Note: I have been preparing a different post but they say we're going to get sixty MPH winds and rain and I'll bet my electricity goes out for more than a day. I hope to finish what I was working on. This is a fun Christmas post two days before Creation should be celebrated. At least it's my idea of fun.
IT'S BEEN A WHILE since some atheist punk tried the old "can God make a rock so big that God can't pick it up" line on me, as one did last month. I'm a little surprised that one as young as this one could know about such a classic of old fashioned barroom atheism but it's no smarter than before. I'm already in the kind of good Christmas spirit that giving up the cargo-cult style for a religious style brings so I'll play with it a bit.
Before when it was trotted out, it was generally a challenge by someone who might claim they were a "skeptic" which they are not. That use of the word means "atheist" not that they practice skepticism. Atheists generally are not skeptical about anything, they know that they know THE TRUTH as much as any 6 Day Creation Fundamentalist does. And, wouldn't you know, just like with "originalism" in the Supreme Court, reality turns out to be just what they wanted it to be!
It's funny that someone so dedicated to the practice of declaring things impossible would think that what is impossible is in any way an indictment of the power of the Creator, God who, by definition, is held by believers to have created all things visible and invisible, that is, which means all that is possible within GOD'S creation and that all that really is is contained in God's creation.
In what God has made is the full gamut of actual possibility and outside of that lies only what is impossible, which has no real existence. Nothing, in fact.
Someday maybe I'll go into how that idea impinges on the assumptions of probability, especially those which imagine other things than what we know lies in the actual universe into their equations on the basis of what they can assign a variable to to fit them into an equation. Probability having been adopted as one of the creator gods of modern atheism. But not today.
That God may have created us to have the ability to imagine what isn't possible is, possibly, an aspect of us being created in God's image. Clearly if we can imagine the impossible, God must be able to. But God gets to choose among what would be possible and what won't be. Because, unlike us, God is the origin and definition of what is, it is possible BECAUSE God makes it possible.
The footnote in the excellent Jewish Study Bible for Exodus 3:14, in which God answers Moses' question as to which god he's to tell the Children of Israel told him to free them from slavery, says:
God's proper name, disclosed in the next verse, is YHVH (spelled "yod-heh-vav-heh" in Heb; in ancient times "vav" was pronounced "w"). But here God first tells Moses its meaning Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, probably best translated as "I Will Be What I Will Be," meaning "My nature will become evident from My actions." (Compare God's frequent declarations below, that from His future acts Israel and Egypt "shall know that I am the LORD (YHVH)," As in 7.5; 10.2;etc. Then he answers Moses' question about what to say to the people: "Tell them: "Ehyeh" ["I Will Be," a shorter form of the explanation] sent me." This explanation derives God's name from the verb "h-v-h," a variant form of "h-y-h," "to be." Because God is the speaker, He uses the first person form of the verb.
There is nothing of comparable and sufficient differentness and radical potency in a conception of divinity in any other religious tradition I know of. Nor any other that would answer the question about a rock too big for God to lift it. God's revelation of God's self is to be found in God's actions, not in our imaginations, not in our imagination of what God has to be like and must be able to do in order to get us to give him the job of being our god.
It's this kind of thing that convinced me I'd made the right decision to choose the Hebrew religious tradition over Buddhism, though it was an argument over the reality of justice that first forced me to choose. A rabbi saying "reality is real" in regard to American style pop-"buddhism" also figured into it.
Considering how many things atheists like to tell us are impossible by THEIR fiat, it's kind of funny that they will insist this one merely seeming possibility is possible when it is ruled out by its blatant illogicality. That is unlike many of those things they declare impossible by fiat . There is no such refutation of logic in an entire range of things that it are forbidden by their Index of Forbidden Thoughts. Indeed, some of those forbidden thoughts have rather rigorous scientific demonstration of their existence, often in ways that many of those things such "skeptics" insist are real do not have. Including natural selection, multiverses, a whole host of different mutually exclusive schemes of string-theory, that is if the fading fad of string theory is not already off the list.
I know they wouldn't give up multiverses (the multi-multi-verses) since those were invented to kill off God and are still overtly maintained for that reason by probably a large percentage of professional cosmologists, today. It's remarkable how much of their "science" has such a blatantly unscientific motivation and end and how they still get paid to be "scientists" doing ideological non-science. Though the impossibility of treating those theories with science wouldn't be enough to get it off of their list. It's remarkable how little the biggest, fattest fan-boys of science care about the actual requirement that science be susceptible to the methods of science. Especially the "skeptics." The atheist cosmologists, indeed, are insisting - such scientific practice being impossible for their imaginary god-killers - that the requirements of actual observation of reality be suspended for their ideologically cherished theories. They have to burn down science to save science, it would seem.
No comments:
Post a Comment