They’re both nonsense questions that do not need to be answered.
I guess, Dale, you could say I am “working out my own salvation with fear and trembling”. Is it supposed to be easy, come naturally, or is it hard and quite a long journey sometimes? What was simple for one to pass could be a stumbling block for another.
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I’ve been prostrate in prayer more than once.
I’m not doubting you or questioning your motivations. We’re just not on the same path right now. Maybe it links up down the road.
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In those old days it was different: then, faith was a task for one’s entire life because people assumed that the capacity to have faith was not acquired either in days or weeks. When the old man, tried and tested, approached his end, had fought the good fight and kept the faith, then his heart was youthful enough not to have forgotten that anxiety and trembling which had disciplined the youth, which the man certainly mastered, but which no person ever entirely outgrows—unless, that is, one were to succeed, the sooner the better, in going further. So, the point at which those venerable figures arrived— that is where everyone in our times begins, in order to go further.
“Preface,” Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard (Kirmmse Translation).
@Benjamin87, sorry about my bristly first encounter with you. I’ll try to keep my wits better.
I’ll probably be quoting F&T for a while. Just finished it this week, and it’ll be on my mind for a while. I’ll try not to continue to overdo it, but this piece seemed particularly relevant.
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That’s beside the point.
It pretty well stands up for itself.
Maybe there are many more than one path for people on this earth, which are different for different people. Isn’t there some passage about, “All things work together for good…”? And maybe, just maybe, Jesus still comes to each individual where he or she is, rather than demanding we all come to Him in the same place, in the same manner? And maybe, just maybe, God really meant it when He said, “God is not willing that any should perish…” And maybe, just maybe we don’t really know how Jesus will judge us (think about the story of the Last Judgement in Matthew, where Jesus doesn’t send people to Hell because they were homosexual, or invite people into Heaven because they believed in Him).
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Or what if God is about to turn the world upside down through a simple argument against atheism? It wouldn’t be impossible for him to do something like that, in a way that nobody saw coming.
Heymike, I’d be willing to bet against this one…but I have some inside information. Back in the early 1980’s, an atheist taught me that God has a very good reason for not allowing an irrefutable proof of His existence. The atheist commented (in an ARPANET forum) that, if God would show Himself, he (the atheist) would grovel. If not, he would not grovel. It immediately struck me that “grovel” is not the relationship God wants with anyone! God wants us to love Him, not grovel in fear. And this atheist’s comments made it obvious to the most casual observer that, if God the Creator were irrefutably present, then some (if not many) humans would grovel in abject fear and dismay.
So maybe God is really permitting this world to run the way He really wants it to run, so that His real purposes (not what we think He might want) are actually being accomplished.
And to bring my apparently religious comments back to the basics of BioLogos: My understanding that God is “omnitemporal” (that is, God exists outside of the time and space of this universe, most definitely, because He created this universe) also means that God knows what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen (which is also claimed in the bible) because He is looking from outside the created space and time of this universe, all of this is based on modern physics, which clarifies and emphasizes some things written in the bible that could not be understood by humans this way when they were written. I do believe that God knows exactly what is going on in this world, and it is leading directly to the results He wants for each and every one of His children. The big problem I have with this, and I am sure most other humans also have, is that some of the things that go on are absolutely not for good to some people in this world - mass murders, abuse. And I can’t explain why that is the best that God can do. I just have to trust Jesus when He tells me He loves everyone, that He died for the whole world.
Disproving atheism doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of God.
How I wonder about a world where philosophers finally get it’s factually wrong to treat other people like they don’t exist when you believe they do.
I don’t understand: If the belief that God doesn’t exist would be proven false, how is it that God still might not exist?
Pretty awesome how it goes right back to the beginning, either God is God or you are God.
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