ElShamah - Reason & Science: Defending ID and the Christian Worldview
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ElShamah - Reason & Science: Defending ID and the Christian Worldview

Otangelo Grasso: This is my personal virtual library, where i collect information, which leads in my view to the Christian faith, creationism, and Intelligent Design as the best explanation of the origin of the physical Universe, life, biodiversity


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The cause of the universe must be personal

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Otangelo


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The cause of the universe must be personal

you need a lot of faith to believe in chance. In the end : what is chance ? Its nothing.

http://elshamah.heavenforum.com/does...-t5-15.htm#749

That problem was nicely captured by Anthony Kenny of Oxford University. He writes, "A proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing."4 But surely that doesn't make sense! Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist instead of just nothing? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being.

From the very nature of the case, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being which created the universe. It must be uncaused because we've seen that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be timeless and therefore changeless—at least without the universe—because it created time. Because it also created space, it must transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical.

Moreover, I would argue, it must also be personal. For how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe? If the cause were a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without the effect. For example, the cause of water's freezing is the temperature's being below 0˚ Centigrade. If the temperature were below 0˚ from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. So if the cause is permanently present, then the effect should be permanently present as well. The only way for the cause to be timeless and the effect to begin in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions. For example, a man sitting from eternity could freely will to stand up. Thus, we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator.


Ken Ham explains, “To believe that matter came from nowhere for no reason; to believe that matter organized itself into complex information systems against everything we know and observe obviously requires faith. Not only faith, but blind faith!” Christianity requires faith too, but objective faith. We have the revealed Word of the creator of the universe. We can believe in Him and have a personal relationship with Him. What we see in the universe is explained clearly without having to bend and twist the creation model of origin. Evolution, on the other hand, has to bend and twist to accommodate science and new discoveries in our universe. Evolution is empowered by chance and not revelation. Evolutionists can’t have a relationship with matter.

http://www.creationdefense.org/24.htm

John MacArthur sums it up best: “Blind devotion to chance is an act of defiance to reason and more importantly against revelation and more importantly against God.” R.C. Sproul calls chance, “the magic wand to make not only rabbits come out of the hat, but entire universes.” Simply put: Chance doesn’t stand a chance.

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/creation.html

From the nature of the case involved, that cause must have transcended space and time (at least sans the universe) and therefore be uncaused, changeless, eternal, immaterial, and enormously powerful. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere [Craig (1979), pp. 149-153; (1991), pp. 104-108], the cause is most plausibly construed to be personal. For the only way in which a temporal effect could originate from an eternal, changeless cause would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who eternally chooses to create an effect in time. A changeless, mechanically operating cause would produce either an immemorial effect or none at all; but an agent endowed with free will can have an eternal determination to operate causally at a (first) moment of time and thereby to produce a temporally first effect. Therefore, the cause of the universe is plausibly regarded as personal. This conclusion receives confirmation from the incredible complexity of the initial conditions given in the early universe, which bespeak intelligent design [Leslie (1990)]. These attributes are some of the core properties of what theists mean by "God."

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com

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