Help an Agnostic who wishes to find God

[aiki]

Also, how do I get to know God? Is there a way of communicating with Him directly?

This has been a busy thread! Sorry I haven't been able to respond sooner.

So, how do you get to know God? Well, here are few things to consider:

1. God has revealed Himself to us through Creation. We see, among many other things, order, complexity, beauty, and vast power in what God has made. These things provide glimpses in on God's nature. To have created beauty, God must have a positive regard and understanding of it. The awesome natural forces at work in our world and in the universe demonstrate something of the power of the One who created them and controls them. The incredible complexity and order we see in Creation also suggest that the Creator is correspondingly complex, and intelligent, and ordered. Unfortunately, we can only perceive God in broad strokes through creation. We can recognize that He exists and that He has certain facets to His Being, but we don't know who or what He is specifically.

2. We see in ourselves, in our moral sense, our self-awareness, our admiration of beauty, in our capacity to love, a reflection of the image of God. In all the very highest and best of humanity we see something of God. But this reflection is marred by our selfishness, by the curse of sin upon us. We hold some few things in common with our Maker, but there is far more about Him that we will never see mirrored in ourselves.

3. The record of the Bible recounts how God began and has continued to involve Himself in human history. In the account of God's dealings with humanity that we find in the Bible, we gain a much clearer, more detailed picture of who God is. We see that He is compassionate, holy and just; a gracious and merciful Creator, and a wrathful Judge of wickedness. In the pages of Scripture, we discover Him to be a kind and gentle Heavenly Father to His children and at the same time deeply inscrutable and even alien.

It is, then, primarily in the pages of the Bible that you will "get to know God." He has decided to reveal Himself there more clearly than anywhere else. Feelings, impressions, goose pimples and shivers, emotional highs - none of these things teach us anything at all about our Creator. If you want to know God, read your Bible.

Inevitably, you'll find that what is revealed of God in Scripture is borne out in your daily experience. Over time you will build a personal history with God. But don't let your experience of God become the final arbiter of what is and isn't true about Him. This is a trap many Christians fall into. God's Word is true whether or not what it tells me about God is proven in my experience of Him.

What is this personal experience of God like? Well, obviously, it isn't like my experience of my parents, or friends, or siblings; I don't interact with God on a tangible, physical plane. I can't touch Him with my hands, or smell his aftershave, or whatever. But God does promise me certain things as one of His children. These promises I can "put to the test." Most notably, I have seen God provide for me in immediate and specific response to my needs, both physical and spiritual. One might have some grounds for assuming that what I ascribe to Providence is merely coincidence, but when the answers to prayer are so numerous, and particular, and perfect, well, it begins to badly stretch credulity to do so.

And there is also the knowing, the unshakeable certainty of God's presence, that certifies my experience of Him. "The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God..." (Ro. 8:16)

How do you communicate with God? As some have already said, through prayer, which is just talking to God. You don't have to pray in the King James English, or have perfect grammar, or have everything you pray set out ahead of time. Simply talk to God all the time about everything.

Selah.

 

[bling]

Hi Bling,

What do you understand mankind's objective to be, I have often wondered this..

First: Try this out for why God created man: God’s Love compelled Him to create beings that could Love like He Loves.
This Godly type Love is the real issue since it cannot be just instinctively given to us (robotic love) and it cannot be forcible given to us ( Love or I torture you) for that would not be Loving on God’s part and the love that was forced on us would not be Godly type Love.
Man’s objective is thus to obtain and grow this Godly type Love to fulfill the mission (statement) of Love God and secondly others with all our heart, soul, mind, and energy.
This Godly type Love is defined by Jesus’ words and deeds (you can also use 1 Cor 13 and 1 John 4).
God is doing and allowing all He can to help those that are just willing to accept His help fulfill their objective. That Christ to go to the cross, satan to roam the earth, tragedies of all kind, hell, evil, and even sin.
God is not trying to trying to get us to do something, but is trying to give us the most powerful force in all universes if we will just accept the gift as it was given (charity).

 

[Sir Wilshire]

First off, thank you for being open to being convinced. That is a good attitude to have. I also apologize for those who are spouting off bad science.

What troubles me about religion is that it disagrees with much of modern science. For example, we know Earth was created by the accumulation of star dust from an ancient supernova a billion or so years ago, and that humans evolved from ancient species. We also know the Earth is not a mere thousands of years old, but is in fact MUCH older.

It doesn't teach that the Earth is a mere thousands of years old.

If the Bible was true, it seems to me that God would have included these things in it.

Really, why is that when science didn't exist during the time period of the people he is said to have revealed things too?

What also concerns me is that there seem to be two versions of the Christian God. That from the Old Testament, and that of the New Testament. One is a vengeful and violent God while the other is loving. It seems to me that most people follow the New Testament nowadays but which do we believe?

Example?

I'm also curious how a Christian could believe in evolution. If they did, they would believe that humans evolved from simple organisms over millions and millions of years, which would conflict with the idea that God created man in his image, and that earth was created in a relatively short timespan.

Christian theology says God sustains the very existence and operations of the universe by his power. If he's running things like that from such a fundamental level, then it's very simple to say evolution is the process he used to create us.

As for being made in his image, that has nothing to do with a physical reality. Back then, when people spoke of an "image," they meant a contact point through which a deity expressed its authority. It involves ruling. And human beings are certainly the only species that can be said to be ruling the Earth.

I can accept the possibility that a God created the laws of physics and just let the universe play out, but that theory is no different than having no creator at all and doesn't really answers any questions.

That would be deism. But in theism, the universe can't just run on its own. It needs God's sustaining power.

That's just talking in my head to no one. He doesn't talk back.

If God is there and listening, then it isn't talking to no one.

The difference between things taught by science and those believed on pure faith is that scientific theories have been tested and are falsifiable, while beliefs based on faith are not.

If any scientific theories are disproven, I will not believe them any longer, but for some reason people who have "faith" will continue to believe things which do not agree with facts.

When Christianity first started, faith wasn't understood this way as it mistakenly is today by some Christians and non-Christians.

It is a commitment of trust and loyalty based on evidence of reliability. Jesus showed himself to be reliable by rising from the dead. So it rests on the evidence for that. The writer of half the NT said himself in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Jesus didn't actually rise from the dead, then Christians should be pitied above all others for believing a lie.