03/03/23

How Faith is connected to Forgiveness

Your request for my feeling about the above question is, on the one hand, complementary, but on the other a bit perplexing.

The easy answer is given in Jesus' answer in the Lord's Prayer. Matthew 6

"¹² And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors." A debt is ": something owed : obligation".

  I originally learned the prayer replacing debts and debtors with trespasses and trespassers.

Is there a God?

Often we Christians get into a conversation without the fundamental question being answered. I believe we should be aware of different approaches to the answers both positive and negative to this question. Non-Christians rightly doubt our authority to talk about Jesus and Judaic history if we have not considered this basic question.

I am posting some of what one man, Steven Hawkins, says who opposes the idea of a God in any form.

It’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

As I was growing up in England after the Second World War, it was a time of austerity. We were told that you never get something for nothing. But now, after a lifetime of work, I think that actually you can get a whole universe for free.

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called “negative energy.”

To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill — he’s also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out. This is the principle behind what happened at the beginning of the universe.

When the Big Bang produced a massive amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. In this way, the positive and the negative add up to zero, always. It’s another law of nature.

So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space. This may sound odd, but according to the laws of nature concerning gravity and motion — laws that are among the oldest in science — space itself is a vast store of negative energy. Enough to ensure that everything adds up to zero.

I’ll admit that, unless mathematics is your thing, this is hard to grasp, but it’s true. The endless web of billions upon billions of galaxies, each pulling on each other by the force of gravity, acts like a giant storage device. The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things — the mass and energy we see today — is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space.

So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

Since we know the universe itself was once very small — perhaps smaller than a proton — this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded — a place to store all the negative energy needed to balance the books. But of course the critical question is raised again: did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur? In a nutshell, do we need a God to set it up so that the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator.

Imagine a river, flowing down a mountainside. What caused the river? Well, perhaps the rain that fell earlier in the mountains. But then, what caused the rain? A good answer would be the Sun, that shone down on the ocean and lifted water vapour up into the sky and made clouds. Okay, so what caused the Sun to shine? Well, if we look inside we see the process known as fusion, in which hydrogen atoms join to form helium, releasing vast quantities of energy in the process. So far so good. Where does the hydrogen come from? Answer: the Big Bang. But here’s the crucial bit. The laws of nature itself tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

There are many arguments for the existence of God of which is Saint Anselm's famous and highly controversial ontological arguments for the existence of God.

First argument

There are various reconstructions of Anselm's first argument, such as Dr. Scott H. Moore's analyses, for example:

• Proposition 1: God is a being than which none greater can be conceived.
• Proposition 2: If existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind alone, an imagined being who exists only in our mind is not a "being than which none greater can be conceived." A being than which none greater can be conceived must also exist in reality, where failure to do so would be a failure to be such.
• Conclusion: Thus a being than which none greater can be conceived must exist, and we call this being God.
• because it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind only, the being that nothing greater than can be thought of will both in the mind and in reality.

Objection

Philosopher Immanuel Kant gave an objection to the argument, although it would be toward ontological arguments in general, rather than at Anselm specifically. In fact, it is actually unclear as to whether Kant had Anselm in mind at all. Kant's objection famously states that "existence is not a predicate." If Kant were considering Anselm's work in his analysis, he certainly left it up to the reader to grasp the applicability of the objection. One possible interpretation is to say that, because existence is not a predicate, a being that exists could not be said to be greater than one that does not exist; they would be equal.

Second argument

Just as the first, Anselm's second ontological argument can be formulated in numerous ways. Viney, for instance, renders the second argument as follows:^[3]

1. "God" means "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."
2. The idea of God is not contradictory.
3. That which can be thought of as not existing (a contingent being) is not as great as that which cannot be thought of as not existing (a necessary being).
4. Therefore, to think of God as possibly not existing (as contingent) is not to think of the greatest conceivable being. It is a contradiction to think of the greatest conceivable being as nonexistent.
5. Therefore, God exists.

There are numerous arguments for the existence of God. I have listed one for and one against. If you would like more, visit Wikipedia. Please comment.

Was Jesus the Son of God?

The best answer to this question, in my opinion, is expressed in the C. S. Lewis Trilemma. BTW. I recommend his book "Mere Christianity". Lewis, once an atheist, in his discussions, concentrates on the basic elements of Christianity and admittedly avoids differences between different faiths.

One well-known trilemma is sometimes used by Christian apologists considered a proof of the divinity of Jesus, and is most commonly known in the version by C. S. Lewis. It proceeds from the premise that Jesus claimed to be God, and that therefore one of the following must be true:

1. Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he mistakenly believed that he was.
2. Liar: Jesus was not God, and he knew it, but he said so anyway.
3. Lord: Jesus is God.

The trilemma, usually in Lewis' formulation, is often used in works of popular apologetics, although it is almost completely absent from discussions about the status of Jesus by professional theologians and biblical scholars.