A topic has been lingering in mind mind for a few days, now.  On Wednesday, I was involved in a brief discussion about the “elect” and predestination.  Obviously, some people have a hard time with that concept.  Another part of the discussion was about how God could have made an “error” in creation (the fall).

I think that those two topics can have answers, both biblical ones and non-biblical (yet possibly spiritual) ones.

The idea that has been steady in my mind is that of God’s timelessness.  God is beyond the boundary of time and space.  Only this facet of creation (meaning earth), as far as we know, is bound by time and space.  If that’s the case, then God has known us individually and indefinitely.  If God isn’t bound by time, then all at once, and always, God has known us.  He has known our entire existence.  What we do here on earth is not a mystery to Him.

So how can he just choose some of us to have eternal life, and others are damned to an eternal existence of torment and despair?  Clearly, there’s more to it than we know.  Maybe, though, it’s not as much an enigma as we make it out to be.  If God has known us forever, maybe He’s known things about us that we don’t know.

That leads me to the next questions… When were we each created?  Was it at the time of conception?  Was it at birth?  When do our souls enter our human bodies, and more importantly, where were our souls before that?  When were our souls created?  If God isn’t bound by time, then He’s known our souls for all of eternity as well.  Maybe  some action of our souls have an impact on our eternal lives before we appear bodily here on earth.

This whole concept of God being free of the boundaries of nature unlocks an unlimited number of possibilities, most of which our human minds are incapable of comprehending.  As I’m able to sort through these thoughts, I’ll share more of them here.

We, and the universe we live in, are God’s creation. I’d like to share how I’ve come to this conclusion and the criteria that brought me to this understanding.

First of all, it needs to be said that I’m a scientifically-minded person.  I believe that God created the heavens and the earth with specific scientific parameters necessary to support life.  He has also granted us minds capable of discovering the details of some of these parameters, such as our understanding of chemistry, biology, physics, and quantum mechanics.  God gave us the gift of science in order to understand and “subdue” the world we live in.

Before I did any research on the science of God’s creation, I was a skeptic.  I had grown up in the church, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was a true believer.  I believed in many of the principles of Christianity, especially the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, mainly because I felt that it must be true.  I still had my doubts, though.  I specifically doubted that the Old Testament was much more than some fairy tales with nice messages.

The real progress in my “faith walk” was made after I concluded that there must be a creator.  It started with a struggle I had with the notion that the existence of the universe is a cosmic accident, a result of random chance as atheists tend to assert.  Before I investigated the sciences for the answer, I actually looked inward.

My belief in a creator begins with an examination of human nature.  This includes characteristics such as love, empathy, compassion, consciousness, or any other trait that doesn’t explicitly follow the rules of natural selection (survival of the fittest).  I can’t see how these qualities could have evolved so perfectly and complex.  They aren’t essential to self-preservation, and thus, shouldn’t be qualities of the creatures “at the top of the food chain”.  It’s clear to me that these are God-given qualities of beings created in the image of a loving God.

I realize that a point of contention arises here, already.  Some will contend that the Judeo-Christian God is not a loving God.  How can He allow there to be evil in a world He created?  Wouldn’t he have created the world perfectly, without evil?  These questions are even hot topics among Christians, as there isn’t a consensus among self-proclaimed believers.  Some will say that God created evil to test our faith, others will say that God allowed for evil by giving us free will.  This is a whole other discussion is an of itself (which I intend to tackle in a future article).  What I can say, however, is that God, in his own infinite wisdom, created the world as it is for a reason.  We need to realize we do not possess the capacity to understand it fully, much to the dismay of those that seek enlightenment and self-actualization.

Let’s move on to further evidence that there is a God, this time from the perspective of science.  We can start on a massive scale and work our way towards the microscopic.

The universe began with a bang (or spoken word of God, as the Bible states).  Most scientists and common folks alike refer to it as the “Big Bang”.  In mere minutes, the existence is said to have exploded from a nothingness (or a formless void) into the universe as we know it.  Calculations by Einstein and his successors postulated that the universe was, in fact, expanding, and that it must have began at a single point of existence with an explosion, leading to the term “Big Bang”.  This left scientists reeling, because the next logical question is “what caused the explosion?”.  If there was nothing, and then there was something, doesn’t that scream creation?  Theories exist that try to suggest that the universe is static, but none of them hold up to scientific scrutiny.

Furthermore, when we look deeply into the physics of the universe, we find several factors that precisely allow for the possibility of life to exist.  By precisely, I mean this:  If we are to examine one of the cosmic conditions of our universe, the cosmological constant, we find that it’s so finely tuned that a variation of a factor of 1 divided by 10 to the 120th power could render the universe unlivable.  As a counter-argument, there are unsubstantiated theories that there exist an infinite number of universes (a multiverse), and thus, we just happened to luck out and live in one of the ones that’s habitable.  Even this perspective still leaves the question of the origin of the multiverse.

At this point, we haven’t even scratched the surface of all of the scientific conditions present that allow for us to life safely on Earth, revolving around our sun at precisely the right distance, with a moon perfecting our tides, spinning around the galaxy in relative safety at precisely the right distance from the black hole in the center.  An examination of the structure of molecules or the complexities of DNA further substantiates this perspective.  This discussion is commonly referred to as the fine tuning argument.  Of course, there are opponents to this argument.  Some will say that there are scientific explanations for the conditions of our universe that we have yet to or are unable to discover.  Others will ask who fine tuned the universe to exist is such a state to allow for a creator.

My answer is that my understanding of God assumes that He is infinite, without beginning or end.  We cannot define Him in the paramaters to which we’re bound.  All things considered, the probability for life to exist as we know it is infinitessimally small, and yet here we are.  Even the “evidence” of evolution, a cornerstone of athiesm for years, is crumbling before our very eyes.  It has come to a point where science points directly to a creator, and those that wish to disprove the existence of God are the ones left reeling for answers.

To paraphrase William of Ockham, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” The simplest solution is also the same solution that humans have asserted for thousands of years.  The simplest solution has survived the enlightenment and post-modernism.  The simplest solution is that there is a God, one God, and that He created everything in glory and wonder.  Amen!