Need help

[raven1]

Please no rude answers. For a Christian forum some of the people on here can be rude. Just in case I get people saying your statis says Christian. I just have a lot of doubt. I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved. Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

 

[elopez]

I don't think it is more logical to think we were created like a magic trick. Christianity doesn't require that specific belief. What makes you think that?

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Please no rude answers. For a Christian forum some of the people on here can be rude. Just in case I get people saying your statis says Christian. I just have a lot of doubt. I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved. Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

Well, I actually think that we do have a hard time with things like "Jesus walking on water, etc." In fact, most of us probably have a hard time with Jesus in general, beginning with the presence of angels and the annunciation through the virgin birth.

Perhaps the problem in your thinking is the false assumption [and I do mean this respectfully and not as a reflection on your actual intelligence] that what is taken as the apparent use of logic always and necessarily leads to conclusive answers. What form of logic are you using, raven1?

 

[aiki]

I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved.

Evolved from what? How was there anything to evolve from in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are better questions, I think.

Calling God's creative acts "magic tricks" is to confuse human acts with divine ones. We humans do magic tricks, God does not.

Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

If he is God incarnate, why would I have a hard time with him walking on water? I would expect just such incredible feats from God made flesh.

Selah.

 

[ViaCrucis]

Please no rude answers. For a Christian forum some of the people on here can be rude. Just in case I get people saying your statis says Christian. I just have a lot of doubt. I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved. Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

It's not more logical. We did evolve, and there is nothing in evolutionary theory that is incompatible with the Christian religion.

I think people do have a hard time with the notion of the supernatural (e.g. Jesus walking on water), otherwise everyone would accept the supernatural. People of faith (or rather, Christian people of faith) embrace the reality that on occasion the normative rules of the universe are contravened. Not as though this were a common thing, but that there have been instances of this happening according to God's intended purposes.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[talitha]

Hey, Raven. Have you and your husband found a church yet? I have found that when I do not draw near to the family of God, I find myself with more doubts and struggles. I think logic is inferior to revelation. Logic is merely brain-comprehension, whereas revelation is truth opened up to us by the creator of truth.

 

[oi_antz]

Beliefs are only as good as their fruits.

 

[bling]

There is excellent logic behind evolution, but chemicals do not evolve, so what is the mechanism for just a bunch of chemicals to come together and form life?

As far as Jesus walking on water there is no problem with that if you believe Jesus is deity come in the flesh to walk among us.

 

[ebia]

Please no rude answers. For a Christian forum some of the people on here can be rude. Just in case I get people saying your statis says Christian. I just have a lot of doubt. I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved. Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

If we didn't assume the world behaved consistently we'd have a big problem living. Consistency is a great gift. It's not a big step from there to absolutising it.

 

[KimberlyAA]

There's no need for rudeness. Everyone has their doubts once in a while, it's perfectly normal. Asking questions is the key to increasing knowledge and wisdom.

Logic and reason are far from being incompatible with biblical Christianity. Rather, they are essential. Without them it is impossible to deduce anything from the true propositions of the 66 books of Scripture, the Christian’s final authority. This applies to Creation, one of the foundational doctrines of Christianity.

Consider the Bible's amazing unity, amazing preservation, historical accuracy, scientific accuracy, prophetic accuracy, civilizing influence and life-changing message.

The universal tendency of things to run down and to fall apart shows
that the universe had to be ‘wound up’ at the beginning. It is not eternal.
This is totally consistent with ‘In the beginning God created the heaven​

and the earth.’ (Gen. 1:1).

The changes we see in living things are not the sorts of changes that
suggest that the living things themselves came into being by any natural,
evolutionary process. Evolution from molecules to man needs some way
of creating new complex genetic programs, or information. Mutations​

and natural selection lead to loss of information.

The fossils do not show the expected transitions from one basic kind
of organism to another. This is powerful evidence against the belief that​

living things made themselves over eons of time.

The explosion in knowledge of the intricate workings of cells and
organs has shown that such things as the blood clotting system could
not have arisen by a series of accidental changes. The instructions, or​

information, for specifying the complex organization of living things is

not in the molecules themselves (as it is with a crystal), but is imposed
from outside. All this demands an intelligent Creator who vastly exceeds​

our intelligence.

Evolutionist Harold Morowitz estimated the probability for chance formation of even the simplest form of living organism at 1 in 10 to the power of 340,000,000.

Every year, and especially around Easter, the secular media promotes new anti-biblical theories about Jesus (e.g. that He was homosexual/drug-addicted/married) and about biblical miracles. Naturalistic theories endeavoring to explain away the biblical miracles are churned out ad nauseam by secular academia. Jesus’ disciples were not stupid, and as fishermen (Mark 1:16–20; Matthew 4:18–22) some of them were intimately familiar with the Sea of Galilee. They were just as naturally sceptical of miracles as anyone else. For example when Mary Magdalene and other women first reported that Jesus had risen from the dead (Mark 16:10; Luke 24:11), the disciples initially dismissed what they said as ‘idle tales’. It is well worth contemplating what occurred to overcome their healthy scepticism. Neither were they hoaxers (2 Peter 1:16). Most of the apostles were eventually executed because they insisted that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God, and refused to deny Him. But if they knew that Jesus’ miracles were just tricks, why were they willing to be martyred? When confronted with Jesus’ miracles one is faced with a choice—To willfully deny the powerful eye-witness evidence, and instead use fallen human imagination to concoct vain and fanciful fairytales or to humbly face up to the fact that these miracles are authentic, and that Jesus truly is the living Son of God, as the empty tomb and the willing martyrdom of His disciples testifies.

 

[Ultima4257]

Please no rude answers. For a Christian forum some of the people on here can be rude. Just in case I get people saying your statis says Christian. I just have a lot of doubt. I am just curious about why it is more logical to believe we were created like a magic trick than we evolved. Why do people not have a hard time with things like Jesus walking on water.etc.

I think that the creation story is more of a summary of how everything was created and not the entire picture, meaning God didn't go into great detail of how everthing was made. If you think about the time in which Genesis was written, people were very uneducated and unsure of things we now about now. It seems logical that God would tell His people things in a way they would understand and not weigh them down with details they couldn't possibly understand. As far as Jesus goes with walking on water, He was God and because of that I believe he wasn't limited by time and space as we are. Take the miracle of the loaves and fishes for instance. It is possible since He was God to stop time which allowed him to perform the miracle. My point is we may not always understand the details of things, but we can see the end result which is more important sometimes. Good luck in your continued search.

 

[Harry3142]

raven1-

It appears that your experience with Christians has been primarily with those who preach that unless we accept The Creation Story as a literal event, The great Flood as another literal event, and have absolute faith that Jesus performed all that he is credited with doing in the gospels, we aren't really Christians. I've encountered some of these people myself.

But there are many of us who do not accept a literal 24-hour day, 6-day timespan for the creation of the various objects and animals which are part of our present-day environment. We also see The Great Flood as a morality tale which taught the hebrews that even if God did destroy the entire world, he would still save those who put their trust in him. And we accept that Christ did indeed perform what the gospels describe him as doing primarily because they were written so close to the time of the events that they would have been exposed as fraudulent by eyewitnesses to those events if their authors had lied or embellished.

One thing that might help you with your problems concerning Jesus Christ and what he did is to read this:

www.bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html

The arguments against Jesus' having performed what the gospels claim rests primarily with those who also claim that the gospels weren't even begun in written form until at least 70 AD. But this document, itself dated to 170 AD, dates the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) to before 62 AD, with Acts also having been written before then. The events and the time of their being recorded were simply too close together for anyone to 'make up' stories about what Jesus did without knowing that there would be those who would call him to task if he did.

 

[raven1]

My problem is believing God can create matter and how God exists without being created. I just have such a hard time that I think it must be all faith I wasn't given.

 

[raven1]

The virgin birth is also hard to take in.

 

[ViaCrucis]

My problem is believing God can create matter and how God exists without being created. I just have such a hard time that I think it must be all faith I wasn't given.

A major stumbling block for many people, I think, is that far too often we try to envision God as essentially "a very powerful guy in the sky". Sometimes to the point that God is portrayed as a white-haired grandfatherly figure with a robe and sandals walking on clouds:

However within the broad Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) tradition God is considered radically and completely other. God cannot be described, God cannot be defined. We consider this the ineffability of God, wholly indescribable and incomprehensible.

God is not a "super powerful being" somewhere "up there"; rather God is the Ground of Being, He is the wellspring of existence. God is therefore not something that exists, but rather is Existence, in a way wholly beyond our experiences ("I AM that I AM").

The more one attempts to divorce themselves from the idea of God as "That Dude Up There", the easier it becomes (at least I think so) to affirm God's radical otherness, His transcendence.

A possible helpful tool for trying to expand the imagination is to consider the Ontological Argument put forward by St. Anselm of Canterbury: God is "That than which nothing greater can exist." God is, at all times, greater than what can be conceived, if you can conceive of something greater or higher than what you call "God" then what has been called "God" isn't God at all. Perhaps use this as a thinking tool.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Ultima4257]

My problem is believing God can create matter and how God exists without being created. I just have such a hard time that I think it must be all faith I wasn't given.

That is hard question for anyone to accurately answer because their is so much of God that we as human beings cannot comprehend. I will however leave you some thought to analyze since they have helped me come to terms with this question, even though I still have a hard time with it sometimes. God is infinite and the source of everything created. Everything in our universe and outside of it came into existence through Him. God exists in eternity, or infinity since time doesn't exist in His domain. Therefore, God isn't restrained by our time and space because He is the creator and the creator cannot be restrained by His creation. If you think of Him in these terms, it is possible He has always existed since everything was created by him. We as human beings have a problem with this because we tend to think of existence in a linear perspective, in other words we are born, we live and we eventually die. God is not like us since He is the creator of all things. As far as the virgin birth goes, your guess is as good as mine.

 

[raven1]

It's just all so hard to believe. It seems like a fairy tale.


I was wondering about the bible how do we know someone didn't make it up.

 

[Ultima4257]

It's just all so hard to believe. It seems like a fairy tale.

True it can seem that way. However, I find it much harder to believe that if it was a fairy tale, it would have impacted the the world to the extent it has. Most people would not lay down their lives for a fairy tale.


I was wondering about the bible how do we know someone didn't make it up.

I find it unlikely that people would have the patience and resolve to make up a book over thousands of years, carefully trying to maintain its integrity. If that were so it would be the biggest hoax in human history. Furethermore, if your consider the time in which it was written and the people it was written by, what would they have to gain and how would you explain the accuracies in the book, especially pertaining to prophecy.

 

[ebia]

It's just all so hard to believe. It seems like a fairy tale.

I was wondering about the bible how do we know someone didn't make it up.

It might be helpful to focus in on the central truth on which everything else hangs - the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

We have five independent accounts of the event (4 gospels + Paul). The first written down within 20 years or so of the event, the last no more than 60 years after the event. All show strong signs of being accounts that took their form much earlier than that. That's pretty quick to make up something like that remembering that there was no expectation of a resurrected messiah. The messiah was not supposed to die. The whole point of crucified messiahs was to prove they werent the messiah. What normally then happened was either their followers faded away overnight or they decided that someone else - usually a brother or son - was the real messiah.

So this is not believing what you thought would happen - its completely unexpected.

It's not for gain - many of those claiming to be eyewitnesses were killed because of it. People often will die for a false belief, but not for a belief they know to be false.

Then there are details in the accounts no-one would make up. For example, women were not valid witnesses - their testimony was not considered reliable. Yet all 4 gospels insist the first witnesses were women. That's a stupid claim to make unless it's inconveniently true.

And so on

 

[aiki]

My problem is believing God can create matter and how God exists without being created. I just have such a hard time that I think it must be all faith I wasn't given.

If God cannot create matter, He cannot be God. If God cannot exist uncaused, He cannot be God. By definition, God is the Greatest Possible Being, which means, in part, that He is the uncaused First Cause of everything. It is just such a Cause that the existence of the universe requires. The universe cannot have created itself. Such an idea is utter circular nonsense. The universe cannot always have existed. The Big Bang Theory clearly indicates that the universe had a beginning point in time. So, where did the universe come from? THe obvious and simple answer is: God. Many years ago a Muslim philosopher named Al Ghazali posited the following argument in favor of a Creator-God:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

And what sort of cause could have created the universe? Only one that was transcendent to time, space, and matter; only one that was incredibly powerful; only one that was personal and unchanging -- which is exactly the kind of God we find in the pages of the Bible. This isn't a conclusion born of blind faith, but of clear and simple logic. It isn't the conclusion of a fairy tale, but of sound reasoning.

Selah.