Posted on 02/09/2012 12:23:01 PM PST by spirited irish
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Genesis 1:27, KJB
For fifteen hundred years, Christendom and then later Protestant America, had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming that as all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the transcendent Triune God then it logically follows that each person is a trinity of being — of soul, spirit, and body:
"The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the soul that he loves....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)
In Biblical thought, the body is inert matter organized and vitalized by the soul. A human life is a soul which informs inert matter, thus a body without a soul is no more than a disorganized mass of cells that would quickly deconstruct, said Pastor Louis Pernot in a sermon delivered at the Temple de l'Etoile in Paris. ("Body, Mind, and Soul," Nov. 28, 2010)
The noblest part of the soul is spirit (the heart). Spirit is immortal and self-aware. It can will and think and is freely responsible for what it thinks, wills, and does.
Spirit is the unique property that distinguishes soul from matter. In Biblical thought, spirit allows man to spiritually transcend the natural dimension in order to access the supernatural dimension, thereby allowing him to enter into a personal relationship with the Spirit of God. Through this relationship, man's conscience is cleansed over time, thus enabling him to more perfectly orient the manner of his existence in this world in preparation for eternity.
In Christian thought, a person is a spirit and personality is the total individuality of the spirit. Without spirit there is no person.
Pastor Pernot notes that the key to individual liberty in the temporal sphere is man's spiritual liberty contrasted against a genetically programmed animal-like orientation. Animals do not have spirits, which are linked to intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, self-consciousness, reflection and the capacity for truth and moral goodness.
A person is uniquely free because he can spiritually transcend matter to access the supernatural dimension as Paul affirms:
"Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17)
Man is God's spiritual image-bearer, and, said the brilliant French economist, statesman, and author Frederic Bastiat, this is the gift from God which includes the physical, intellectual and moral life:
"He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man (and) these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (How Evil Works, David Kupelian, p. 8)
Vishal Mangalwadi, India's foremost Christian scholar observes that the unique concept of man as God's spiritual image-bearer gave birth to the "belief in the unique dignity of human beings," and this is,
"...the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights." (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)
Death of the Western and American Soul
Jesus to Buddha, "....you took God away from them (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made...You turned from Hinduism because it said there was an essential self, which they called the atman." (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp.59, 67)
Of all Christian doctrines the most difficult to understand is that of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). This doctrine is the complete opposite of ancient and modern evolutionary cosmogonies affirming that the universe and even the gods, emerged or evolved out of a pre-existing substance such as primordial matter or the watery chaos, which begs the question of where the substances came from.
The Triune God's miraculous creation has its' foundation in the fact that He spoke all things into existence from nothing. Early Church Father Irenaeus comments,
"God, in the exercise of his will and pleasure, formed all things...out of what did not previously exist."
But if there is no Triune God, then it logically follows that there is no source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and will, or for human dignity, worth, liberty, and property. Without God the Father unalienable (God-given) rights are meaningless. If man is not God's spiritual image-bearer, then he is less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Jesus Christ walked this earth:
"Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either......Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one's psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one's being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman). You don't exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)
Teaching Monstrous Lies About God
The great Oriental scholar Max Muller observed that monotheism preceded the polytheism and monism of the Veda. It was Buddha who took the God of monotheism away. Buddha craved God-like power to reinterpret the order of being — to deconstruct and reinterpret the soul. Taking power not only requires the murder of God but the teaching of lies.
Telling lies is wrong. But telling lies about God is a monstrous crime with eternal consequences.
Centuries later, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, among others, followed in Buddha's footsteps. God was taken away, man's soul deconstructed and lies taught as truth. Eric Voegelin comments:
"....the order of being (was) obliterated (and reinterpreted) as essentially under man's control." Taking control "requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God." (Eric Voegelin, "Science, Politics and Gnosticism," p. xv)
In place of man as God's spiritual image-bearer, the New Man was beast-man, qualitatively no different from a rat, pig, or ape.
Nihilism, or non-belief in one's own soul, is the logical assumption if the transcendent God does not exist. Nihilism is spiritual, moral, and intellectual suicide, yet for the last two hundred years, Enlightenment atheist humanists — rationalists, materialists, positivists and their modern naturalist counterparts such as occult New Agers and Trans-humanists — have been moving the West and America closer and closer to Buddha's denial of the soul.
Beginning with Kant, soul was separated from body. Man was a machine. Soul hovered somewhere in the vicinity. This did not go far enough for Enlightenment nature philosophers however. Lester Crocker explains:
"There existed in the eighteenth century a widespread desire to equate the moral with the physical world..." What was desired above all was "total integration of man in nature, with refusal of any transcendence, even though it was admitted that (being God's image-bearer) gave him certain special abilities and ways of thinking. The important thing, as La Mettrie, d'Holbach and others made clear, is that he is submitted to the same laws; everything is response to need — mechanically... like a tree or a machine. Man merely carries out natural forces — without any freedom whatsoever — in all he does, whether he loves or hates, helps or hurts, gives life or takes it." (Monsters from the Id, E. Michael Jones, pp. 5, 7)
Nietzsche declared the death of the Triune God and reinterpreted soul as an aspect of body, but it was Marxist materialists who attempted to scientifically re-engineer human beings after the fashion of Buddha's programmatic nihilism said Mangalwadi.
After seizing control of Russia, they utilized mind-conditioning techniques such as propaganda and re-education with emphasis on Darwinism as well as mind-altering drugs, electro-shock therapy, terror and other brutal measures to,
"...liquidate all expressions of individual identity in favor of an impersonal collective, communal consciousness." (The Book that Made Your World, p. 74)
With B.F. Skinners' behaviorism there is neither God nor soul. Human beings are chemicals turned into psychochemical machines determined by environment, chemistry, chance, and cultural conditioning.
With Richard Dawkins nihilism, metaphysical "thinking" memes plant thoughts in the grey matter of psychochemical organisms that are fatalistically determined by DNA.
Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, claims there really is no you, that soul, spirit and will are illusions caused by chemical interactions in the brain while his partner in nihilism, naturalist Tom Wolfe proclaims,
"Sorry, but your soul just died." (The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul, Beauregard and O'Leary, p. 4)
After World War II reaction set in against the eclipse of the unseen dimension by materialist and positivist simplifiers. Seeing the writing on the wall, Mortimer J. Adler, the guiding hand behind The Encyclopedia Britannica predicted that belief in the unseen dimension would soon be considered orthodox science. (The Seduction of Christianity, Hunt and McMahon, p. 107)
Sure enough, scientism, evolution, theosophy, spiritism, Vedanta monism and shamanism mingled, giving rise to occult science. Whereas the metaphysical program of materialist scientism outwardly denies anything nonphysical and supposedly confines itself to physical laws, occult scientism deals with spiritual laws and metaphysical forces believed to govern the physical. Building off of Darwin's materialist theory of evolution, Teilhard's spiritual theory teaches that after millions of years of evolution an impersonal god has emerged from matter. Whereas Christianity had de-divinized nature, Teilhard's theory trumpets its' re-divinization. The stage was set for the return of the gods and goddesses.
Buddha's Nihilism Comes to America
In no Western thinker has Buddha's nihilist doctrine been more clearly expressed than in Nietzsche's ecstatic utterance, "God is dead." God is dead in the hearts of modern Westerners:
"...and it is as true of the atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is of the unsophisticated multitudes....Man has lost faith in God and in the Divine Truth that once sustained him; the apostasy to worldliness that has characterized the modern age since its beginning becomes, in Nietzsche, conscious of itself and finds words to express itself. God is dead..." (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 60)
Prior to the turn of the century, God was already dead in the hearts of America's 'elite' progressives, and upon the arrival of Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 the 'elites' eagerly embraced him:
"He was immediately lionized by high society in Boston and New York. Philosophers at Harvard were mightily impressed. Many wealthy high society types and intellectuals reverted to the Buddhist idea that self is an illusion. They constituted a '... hard core of disciples who supported him and his grandiose dream: the evangelizing of the Western world by....Vedantic (monistic) Hinduism." (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 21)
Vedanta Societies were established in America and Europe for the purpose of injecting Vedantic ideas into the bloodstream of the West and America. Among those who helped disseminate Vedanta monism were Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Somerset Maugham, and Teilhard de Chardin.
The Sixties witnessed a whole series of Indian gurus make their mark on the student generation. Popular culture was introduced to any number of nature- beliefs, from Vedanta monism, Zen Buddhism, pantheism, panentheism, reincarnation and karma to belief in a vague immanent 'force,' World Soul, Gaia (Mother Earth) and Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point:
".....de Chardin believed that humanity could achieve a form of Godhood or a high level of spirituality called the Omega Point. This was an evolutionary process that everyone could attain through discipline and dedication to the path of enlightenment." (Reflections of the Omega Point, Frank Tipler, omegapoint.org)
The exciting new spirituality discouraged belief in the Biblical God and promised followers that by dedication to the path of enlightenment they would attain godhood through the merging of their souls with the cosmic universe. Through guided imagery, Tantric sex, kundalini yoga, hypnosis, possibility-thinking, dream-work, past-life regression, mind-altering drugs, rhythmic music, and spiritistic practices such as channeling, initiates could be raised to new levels of consciousness, develop psychic powers, release their souls from their bodies through astral projection and merge their consciousness with the void.
In his article, "Confronting Neo-Paganism in the Culture and the Church" Dr. Peter Jones reports that many of the architects of the new spirituality,
".... such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and Huston Smith were converts of Vedanta ..... Contemporary architects... call themselves 'Cultural Creative's,' 'Progressives,' 'Evolutionaries,' 'Integral Spiritualists,' 'Interspiritualists' or 'Transtraditional Spiritualists.' It is doubtless true to say that the key New Age leaders and their present disciples all claim some form of Vedantic enlightenment." (truthexchange, Apr. 12, 2011)
It is already the case that for increasing numbers of contemporary believers the death of God has made it impossible for them to affirm the existence of the human self thus they actively seek the annihilation of their souls through drugs, Tantric sex, yoga, and meditation. As with Buddha and contemporary Hindu gurus some initiates are trying to merge their individual consciousness with the void.
Perverted Christianity
Jesus to Buddha: "Wherever the worship of the living God has been perverted, it has always been the result of a departure from my Word....when my people cast aside the Word, the absolute is lost. Pollution in worship is the result." (The Lotus and the Cross, pp. 74, 77)
Perpetuating the lies of his predecessors, spiritual evolutionist and Vedanta prophet Ken Wilber, a Mahayana Buddhist from a Christian background, teaches "integral spirituality." A popular author whose teachings have been avidly studied by world leaders, politicians (i.e. Bill Clinton and Al Gore), scholars, writers, artists, musicians, spiritual teachers and pop culture icons, Wilber combines evolution with the world's nature religions, morals, and Eastern and Western philosophy so as to establish a universal spirituality.
A panentheist, Wilber imagines that the entire universe is God evolving from matter through billions of years toward de Chardin's 'Omega Point.' Having evolved from primordial soup beast-man now evolves toward total god-consciousness, and in this way, the imaginary god is in process of becoming while evolution becomes conscious of itself.
A form of Christianized-Vedanta monism is already here, said Dr. Peter Jones:
"Evolutionary Christianity" is producing the longed-for and much-prophesied synthesis, namely, the union of science and spirituality.... Evolutionary Christianity is a variant of Wilber's 'Theory of Everything,' a worldview of (Vedanta monism) that claims to explain everything through the notion of human evolution into a non-dual divine. Michael Dowd, the ex-Evangelical now evangelist for evolution (agrees) with Bishop's Spong's post-theistic Christianity (and) declares supernatural other-worldly religion will die out for a post-metaphysical natural religion."
Jones adds that Evolutionary Christianity is an online gathering place for:
"....evangelical theistic evolutionists, 'progressive' Emergent Christian leaders, radical post-theistic Christian liberals, Christian non-dual mystics, pro-homosexual ministers, radical religious feminists, and recognized evolutionary scientists. Some are deeply influenced by Pierre Teillard de Chardin, and pagan "geologians" such as Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme."
Emergent Church Pastor Rob Bell for example, enthusiastically endorses Ken Wilber and claims to be reinventing Christianity as an Eastern religion while evangelical leader Leonard Sweet uses quantum physics to 'scientifically' prove that God is 'in' everything. Not surprisingly, Sweet cites Teilhard de Chardin as "20th century Christianity's major voice." (Normalizing Necromancy: Tempting the Church to Talk with the Dead, Worldview Weekend, 1/23/12)
Nihilism underlies all permutations of the 'new' spirituality, whether Evolutionary Christianity, Hinduism, Gnosticism, Mythology, Jungian Depth Psychology, the Perennial Philosophy, Interfaith, Trans-humanism, Wicca, Scientology, Goddess worship, or the spiritual 'gay' agenda, for there is no form of the new spirituality that is not naturalistic. All are equally God-less; none have a source for life, consciousness, and soul, hence all are merely different expressions of nihilism.
Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd
For over two hundred years, nihilist philosophies have been working their way through our culture, embedding themselves, often unconsciously, within our psyches. This means that not only is the way we see ourselves and America colored by nihilism, but to the degree that our minds have been polluted are we immobilized by apathy, the spiritual emptiness that says in reaction to our peculiarly twisted, degraded culture, "Why bother?'
The strangely twisted atmosphere of our age is the "death of God" made tangible and it is Nietzsche who describes our meaningless, disordered, ugly, atonal, brutal, upside-down climate of nothingness:
"We have killed him (God), you and I! ...But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? ...Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray...through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? ...Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?" (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 108)
Such is the theater of the absurd in which there is neither up nor down, male nor female, right nor wrong, true nor false, normal nor abnormal because the living God is dead, and while America and the West drift aimlessly in "infinite nothingness" nihilism progressively dissolves the foundation of soul, mind, worth, morality, family, and individual liberty.
America and the West are swirling ever downward in a spiraling vortex issuing into a void of outer darkness.....hell.
Choose Life that You May Live
As the new spirituality forcefully sweeps over and across America it effects a counter-conversion of souls. This means that in turning away from the Triune God comes the reversal of conversion in which the soul ceases to live from the spirit and begins to live with the life of the body. The disordered passions thereby revived absorb the life of the person who spiritually dies resulting in the natural man of 2 Tim. 3:3. (St. Tikhon, Works II, as quoted in Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, Ellis Sandoz, p. 120)
"..... I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life..." Deuteronomy 30:19-20
The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Word become Flesh, Jesus Christ the Physician came to heal the spiritually sick. But whoever rejects the Physician and his own soul, whether through indifference or outright denial, rejects His prescription, hence destroys him or herself.
Destruction however, does not mean annihilation of the soul. The soul though immortal, said St. Augustine, nevertheless suffers a kind of death when the living God forsakes it:
"...in that penal and everlasting punishment....the soul is...said to die because it does not live in connection with God (meaning that) though man does not cease to feel, yet because this feeling is neither sweet... nor wholesome (but) painfully penal, it is (called) death rather than life." (St. Augustine's City of God, Chapter 2, Of that Death Which Can Affect an Immortal Soul, and of that to Which the Body is Subject)
© Linda Kimball
For the faithful no evidence is needed, for the nonbeliever no evidence will suffice.
bttt
Her view (or yours) is one of many, and the others aren't simply negations of your own idea and they aren't going to go away.
If a "personal relationship with the living Spirit of God" is possible, it would be more complex and more awesome and harder to explain or describe than what this article represents.
A "personal relationship with the living Spirit of God" might perhaps make one more tolerant and less dismissive of other traditions.
You began by accusing the author of being disapproving, that is, judgmental. Now at last you confess the truth: it is YOU who disapprove. It is you who are offended, not the other way around.
Now you claim that different ideas contradict and compete with each other. This is true. But your argument for examining them independently of each other is fallacious.
This is because light shines brightest in the dark just as good is seen against a backdrop of evil, sanity against insanity, order against disorder, truth against hypocrisy, and life, purpose, meaning, and hope against death, meaninglessness, purposelessness and hopelessness.
By unpacking and contrasting nihilism in its many historic forms against eternal verities, truth, purpose, meaning, hope and eternal life the author has shown that these two antithetical worldviews have been competing against one another since at least the time of Buddha.
It is truth and reality that offends you for you prefer the delusion.
And no, having a personal relationship with the Spirit of God is neither complex nor hard. His hand is open to all who seek Him.
ping to #25
I hope she realizes that Christ and the Buddha didn’t actually talk with each other.
“Animals do not have spirits, which are linked to intelligence, imagination, sensitivity, self-consciousness, reflection and the capacity for truth and moral goodness.”
This woman has no clue about animals.
For instance, the Buddha did not teach nihilism, and, in fact, he taught against it. It's true that he didn't believe in a creator god (because in Buddhism the view is that creation happens over and over, like a tide coming in and going out, eternally, and there is no original creation to require a creator) but that does not suggest that he taught that life is meaningless or without moral values. Quite to the contrary, he was very specific about life's moral values and purpose, which he believed was to live with compassion for each other and all other beings.
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Not only are Vedantists not nihilists, they aren't even atheists. Members of the Vedanta Society believe in the existence of a creator god with whom one may have a personal relationship. That's simply a fact. In addition, Vivekananda had no intention or ambition to convert the West to Hinduism. He believed that all people of faith are united in their mutual desire to improve the world, and that in their essence all religions are broadcasting the same message.
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We live in a world where Christianity is often misrepresented to its detractors, for instance in the Middle East and South Asia. If we want fair treatment from other religions, isn't it important to get our facts straight about theirs?
You selectively rejected the Christian comments in favor of an obvious monist.
Be that as it may, the professor of world religions admonished:
” Buddha did not teach nihilism, and, in fact, he taught against it. It’s true that he didn’t believe in a creator god (because in Buddhism the view is that creation happens over and over, like a tide coming in and going out, eternally, and there is no original creation to require a creator) but that does not suggest that he taught that life is meaningless or without moral values. Quite to the contrary, he was very specific about life’s moral values and purpose..”
Ideas have consequences, and as the professor’s understanding of how ideas work is extraordinarily shallow he cannot see the logical inconsistencies and nihilism lurking at the deepest level of Buddha’s ideas.
Did Buddha mean to teach nihilism? No. But like a man who does not foresee the consequences of drinking and driving Buddha neither saw the logical inconsistencies nor the nihilist consequences of his teachings. And the foolish professor has placed his faith in the claims made by an egoistic fallible man who could neither see nor envision the inconsistencies, hypocrisy and other failures of his own teachings.
According to the professor creation “just happens” meaning that ‘something’ came from ‘nothing’(creation ex nihilo) but unaided by a living Creator. The professor adds that this ‘something’ is like a tide coming in and going out.
By virtue of Buddha’s naturalist belief system (monism) both he and the professor are aspects of nature, mere grains of sand on a cosmic beach, making them fully determined and caused by natural forces acting upon the sand.
The beach is the monist ’whole-thing’ or one-substance (known as Chaos to the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans) of which everything—including Buddha and the professor— is comprised. Buddha and the professor then are as grains of sand helpless against the forces of nature—wind, rain, tide and the things that sea gulls do on sand.
Logical consistency demands that neither the Buddha nor the professor be free to choose other than to be tossed to and fro, blown hither and yon or to resist being used for the building of sand castles by little children who are the spiritual image-bearers of the supernatural living Triune God.
Either the Buddha and the professor are aspects of nature, which has no source for life, consciousness, soul, spirit and free will or they are not.
But if the professor is an aspect of nature then there is no ‘him’ capable of freely choosing Buddha over the Son of God let alone choosing to angrily contend against Linda Kimball.
Do grains of sand argue? No. Do grains of sand seek Godless ‘moral systems’ as the professor claims? No.
The professor disproves his own claims by his use of personal pronouns and the fact of his free will, thereby demonstrating Vedanta monism’s utter lack of logical consistency.
Because Buddha built his house on shifting sands, so did the unthinking professor. And so have you.
“I hope she realizes that Christ and the Buddha didn’t actually talk with each other.”
Spirited: Conceit invariably makes a fool of its’ ‘owner,’ so doubtless you believe that you have said something quite grand and utterly illuminating. You have not. All you have done is spit. And as what goes up must come down, keep in mind where you are standing....in a ditch.
WTF?
Nor can any one of them postulate what, if anything, preceded the Big Bang. The laws of physics do not yet exist in the Planck era — the earliest period of time in the history of the universe, from zero to approximately 10−43 seconds immediately following the Big Bang. We can not only not "see" what the immediate aftermath (i.e., the Planck era) of the Big Bang "looks like"; but we have no scientific means that can tell us what preceded it (if anything).
And so please forgive this Christian if she simply believes that God did in fact create the universe exactly as He told us He did: ex nihilo. Though science can neither validate nor falsify this claim, I reason that it is true — because the Foundation of Truth cannot Lie and be consistent with Himself.
Ex nihilo means: no time, no space, no dimensions, no matter, no fundamental forces of nature, no physical laws, nothing at all pre-exists the Creation. All of these are God's creatures, too: They did not pre-exist; they too were first made in the Beginning. And whatever was loaded into God's Word of the Beginning (i.e., the "singularity" in scientific jargon) became manifest in cosmic evolution.
Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, L,TOWM.
Darwinism is a God-less naturalist metaphysical program positing the pre-existence of self-generated primordial water. Where did the water come from? The void. Similarly, the Big Bang and quantum theory hold that things materialized out of a vacuum (void).
It is precisely because some naturalists desire a God-less source for life, consciousness, mind, and will that Teilhard held that ‘god’ had finally emerged out of brute matter that had spontaneously self-generated out of the void.
All of these positions ultimately implode in nihilism because the void is nothingness. It is not conscious. It cannot think, see, move or tell time.
Nothing is not life but death. From death came life by chance, thus back to death goes life. Death is the victor.
Jesus Christ the Physician said ‘freely choose’ life that you may live. Though naturalists go to great lengths to deny the reality of free will, they ultimately demonstrate its’ existence by choosing death (the void) rather than life.
Since the 1960s forward measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation consistently agree that the universe is expanding. This means that space and time do not pre-exist but are created as the universe expands. It also means there was a beginning of real space and real time.
That was the most theological statement to ever come out of modern science (Jastrow) – “In the beginning, God created …” (Gen 1:1)
There is no infinite past. Steady state cosmology is dead as a doornail.
So of course physical cosmologists went into high gear trying to obviate God the Creator evidently because methodological naturalism cannot allow for Creator God.
But none of the theories – cyclic, ekpyrotic, multi-verse, multi-world, imaginary time, etc. – can avoid the problem that space and time do not pre-exist.
In the absence of time, events cannot occur.
Both are required for physical causation.
Also, the singularity of big bang cosmology is not nothing:
It is not nothing. It is a spatial point. A singularity is not nothing.
In ex nihilo Creation (beginning of space/time) - the dimensions are not merely zero, they are null, dimensions do not exist at all. There is no space and no time. Period.
There is no mathematical point, no volume, no content, no scalar quantities. Ex nihilo doesn’t exist in relationship to anything else; there is no thing.
In an existing physical space, each point (e.g. particle) can be parameterized by a quantity such as mass. The parameter (e.g. a specific quantity within the range of possible quantities) is in effect another descriptor or quasi-dimension that uniquely identifies the point within the space.
Moreover, if the quantity of the parameter changes for a point, then a time dimension is invoked. For example, at one moment the point value is “0” and the next it is “1”.
Wave propagation (e.g. big bang, inflation) cannot occur in null dimensions nor can it occur in zero spatial dimensions, a mathematical point; a dimension of time is required for any fluctuation in a parameter value at a point.
Moreover, wave propagation must also have a spatial/temporal relation from cause point to effect point, i.e. physical causation.
For instance “0” at point nt causes “1” at point n+1t+1 which causes "0" at point n+1t+2 etc..
Obviously, physical wave propagation (e.g. big bang/inflationary model) cannot precede space/time and physical causality.
And he realizes that only God, beyond space/time and physical causation, can be the uncaused cause of causation, the first cause, The Creator of the beginning.
Space, time and physical causation are not properties of God the Creator. They are properties of the Creation. Only God is uncaused.
Order cannot arise from chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system whether one is using chaos theory, self-organizing complexity, cellular automata or whatever to analyze complexification, entropy and order.
Indeed, to me, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Wigner) is God’s copyright notice on the cosmos.
Logos is the Greek word which is translated “Word” in the following passage. It is also the root for the word “Logic:”
At least Nazism is an ethos.
Excellent post.
Of course, from a purely scientific POV it is not possible to say the God of the Bible created the Universe out of nothing. Only that the Universe was not, and then it was, with time and space coming into existence together.
OTOH, belief in a Creator-God that caused the BB is entirely in agreement with present scientific thought.
I am constantly amazed by those atheists who think the BB Theory has disproved the existence of God. In fact, it is much more in agreement with the Bible than a Steady State universe would be.
But Judaism and Christianity overcome that despondency with the kind of thinking you admire. Part of the richness of the religious tradition, though, is that it's not all just the system of triumphal ideas that you proclaim, but that it understands life's darker side. Having seen the worst makes the positive vision more substantial, than if it were just a system one was expected to follow to achieve a goal or a set of inspiring truths that had no contact with the less inspirational aspects of existence.
I'm no expert on Buddhism (or any other religion) -- I keep forgetting which is the "Greater Vehicle" and which the "Lesser Vehicle." But there are different schools in Buddhism. They don't all rest content with nothingness and chaos. The whole religion isn't what beats and hipsters took from it in the 1950s and 1960s. Bottom line: there is a moral law, there is right and wrong in Buddhism, so "nihilism" isn't the right term to describe the religion.
There's a case to be made that one religion goes further and answers more questions, is more satisfying and truer in some way, and also a case that many make for Western rational-empirical thinking over Eastern mysticism, but most people who are really interested in religion wouldn't be as dismissive of another tradition as you and Kimball appear to be.
Anyway, here is what's been said about Buddhism's concept of "emptiness":
This teaching does not connote nihilism. In the English language the word "emptiness" suggests the absence of spiritual meaning or a personal feeling of alienation, but in Buddhism the emptiness of phenomena, at a basic level, enables one to realize that the things which ultimately have no independent substance cannot be subject to any irreconcilable conflicts or antagonisms. Ultimately, true realisation of the doctrine can bring liberation from the limitations of the cycle of uncontrollably recurring rebirth.
I don't claim to fully understand that, but as I said above, Buddhism doesn't repudiate ethics, moral law, or ideas of right and wrong, so "nihilism" doesn't fit as a description.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: - Romans 1:20
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. - John 1:1-3
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. - Hebrews 11:3
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation 1:8
x: There’s a case to be made that one religion goes further and answers more questions, is more satisfying and truer in some way, and also a case that many make for Western rational-empirical thinking over Eastern mysticism, but most people who are really interested in religion wouldn’t be as dismissive of another tradition as you and Kimball appear to be.”
Spirited: Though many men have turned Christianity into a religion it is in fact a personal relationship with the Holy Trinity, God the Spirit, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ, the living Word become Flesh came to heal the weary souls of men and to declare the Good News: the Way to Paradise is now open.
In that through this relationship with the Spirit of God mortal man can attain life eternal (paradise) then Christianity is “more satisfying and truer,” to use your own words. And this being the case all true Christians have a duty to point all of the unsaved to the Word of God.
Since your current interest lies with Buddhism, which you admit you do not understand, then what better guide for you than Vishal Mangalwadi, India’s foremost Christian scholar?
Called by leading Christian scholars a contemporary St. Augustine, Mangalwadi’s knowledge of Western and Eastern philosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity is intimate, penetrating, and vast.
Here is an introduction to his writing:
http://cdn.learnsocially.com/33a99540-2b00-012d-0b70-7efd4acfe485.pdf
Mangalwadi’s website:
http://www.revelationmovement.com/
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