God and Time

I did a short response to Dr. William Lane Craig's model of divine eternity:

Providentially this reply is fitting for WLC's newest podcast on God and time.  

God and Time

Before I post my critique of William Lane Craig's proposed model between God and time, I wanted to recommend a few articles I found interesting on the subject.

Space, time, and God. Steve Hays here.

Common Misunderstandings of the Tenseless Theory of Time. Jeremy Pierce here.

Did God Change at the Incarnation. James N. Anderson here

God Responsible for Sin?

Page excerpt from Edward John Carnell's"Christian Apologetics."

Book Recommendations

Book recommendations:

I strongly recommend Dr Jason Lisle's works below as a easy and concise introduction to Biblical apologetics.

Dr. Pratt Jr's wonderful work.

Dr. Greg Bahnsen's foundational work.

Robert Reymond's work offered for free Here

Why I Will Raise My Children With God Part 2

Next the blogger says, “God is not logical." She gives evidence of her claim by appealing to God’s “apparent” hiddenness during pain and suffering. She says, “Why did God allow this [pain and suffering] to happen? The blogger interprets most common answer as, “We don’t understand, so we will not think about it or deal with the issue.” I think what best illustrates the bloggers argument is when she writes, “If there is a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who loves his children, does it make sense that he would allow murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind?” I must admit with the blogger that the evil we see is devastating. The pain people go through is real and brings much sorrow. But does such evil in the world make God illogical? I think the blogger is clearly confused between epistemology and ethics. But let us overlook this fact. If God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil to exist, then there is no contradiction in saying God and evil exist. But perhaps, what the blogger is really getting at is, she expects God to intervene at every moment to remove evil.  Such a view would imply God must remove all causes of evil including human beings. Furthermore, it would remove the nomological laws of nature. Distinctions between physical laws and miracles would collapse.

Moreover, the blogger cannot account for moral absolutes, thus she is still not in a position to make moral claims against God. Even more, the atheist, cannot account for logic. Logic refers to invariable, immaterial, universal and necessary laws that human minds are obligated to conform to. They prescribe how humans “ought” to think. How can an atheist “justify” the laws of logic? Given atheism, there cannot be immaterial laws all humans “ought” to obey. But from a Christian perspective, we can effectively justify logic. Scripture teaches God is the standard of rationality. His thinking is the type that our thinking ought to be a token of. He is intrinsically logical and therefore, we are to reflect His thinking being made in the image of God. 

Atheism

God's existence is presuppoisitional (Gen 1:1) and if the Bible were not true we could not prove anything. However, some suppress this truth by the means of unrighteousness (Rom 1:17-20). If I where to ask the reader to look at a building, how could you know there was a builder? It's true you can't see him, touch him or smell him. However, it seems obvious that the building is proof there is a builder. If there is creation there must be a creator. The cosmological argument states Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist,
therefore it has a cause.
This cause must be omnipotent, transcendant, unchanging, and eternal or else itself would need a cause. Moreover, the cause would have to be personal in order to create something personal (humans). The eternal, transcending, omnipotent, unchanging, personal, cause is described in the Bible as God. Some of you might think I am contradicting myself, remember I stated that whatever begins to exist has a cause, God never had a cause because he is by definition eternal, he never begins. Suppose you wanted to borrow a book from me, but I did not have it. So I borrowed it from my mom, but she did not have it, so she borrowed it from my dad, but he did not have it. So this goes on infinitly. If no one has the book you will never get it. This is the same as existence if some one does not have it without having to borrow it from someone else you will never get it. Yet we are here, therefore there must be an infinite God who has no begining or end (eternal). Only the Christian worldview (which is derived from the Bible) can account for causality not the Atheist worldview.

Secular philosophers like David Hume, and theistic philosophers like Immanuel Kant have done the Christian a great service by pointing out what is commonly called in philosophy the problem of induction. Hume pointed out that human beings have no justification for projecting past information including experiences or events into the future. For if we live in a random universe were chance is considered god and can produce anything including matter out of nothing (abiogenesis) as atheists believe, we have no reason to believe that the universe is uniform. Hume stated we do induction- or take past information like experiences and project them into the future--because it is a habit. Immanuel Kant took what Hume believed and revised it, stating we do inductive inferences because we just cognitively think that way psychologically. Hume and Kant both did not give a justification for inductive inference nor could they account for it. Both of their conclusions show apart from the Bible knowledge is impossible because there is no foundation for the belief in regularity in the universe.

Presently, still the problem of induction cannot be justified by an atheistic or agnostic worldview. For example, if I went down a skateboard ramp on a skateboard and fell and hit my knee; I would have no justification for believing that if in the future I repeated my actions the same outcome or experiences would happen because according to the atheistic worldview we live in a random chance universe where anything is possible. Therefore, if the atheistic worldview were true (Which it is not) there is no regularity in the universe, therefore knowledge and science is impossible. However, as the atheist should rightly point out we do gain knowledge through induction and science that is because the Christian worldview is true.

The Bible states as I have already pointed out, we all do know in our heart of hearts the Triune God of the Bible, but we have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. We know we have broken God's laws the Ten Commandments, and our conscience bears witness. Since we have broken an infinite law (God's laws) we deserve an infinite punishment in hell. We are all liars, theives, adulters at heart, and blasphamers in God's sight but God commended his love toward us (his people) that while we were still sinners Christ Died for us. Jesus suffered and died on a latin cross taking the punishment upon himself for all who repent and trust in him. On the third day he rose from the grave, and defeated death. It's as if we broke God's Laws but Jesus paid the fine of who ever will believe (trust) in him. God now commands us to repent (turn from our sins) and trust in Jesus alone for salvation. Not just believe in him but actually trust in him.

Biblical Soteriology

Soteriology is branch of theology that deals with salvation. This is important because it impacts our presuppositions towards the sovereignty of God and his relationship to man. In the Bible, clearly it teaches that God saves people, however, what is disputed is how God goes upon doing it. In the Bible there are some peculiar words that are use that have divided Christians for centuries concerning how God saves people, words like foreknew, and predestined. The two different views on how God saves people are Arminianism and Calvinism which we will be looking at briefly.

Arminians hold to the view that man has a libertarian free will-- that can choose contrary to their sinful natures-- enabling them with the help of the Holy Spirit to choose to accept or reject God's offer of salvation. They believe since God is Omniscient ( he knows everything) he has predestined those who will choose salvation.

Calvinists hold to the view that man is dead in his sins (Eph 2:1), radically corrupted, and a slave to sin (Romans cpt 6). Man does not have a libertarian free will rather a compatiblist will, so he can make choices but only according to his sinful nature, therefore he cannot choose God. God must by his Sovereign will and prerogative regenerate a sinner dead in trespasses by his irresistible grace which cannot be refused. It is like God raising a man from the dead without his permission (Like Jesus raising Lazurus). Calvinists believe that the Bible teaches God predestines people to salvation according to his good-will and purposes (Eph 1:11, Romans 8:29-9:33) not because of future knowledge of them willfully accepting salvation with their free will. Calvinists hold that if God predestines people because of their choice then those that choose not to accept salvation are not predestined because they did not do something that the predestined people did. They did not meet the condition in order to be predestined. Calvinist would conclude that if God predestines people because of their choosing to believe in him man is saved by works and grace which is in direct contradiction to what the Bible teaches that man is saved by grace alone to the Glory of God (Eph 2:8-9, Titus 3:5, Rom 11:6). The question that would deduce from what Calvinists believe is why does God save anybody? the answer is we all have a wicked heart (Jer 17:9) and are sinners deserving justice which is hell, but God for his Glory has chosen to save some people by the substitutionary death of his son Jesus Christ. But who are we to question God and his divine wisdom and counsel?