Philosophies Of God (part 1)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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With a certain amount of fear and trepidation, I'm going to start off this morning into a three or four or five week discussion of philosophy.

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Now that I've turned everybody off, philosophy as it applies to the

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Christian life and to Christians. Because, and the reason I'm doing this is because, although we use different terms, philosophers and theologians all wrestle with the same questions.

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The difference being that true biblical theologians not only wrestle with the questions, they also come up with the answers.

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Unlike human philosophers. Now what we'll be going through for the next few

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Sundays all comes directly from the work of Francis Schaeffer. And many of you have heard me mention

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Francis Schaeffer before, some of you know who he is. Francis Schaeffer is probably the foremost

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Christian philosopher of the 20th century. He died in 1984, but his work is truly profound.

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And perhaps different from a lot of philosophers, the average layman can read his books and make sense out of them.

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I would strongly recommend to you anything Francis Schaeffer has ever written. In particular, How Should We Then Live, which is a summary of all of his work practically.

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There is a re -release right now that's available on the Francis Schaeffer Trilogy, which has his most famous books,

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The God Who Is There, He Is There And He Is Not Silent, and Escape From Reason.

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And I would also recommend to you his book Genesis. Because one of the things that Schaeffer kept emphasizing was we have to start with Genesis.

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It does matter. You hear people say, well what does it matter whether evolution is right or not?

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Well, the result is profound. The result is profound because as we shall see over the next few weeks, the whole critical point is that, number one, there is a creator

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God who is really there. And we are created in his image. And everything rests on that foundation.

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How should we then live? How should we treat each other? How do we exist in society?

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If you knock out the prop from underneath you that, after all, we are a specific creation of a creator

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God, and therefore we belong to him, we owe our allegiance to him, he is above us, he is greater than we are.

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Once you knock that prop out from under, everything else collapses. And so that's what we're going to be looking at.

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But as I said, theologians and philosophers wrestle with the same basic questions.

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And it's interesting, when you get down to basic questions, there aren't a lot of them. There aren't a lot of them.

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And so we're going to look at three things. We're going to look at metaphysics or the area or the question of being.

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You know, why are we here? Why is anything here? The question of being.

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We're also going to look at morals, the questions of man and his dilemma. And we're also going to look at epistemology, how do we know?

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Epistemology is just a big word that means the science of knowing. When I say I know something, how do

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I know that? What gives me confidence that what I know is true, is in fact real?

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Because if you go, for example, to the eastern philosophies and eastern religions by and large, nothing is knowable.

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It's like the children's nursery rhyme, life is but a dream. You know, nothing has any substance.

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And so how do I know? How do I know what I know? And to quote another human, one of the leading, perhaps the leading humanist philosopher of the 20th century,

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Jean -Paul Sartre, he said this. The basic philosophical question is that something is there.

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It was much more logical that nothing should be there. But something is there. There is an observable universe.

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It's here. And also, proving that a stop clock is right twice a day, another thing

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Sartre came up with is that no finite point has any meaning unless there is an infinite reference point.

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And in both of those two things, he was correct. He didn't say much else that was correct, but those two things he got right.

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And so we'll look at it. In the observable universe, things do exist.

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And they have a certain form and a certain complexity to them.

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And they obey certain laws. The Earth stays in its orbit.

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And we all hold together. The atoms that comprise us hold together. And the universe has form.

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It has complexity. So questions come out of that. Why? Why does it exist?

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Why does anything exist? And where did it come from? Where did it come from?

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How did it get here? How does whatever is here get here? Why is it in the particular shape that it's in?

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Why isn't it in some other shape? And what gives the particulars meaning?

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Now, I use that term particulars a lot. That's another Schaeferism. He refers to the particulars.

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We are all particulars. This chair is a particular. This music stand is a particular.

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But what is the universal that binds all the particulars together?

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As we shall see when we deal with human philosophy, one of the critical problems with human philosophy is that you are reduced to the particulars.

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There's no universal. So nothing gives the particulars meaning.

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Nothing gives the particulars meaning. So we'll deal with that.

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And there are two schools of thought that have arisen over time, and they both started in about the same time.

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Not that they weren't around before this, but we're going to start from the period of time in the 1500s and 1600s where two schools of thought basically arose.

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The first school is what I call Reformation thought. Reformation thought.

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That is a series of a way of thinking about things that had God as its reference, that God formed this infinite reference point that gave meaning to all the particulars.

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There was a creator God who was the universal that tied all the particulars together. And so what came out of this thought, and this was largely northern

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Europe in which this held sway for quite a while, actually. And what came out of this?

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Well, the idea of a government of laws came out of this because if there was a higher power to which all men are beholden, then whatever the higher power dictates as being right and wrong, it tells us what is right and wrong, and we can govern ourselves based on those principles.

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Now, science itself came out of this line of thought, and I've gone over this before too, but modern science arose in only one place and only one time in history.

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And it started with men like Roger Bacon and Galileo and on with Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday and Maxwell and all of the guys that you learned about if you took physics class.

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But why do I say that it grew up out of this Reformation thought? Well, it starts this way.

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If the universe has been created, it didn't just happen. If the universe has been created by a reasonable

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God, then by experimentation and observation,

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I can discover things about that universe. And by discovering those things,

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I can do so in the confidence that what I discover today will still hold tomorrow, will still hold next year, will hold 100 years from now.

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Why? Because it was all put together by a reasonable God. And he governs it according to laws that he has set down.

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It's not all just by chance. It's not the spirit world, and we better not upset the spirit so they might change things on us or any of that sort of thing.

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And if you've ever looked at the peoples of the world and wondered why do certain people advance in the area of science and certain people basically stay static for hundreds or sometimes even thousands of years, look at their view of God.

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Look at their view of God to find a reason behind that. And so, again, science started out of this whole idea of Reformation thought, that there's a reasonable

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God. The thing about Reformation thought too is that Reformation thought aligns with what man observes about himself and has been observing about himself as long as man has been here.

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First of all, man is fundamentally different from the other animals. There is a gap between ourselves and the rest of creation.

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This is all introduction, by the way. There's a gap between ourselves and the rest of creation. We are not like the rest of creation.

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We're different. And man has a personality. There is a manishness about man, if you will, the things that make us part of the human race.

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Certain things are characteristic of men. And I'm using the term here generically, you understand.

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I'm not excluding you ladies, okay? For example, man is driven to love.

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Man is driven to love. One of the comments that one of Dallas' doctors made one time, he said, isn't it interesting, we do not have to teach a child to hate.

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We do have to teach a child to love. And yet without love, the child will die.

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Yet without love, the child will die. Human beings are driven to love each other. We are not made to be in isolation.

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And man is also driven to communicate. We reach out to each other. We alone among the animal world communicate with each other in speech.

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And I know, you know, oh yes, birds chirp at each other, and, you know, monkeys grunt and whatever else, and this is a form of communication.

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But I'm talking about the type of communication that we're doing right here. Verbal communication.

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We are alone in God's creation that we do that. Man also, this whole issue of man's manishness sets us apart.

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Sets us apart. And finally, and think about this a little bit, one of the things that came out of Reformation thought is the

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American Revolution. The idea that we would form a society that would be governed by laws, where we would have liberty without chaos.

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It was possible to have liberty without chaos. So that we could be free, we could operate within this context of freedom, and yet there would be an underlying order underneath it.

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And we would not degenerate into what the French Revolution, by contrast, became, which is the other side of the thing.

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The other thing that grew up at roughly the same time was what I call Renaissance thought. The Renaissance came out of Southern Europe, and the thing that sets it apart from Reformation thought is that in the

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Renaissance, man is the point of reference. We don't have an infinite point of reference, we have a localized point of reference.

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Man attempted, the humanist attempted to reach within man himself and come up with the point of reference for everything within ourselves.

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And not to say that a great deal of great art, great construction of buildings, marvelous music all came out of the

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Renaissance. But ultimately it failed. Ultimately it failed.

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And interestingly enough, none other than Leonardo da Vinci, several hundred years early, said, actually could tell where this was going to go.

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That it was going to ultimately result in a descent into despair, which is exactly what has happened in the modern day.

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Even though it took several hundred years from da Vinci's time to accomplish this. And why? Because there is no ultimate reference.

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And so you went from a period of time where the early humanists were also optimists.

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They felt they could really do this. They could really have this universal thing and tie everything together and they could build a society in which man was the center.

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They thought they could really do that. And for several hundred years after that, they kept going, they kept failing, but they didn't lose the idea that, you know, we keep at this, we can do it.

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But then as you started into the late 19th century and the early 20th century, there was a fundamental change in which the humanist thinkers all became pessimists.

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That it isn't possible to do this. And therefore you descend into nothingness or despair.

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Because nothing has any meaning. Now, you may say, well, gee, didn't Solomon say that?

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Yes, he did. Several thousand years before all these guys, Solomon writes the book of Ecclesiastes where basically he has said the same thing.

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That if you abandon God, nothing has any meaning. That's one of the two overall arching ideas that comes out of the book of Ecclesiastes.

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Without God, nothing has any meaning. And it's taken us to get to the 20th century to come to the same conclusion.

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But we have finally reached the same conclusion. And so we descend into despair. Again, what

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Schaeffer calls, we went below the line of despair. And so there we are. But what came out of that?

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Because, and this is important to know, because Renaissance thought is the dominant philosophy of modern times.

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And so, what does it say? It says there is no basic intrinsic difference between man and non -man.

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We have now reduced ourselves. Basically, we are the animal that clawed its way to the top of the food chain which doesn't promise that something else will not eclipse us at a later date.

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And it doesn't make us fundamentally any different from any other animal. We might be a little more intelligent.

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We might be a little smarter. Although some of the people that I know, you would question that perhaps.

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But anyway, we are not fundamentally different. There is no intrinsic difference between man and non -man in this way of thinking.

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Men, the universe is reduced to a closed system, and a totally impersonal closed system.

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And we are just cogs in the machine. There is no intrinsic meaning to your existence.

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You're just one more little cog in the machine running along as you go. Ultimately, nothing has meaning.

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Back to the Ecclesiastes once again. It produces, for example, the

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French Revolution in which you had total chaos. You had the tyranny of the majority.

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And let's kill everybody that doesn't agree with us and then when the crowd moves on, then the people that started the whole thing will go kill them too, which is exactly what happened if you studied the

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French Revolution, even though it occurred not long after the American Revolution occurred. It produced a totally different reaction, totally different result.

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And the thing of it is it runs contrary to what man has observed about himself.

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It does not fit. What we instinctively know to be true about ourselves.

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And if you go to Romans, one of the things Paul talks about is that they knew the truth.

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They knew the truth and they suppressed it. And while I believe

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Paul there is specifically speaking of truth about God, it's also truth about ourselves or truth about the universe because it's all tied together.

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And so we have the problem, man is finite. Man is finite. And as such, he is insufficient to be the reference point.

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Remember what Sartre said. In this he was correct. You need an infinite reference point to tie everything to.

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And so man cannot be the reference point. He's too small. And men invent gods of their own in an attempt to address this whole issue.

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The Greeks had all their pantheon of gods and the Vikings had Odin and Thor and all those guys running around with battle axes and helmets with the horns on them and all of that.

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And so they do this. But the trouble is with the gods that we invent, that's a little small g, the gods that we invent for ourselves, they're just like us.

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They're just us with superpowers. We're like little kids.

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We invent superpowers for ourselves sometimes until we sometimes prove that just putting a cape on your back does not give you the ability to fly off the roof of the house or whatever.

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But that's the problem with all of these gods that have been invented by human societies is they're too small.

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If you study Greek mythology, one of the things you'll discover about that is that the Greek gods are just as jealous, just as petty, just as little as the human beings that invented them were.

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The dangerous part was they had superpowers. When Zeus throws a tantrum, look out, that kind of thing.

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So that's the problem. They are unsatisfactory. And then you come to the whole behaviorist theories.

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Some of you may be familiar with the work of B .F. Skinner who's perhaps the best known of the behaviorists. Another man,

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Francis Crick. Francis Crick is the man who, one of the two men who developed the whole idea of DNA.

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And men like this insist that we're just cogs in the machine.

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We're just the sum total of the chemicals and molecules and atoms and what have you that make us up.

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Again, there's nothing intrinsically worthwhile about us. We don't have any worth just because we're men.

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We're just cogs in the machine. And yet, this one's contrary to what man has observed about himself for his entire existence, as we said.

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Because what kinds of things do we observe? Well, men are fallen, yes, absolutely.

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But even in our fallen state, there is a nobility about man that the rest of the animal world simply does not have.

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Men do things like soldiers lay down their lives for their comrades in battle.

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Men go into burning buildings to rescue women and children.

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Men give up their seats in the lifeboats so that the women and children can go first.

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You know, there is a nobility about man. There is a nobility about man.

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We also have the problem that man is also cruel, proving that man has alienated from God, man has also alienated from other men, and man has also alienated from himself.

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But these things, these are things that we observe about ourselves. And the point here is that the whole deterministic philosophy cannot, gives no reason for why we should be that way.

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There's no reason for why we should be that way. And so we're going to be looking at this over the next few weeks.

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And as far as this study is concerned, when I use the word philosophy, I am not referring to the dry, dull academic study, which we call philosophy, that very few people pursue.

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I'm talking about worldview, because very few people actually study philosophy in the university, but everyone has a worldview, whether you are conscious of it or not.

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You have a worldview. And so that's what we're talking about. And so we come this morning, we're going to spend the rest of the time on the question of being, or why is anything here?

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How did it get here? Why is it here? Where is it going? Those types of things. And there are two possible answers.

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Again, there are not a whole lot of fundamental questions when you really get down to the baseline. And once you've done that, there are also not too many categories of answers either, when you get down to the fundamentals.

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And so there are two possible answers in the areas of metaphysics, one of which is, there is no logical, rational answer.

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And you say, that sounds ridiculous, which it does, except this is the answer, basically, if you want to know what existential thought, that sums it up.

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There is no rational answer to anything. Although we can get paid a lot of money and we can rise high in the academic world by saying that, if we say it correctly.

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The never -ending search for truth. Don't find it. Search. If you're searching for truth, you rise high in the academic world.

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If you claim you find it, you get zipped and get fired. But anyway, there's no logical, rational answer.

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There's no cause and effect relationship in the world. The problem with this is that you can hold this view in theory.

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You cannot live that way. Not really. The external universe is there.

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It does have form and order. The world is not completely chaotic.

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The world ultimately is not random. Chaos theory has become one of the big things.

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It's a fun thing to look at. Read a book or two about it. But one of the things about chaos theory is that there is an underlying order even under so -called chaos theory.

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And so, there's an order to the universe. Laymen tend to jump on Einstein's theory of relativity.

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Ah, well, everything is relative, obvious. But that is not what Einstein is referring to when he tagged that tag onto it.

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All Einstein is saying is that when you come to start measuring speeds and velocities, again, in a way, he's stating the philosophical point.

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What's your reference point? When I say I'm going, if I'm driving down the road and I say

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I'm going 60 miles an hour, well, the unspoken thing is I'm going 60 miles an hour referencing to the road that I'm driving on.

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But when Captain Kirk says, how fast are we going? The next question that the helmsman has to ask is reference to what, sir?

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Because all of these points out in space are also moving. And so,

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I'm going how fast in reference to some reference point? There must be a point of reference. And that's what

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Einstein was dealing with, was if the reference points are moving, it affects everything that goes on.

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There's another famous principle that you may have heard of if you've taken physics, and that's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which roughly says that it is impossible to know simultaneously the position and the velocity of a particle.

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You may know one or the other, but you can't know both at the same time. And I saw a bumper sticker once near Lawrence Livermore Laboratories where it said

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Heisenberg may possibly have slept here. And I'm thinking that only a physicist is going to understand what that means.

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But anyway, my point here is that neither one of these men is saying that the universe is chaotic, that the universe is random.

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The universe has order. In fact, Einstein to the end of his days was working on trying to find a unifying theory that would bring everything together.

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He would try to bring everything together. The second possibility, to sum up, no one can seriously hold this view in other than a theoretical way because the universe is here, and we must function within the universe the way it exists, simply in order to live.

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We are created, for example, we are created to live in a certain kind of atmosphere.

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And if we go somewhere where that atmosphere does not exist, we had best take that into account and deal with that problem.

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Otherwise, we are going to very quickly find ourselves dead. We exist in a universe, for example, in which gravity works, in which gravity holds things together.

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And so if I'm up on the top of a 10 -story building, I don't care what I think theoretically,

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I'd best not step off the roof or else I'm going to discover that gravity, after all, is deterministic.

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Down I'm going. I have to live in the universe as it is. So that brings us to the second possibility, that there is an answer that can be rationally and logically considered and communicated to others.

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And once again, there's only a few possibilities here. First of all, we can have the theory that everything came spontaneously out of nothing.

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And that's such a ludicrous idea that no one seriously holds to that view, that everything just came spontaneously out of nothing.

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Because here it must be true nothing. No energy fields, no mass, no motion, no nothing.

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And then to think that we went from just absolute nothing to something, the human mind can't get around that.

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So no one seriously advances that argument. So that leaves us with two other possibilities.

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And the first one is that everything originated from an impersonal beginning. And this is the dominant theory of today, is that everything originated from an impersonal beginning.

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There is some impersonal mass or there was some kind of impersonal energy field or something.

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No one addresses where that came from. But it's there and then poof, all of a sudden, everything that exists began out of this impersonal start.

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Something kick -started the universe and then away we go. And there are men and women who put a great deal of effort into studying what they think went on, what they theorize went on in the first few nanoseconds of the universe's existence.

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Now did the universe start from a start beginning? Yes, it did. You can find it in Genesis 1 .1.

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You can find it in Job 38. But we'll get to that in a minute. Because right now we're working with the idea that this is all impersonal.

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And so if you do that, if you say that, then you have to explain everything. Everything from the universe, the stars, the galaxies, right down to the smallest single -cell animal has to be explained as a result of this impersonal beginning plus time plus chance.

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Now, what's the problem here? One of the problems here is that there's nothing here to give any meaning to anything.

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Nothing has meaning in a system that works this way. Because there's nothing to give it meaning.

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There's no ultimate reference point. There's no infinite reference point. The particulars are all that we get.

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And no one has ever demonstrated how an impersonal beginning plus time plus chance can result in the complexity that we observe in the universe.

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The universe is there. It's observable. We can watch the planets move in their orbits.

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We can delve into the human body. And one of the things, for example, that sets us apart in this day from, say, the time of Darwin's time is that we know to a very high degree actually how the body works.

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Back in Darwin's time, he had no idea how the eye actually worked. Well, now, if you go to a biologist, he can tell you in excruciating detail exactly the steps that it goes through from when a photon of light hits one of the receptors in your eye to when it kicks into your brain and you build an image out of this.

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They can describe this. At each step of the way, we can be amazed at just how complex this is.

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And the more you learn about how these processes work, the more you are driven to see the absurdity of the idea that this can be produced by time and chance.

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And yet, because we refuse, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that there is a creator

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God, because that is something we just simply will not deal with, we stick to this idea that we all came about by time and chance because that's the only other answer we've got.

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Although, like I say, no one has ever demonstrated how that can work. You can theorize about it, but you can't demonstrate it.

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As one comedian put it, if man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

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Did some not make the cut or what? How did this work? But anyway, in some respects, we try to apply a

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God word to this. We call it pantheism. And the idea of the theism part sort of has a

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God connotation, but there's no God involved at all in that idea. You might call it pan -everythingism if you want to.

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So the impersonal beginning does not address the diversity that is observable in the universe.

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It does not address the issue of unity because there is diversity in the universe.

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There is also unity in the universe, and you need something that pulls those together. The impersonal beginning provides no basis for significance of the individual.

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It provides no basis for moral behavior. It provides no basis for moral behavior.

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And yet, human beings make, again, what Schaeffer calls moral motions.

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There are certain things built into us, hardwired into us, if you will, that we know are right and wrong.

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And we have to ask the question, why? Most people instinctively know that there is something wrong with killing another human being.

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If we don't, if a human being does not know that, we call them a psychopath, don't we?

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Because that, even doing that, we are acknowledging that this is not a normal situation.

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Why is that? Why is it wrong to kill another human being?

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You know, it's there, so where did it come from? And then that leads us to the last possible answer, and this is where we're making some progress here.

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And that's the personal beginning. That something, someone, existed prior to what we observe, outside of what we observe, and caused it to exist.

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But there is an intellect behind the universe, is what we're saying. And one of the criticisms that you may have heard, leveled at intelligent design, is, well, that's a religious concept.

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Well, it is, actually. It is a religious concept. But naturalism is equally a religious concept.

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Basically, the human race cannot function without religious concepts. And so, you know, it's not religion over here, and non -religion over there, it's which religion do you want to follow, is the issue.

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And so, the personal beginning. If there's a personal beginning, this provides the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

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Now, I will confess to you, I read science fiction. And those of you who are not, some of you are smiling, because you recognize where that line came from.

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There's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's actually a trilogy. It's a trilogy with five parts.

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Don't try to figure it out. But part of the plot of that series of novels is that they wanted to know the answer, the unifying answer, so they built the universe's largest computer and set it to work to answer the question, to life, the universe, and everything.

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And so, this computer has computed for 10 ,000 years, but it has alerted the world now that it is going to render the answer.

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And so, with great ceremony, everyone gathers to see what the computer will say. And at the due time, the computer runs to the end of the program and presents the answer, which is 42.

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42. Well, see, that's the thing. The personal beginning gives you the real answer, and it isn't 42.

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It gives you the real answer. It gives you the answer to life, to the universe, to everything. Why are we here?

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We're here because a creator, God, made us. And why are we the way we are?

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In part, we are the way we are because we are created in his image, which the rest of his creation is not.

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And also, why is man... That's the answer to the side of the question, why is man noble? We're noble because we're created in God's image.

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We have value because we are created in God's image.

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But also, men are cruel. Why are men cruel? Because men are fallen. We are not the way

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God created us to be. We are damaged, if you will. But we are not zeros.

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We are not nothings. We do have an intrinsic value that comes because of the way we are created.

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We are created in God's image. And so, it gives the answer to man's basic dilemma and tells us that, yes, we do have value.

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We can take comfort from the fact, even from the idea that we are damaged because if we are damaged, what is damaged can be repaired.

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If we were intrinsically cruel, there would be no way to change that.

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But because we have been damaged, that damaged can be fixed. Now, it can't be fixed from within ourselves.

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It has to be fixed from without. And that's several lessons down the road when we start talking about the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ.

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But that's what makes the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ possible, is because there's something to repair.

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So I don't want to get too far down that rabbit trail. But we'll be back to that. And so, there is a personality that lies behind creation.

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And that personality has always been and always will be. It existed before creation.

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It will exist in eternity past. It will exist in eternity future. And that creating personality,

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God, provides the reference point, the infinite reference point that gives meaning to everything else, you see.

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And so, man, after all, is not simply a cog in an impersonal machine.

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And that is the other side of the message of Ecclesiastes. Because remember, the first part of it was, without God, nothing has meaning.

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But with God, everything becomes a gift from his hand.

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Everything has meaning. Everything that is brought into our lives has meaning because it is a gift from a creator,

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God, who deals with us. And we, therefore, have value.

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And we, therefore, have meaning. So all of a sudden, things are brought together. Man requires an infinite personal

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God. And only the Judeo -Christian

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God of the Old and New Testaments provides the proper answer. So that the

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God of the Bible is not the best answer. It is the only answer that you can have.

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Because, number one, God is there. He's really there.

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That's the critical point of this whole lesson, if you will. God is there. He exists.

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We are created in his image. If you look at Genesis 1, verses 26 to 27, what does it say?

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God says, go to, speaking in the King James, go to, let us make man in our image.

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You have two things there. Number one, you have the creation of man in God's image. And number two, you have the

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Trinitarian God. That's probably one of the clearest references to the

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Trinitarian God. People sometimes say, well, the word Trinity doesn't appear in the

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Bible. Well, that's true. It doesn't. But the Trinitarian God appears in the Bible all through it.

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And so it addresses the problem that man is finite and cannot be his own reference point.

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And so we now have our reference point. We now have our reference point.

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There is a creator God. This is the only possible answer to man's questions in the area of being, in the area of metaphysics.

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We exist. Why do we exist? We exist because there is an infinite personal

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God who is really there, who created us. And so what does it say?

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Well, first of all, God is infinite. We need an infinite personal God. God is infinite, number one.

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So from this perspective, there is a chasm between God and all of his creation.

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The infinite God stands alone. He is totally other. He displays totally what

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R .C. Sproul calls the otherness of God. Only God is infinite.

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Everything else is finite. Only God is the creator. Everything else is created.

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Only God is independent. Everything else is dependent. Or to put it another way, only

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God is autonomous. God is sovereign. God does what it pleases him to do because he doesn't have to be a reference to anyone else.

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He is the point of reference. Now, we are not autonomous. We are not autonomous.

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We are dependent upon God. And as far as when we're referring to the infinite

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God, we are as separated from the infinite God as any other element of his creation is.

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But it doesn't stop there, fortunately. Now, this is one of the things if you look at Islam.

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The God of Islam is totally transcendent. The God of Islam is infinite.

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But it stops there. There's no way for his creation to know him or to be personally related to him.

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But that's the other side. We need a God who is personal. We need a

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God who is personal. And fortunately, that's what else God teaches it about himself is that when we start dealing with the personal

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God, now all of a sudden there's still a chasm, but the chasm has moved.

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It's now between man and the rest of God's creation. We are especially related to God in a way that the rest of creation is not because we are created in his image.

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And number two, we have a God who speaks. From our perspective, a

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God who is silent isn't much use to us. But we don't have a God who is silent.

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We have a God who speaks. We have a God who has communicated to us in propositional ideas that he has had written down in written form, and he has communicated with us.

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He has told us about himself. He has told us, number one, that he exists,

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Psalm 19. And the heavens declare that God exists. The heavens declare that God exists, but he didn't leave it there because even if we knew that God exists, if he didn't communicate anything else to us, we would be in pretty sad shape.

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But he has communicated to us through his word. He has told us that he existed before all else, that he has created all else.

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He has told us about ourselves. Oh, man, you want to know why you are the way you are?

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Well, let me tell you. I will tell you why you are the way you are. You're wondering what the problem of evil is?

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I will tell you what the problem of evil is, God says. You want to know what the solution is? I will tell you what the solution is.

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The solution must come from outside. But there is a solution, and I'll tell you what it is.

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So God communicates with us. He is not silent. And therefore, God can be known because he has made himself known.

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We can know him, not exhaustively because God is infinite and you cannot exhaust the infinite, but we can know him truly.

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What he has told us about himself is truth. It's real truth.

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It's truth with a capital T, which brings us to the next point, that God is

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Trinitarian. And why is this critical? God is not just there.

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God not only speaks, but God is Trinitarian. God exists in three persons.

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He has always existed in three distinct persons from eternity past. Now what does this mean?

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Remember when I referred back, we have certain characteristics. We are driven to love each other.

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We are driven to communicate with each other. Why is that? Because we are created in God's image.

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And you have this Trinitarian God that existed prior to creation.

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And love, communication, all of those things existed between the members of the

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Godhead before creation. God did not create to fill some need within himself.

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God wasn't lonely and decided to create man. So that he would have somebody to keep him company.

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No, no. We do not fill any need that God has.

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In fact, God actually said that in his word. He says, if I needed something, I would not tell you.

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He said, I'm complete to myself. I have no needs outside of myself. But it is

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God's nature to create. He is a creating God. And so he creates us.

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And all of these things, all of these things are characteristics of man because we are created in God's image.

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So to sum up, the answer to why anything exists, the answer to Jean -Paul

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Sartre's question, why is there something? Is because God exists and he is there.

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God exists and he is there. And God is there and he is not silent.

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So we're going to stop there today. Next Sunday, we're going to start picking up the issue of morals.

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You know, the second part of our trilogy. We'll start into that. Any questions before we conclude?

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OK. It's enough drinking from the fire hose for one morning. Let's pray.

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Our Heavenly Father, we come to you, Lord, thanking you and praising you because you are there.

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Number one, that you have made yourself known to us, that you have reached down to us and you have addressed our dilemmas.

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Father, you have sent your son. You have drawn us to yourself so that we might know you.

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We praise you for that. Lord, we ask your blessing upon the rest of the service. We ask your blessing upon our speaker this morning as he opens the word to us.