dream. We can’t study medicine, engineering, farming, or anything that produces something outside of our preferences if nothing is real.

The eye of my stove burned my fingers because the electric coil producing the heat is a reality outside of my perception. Had I turned the wrong switch I would have had heat in another eye and possibly wondered why my pan wasn’t warming up. That’s my perception at play in a real world.

Try to stay healthy, friends. And for the kids at home, remember the Lord who made you; that’s the start of good perception.

Non-fiction, Reading, Religion

Free Material That Could Change the World

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Wheaton College has posted eighty-one hours of free videos of Dr. Arthur F. Holmes lecturing on the history of western philosophy. Dr. Holmes has just the right English accent to give his subject the proper authority. Just think about having to learn anything from the farmer in his clip. (via Justin Taylor)

Also The Gospel Coalition has produced its first eBook as a response to an earlier book. Revisiting ‘Faithful Presence’: To Change the World Five Years Later. 

“In 2010, noted University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter published the landmark book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. On the five-year anniversary of its publication, we asked eight contributors to engage the book’s thesis and assess its effect on the ongoing interaction of evangelical Christians with the surrounding culture.”

Those contributors are Hunter Baker, John Jefferson Davis, K. A. Ellis, Greg Forster, R. Albert Mohler Jr., Vermon Pierre, Daniel Strange, and Collin Hansen as editor. The eBook is free.