Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Made to Worship

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. - (Romans 1:20 NIV)

Human beings are the highest form of physical life on our planet, if not our solar system.
Whether you take that statement from a naturalistic standpoint or a spiritual viewpoint, it remains true.

We humans are meant for great things.
Which begs two fundamental and existential questions for humanity:

What are we made for? And more importantly WHO made us?
The naturalist will tend to digress at this point, and say that human beings are NOT made. They have evolved as a result of the interaction of the natural laws of the universe, namely the interaction between time, matter, and a rather unscientific sounding thing called “chance”.

If you ask a naturalist what chance is, chances are he/she will tell you that it is but the result of the random interplay of events and matter in our physical world.
In other words, human beings, from a naturalistic standpoint, are an accident. There is no conscious purpose behind the laws of nature that sought to bring human beings into existence. We simply came to be as a result of the interplay of those laws.

If this sounds straight out of a science fiction novel, let me point out that apparently, this is what leading scientific figures in the world’s most influential societies are thinking. And what the scientific community thinks, the rest of the world tends to follow.
There are certain logical conclusions one can draw from the naturalistic explanation for human existence. First, since humans are the result of a mindless process (remember, lack of consciousness means lack of a mind), then humans by inference cannot have a mind or consciousness.

The logic behind this is simple. You cannot create something out of nothing. If the process by which humans were formed was a mindless one, then you cannot expect that process to impart a mind to that which it had formed. Put another way, I cannot give you a million dollars, if I don’t have a million dollars to begin with.
Sound reasonable enough?

The second conclusion is this: if human beings are without a mind or consciousness, then human beings do not have the capacity to be self-aware.
Again the logic here is simple. You cannot be aware of anything if you do not have a mind or consciousness to be aware with. I cannot spend a million dollars if I don’t have a million dollars (this is different from loaning a million dollars which I do not have the capacity to pay for. While technically, I could spend a million dollars on credit, I still NEED the actual million dollars to spend, despite the fact that I’ve loaned it.)

Do you see where this is going?
The third conclusion one can draw from all this is as follows: if human beings do not have a mind or consciousness to be aware of themselves with, then who the heck wrote and is reading this article?!

The answer: nobody. There is no mind or consciousness outside of humanity that is capable of being aware of humans, since creation or “nature” (which is the politically correct way of describing reality from a naturalistic viewpoint) is a result of a mindless process. And since humans are a part of nature, humans themselves do not have the capacity to be aware of their own existence.
Therefore nobody has written or is reading this article.

This is problematic in so many different ways that it would take reams and reams of philosophical discussion to tackle properly. And even then, it wouldn’t matter because as the arguments above show, nobody would write nor read them anyway since no one has the conscious capacity to do so in the first place.
The question that needs to be asked at this point is this:

Where did all these words in this article come from?
Perhaps the naturalist would say: they’re just the mindless result of the interaction of the natural laws of time and matter, plus chance.

To which I would ask: then where did the naturalistic explanation for reality come from? To whom is it addressed to?! And for what purpose?
See, as much as the naturalist worldview would like to believe (the word “believe” here is crucial) that everything that exists does not have an underlying purpose behind them -- being the result of a mindless process -- the naturalist’s very explanation for the existence of nature in itself serves a purpose.

What purpose does it serve?
To explain the nature of reality!

To whom?
To someone who has the mental capacity (i.e. a conscious mind) to process that explanation with!

And who in nature has that mental capacity?
I do not doubt that even the naturalist would say that nothing less than a human being would suffice for the job.

The naturalistic viewpoint therefore is self-defeating. It does not and cannot sufficiently explain the nature of reality to accommodate for the phenomenon of the simple act of presenting its own explanation for reality to someone.
If we reject the naturalistic explanation for the existence of reality, then what alternative are we left with?

I have to point out that at this point most naturalists would turn agnostic and say that they do not know.
Well, the alternative to me is rather plain and obvious: if a mindless process cannot account for the existence of reality, let alone consciousness in humans within that reality, then something with a consciousness MUST have been there in the first place to impart consciousness to the human race.

If this makes sense to you, then you are faced with the inevitable conclusion that a Creator exists.
And if you’ve accepted as fact that a Creator does exist, not only would you have made it easier to answer the two existential questions at the beginning of this article, you would have already given the Creator honor by acknowledging that you have indeed been created by Him.

If you’re a human being, and you’ve come this far in reading this article, I want you to know that the Creator is waiting with bated breath at the conclusions you will draw from all of this.
Because in the end, you and I were meant to know Him. You and I were meant to give Him honor.

You and I were made to worship.
It is my sincere prayer that you will come to know Him and cherish Him as I do.

To Him be all the glory.

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