Wednesday, January 4, 2023

If God Didn't Create Us...

 ... How did we get the names for things in creation?

... How did we get the names of our body parts? Family members? The sun and moon?

... How did we ever know to eat and drink? 

... Where does the concept of good and evil come from? The concept of truth?

... Why can't man create anything from nothing? There are no colors created without using the existing colors. Create a new color. Create anything while not using what already exists.

I have always pondered things like this when I hear intelligent people question the existence of a Creator God.

If you can go as far as to believe in evolution - that the first humans and animals came into existence without God. That we came out of nothingness without a Creator God - if you can get that far, then how do you explain the beginnings of the very complexity of our being?

Did love and empathy come into being from evolution? Did yearning and hope and laughter and motivation? 

If Adam and Eve were not created and taught life by God, where did human communion come from? The need for communion and community? 

How did the first un-created (but somehow existing) human - mysteriously evolved out of whatever - know to use their mouths and vocal cords for speech? 

If Adam was not created in the image of God - how did we come to want to know about or question the existence of God. Why do we want and need love? Why do we feel guilt? Why do we feel joy? What - without the existence of a Creator God is joy?

I have had conversations with thoughtful and intelligent people of all sorts of worldviews - evolutionism, I-don't-care-ism, and I-don't-know-ism - who don't believe in a Creator God, and not one of them has been able to answer these questions. They usually have responded to the questions but all their answers fall back on things they can't prove to me any more than I can prove to them that there is a God.

Ask me why I believe in a Creator God and my brief response is to tell you to answer my questions. Look at the complexity and design in nature and answer my questions. My longer answer is to address the complexity and design in nature.

There is a computer program called ChatGPT that I find very interesting. Since I don't know how to explain what to you what it is, I asked it to explain that to me like I'm five years old. Here is the answer"

GPT stands for "Generative Pre-training Transformer." (I added the link) It's a type of computer program that can generate text that sounds like it was written by a human. It does this by using a large amount of information from the internet to "learn" about how words and sentences are put together in different languages.

When you use GPT to make a chat program, you can ask it questions and it will try to answer them using the information it has learned. It might not always get the answers right, but it can be a fun and interesting way to learn more about different things.

On days when I am stuck in bed, I spend time asking the program random questions. Whenever I ask about anything to do with evolution, science, etc, I usually get answers that sound very sure. When I ask about anything to do with God or biblical creation, I get respectful but biased answers. I have jokingly decided that the program thinks of my Christian beliefs as "kinda cute". I guess it is being "taught" that Christians are not logical but that we are nice.

At any rate, I just wanted to share some of the things I think about when I ponder Atheism or Nihilism.  In this time of social media, when we get to peek at the daily lives of random people - people who seem good, happy, prosperous, and flourishing in this life - I often wonder what they believe. And when I see an obituary or just hear about someone stranger's death, my first thought is "Did they cry out to God for salvation?"

As a former spiritual wallflower (being agnostic out of laziness and ignorance) as soon as I gave serious thought and study into evolution and creationism, I chose the latter. And I am glad that I took the time to carefully consider the different worldviews before my time on this earth had run out.

I still read and study my Bible almost daily. I have told people that the closer I get to Death the more I want to be ready for it. I hope that everyone is ready when it's time for their last breath.

I am not the kind of Christian who is a bold "witness" but I do encourage people to give their beliefs deep and serious thought.

Peace

-- Free

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