Monday, January 24, 2005
God The Logician
Prothesis has a post today regarding whether God is good, evil, or exists at all. He goes on to make this point:
There are two classes of laws that God has created for creation - determinative laws and normative laws. Normative laws can be responded to - obeyed or disobeyed - while determinative laws cannot. If I jump off a building, I can't respond to God's physical laws by choosing not to fall. I can, however, choose not to jump off in the first place. Normative laws are generally what most people mean by morality, but they also include things like whether we decide to use good arguments or bad arguments while thinking.
What really piqued my interest though is this statement:
I claim that we should take the same view with regards to all of the laws that God has created. This is a more controversial claim, especially if we were to include the laws of logic in with the laws that God has created (which I do).
You know a person by their actions more than any way they look or anything they say. I believe the logic of God, when it comes to the redemption of man, says much about what kind of God we have and how he thinks.
There was a chasm between imperfect man and perfect God in relation to his laws. Man was utterly cut-off from God's glory with no hope of renewal. How did God bridge this? He did what seems illogical. He went through the process of taking human form, living among the cut-off, and then finally dying a most miserable death in order to pay a ransom for our souls.
Why didn't he just forgive us and be done with it? There had to be a penalty paid for breaking his law. Then why didn't he just destroy us and be done with it? Because there was a way to pay that penalty. God could no more break his law by not applying the penalty for our transgressing it, as he could give up on man while there was still a chance to redeem us to the law.
To man this doesn't make sense. To see victory in what appears to be failure, hope in the doom of a cross. None of what I'm typing is new revelation, but to me it proves the existence of God. Only a God could think this way. No man, or group of men, could've come up with that kind of logic.
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There are two classes of laws that God has created for creation - determinative laws and normative laws. Normative laws can be responded to - obeyed or disobeyed - while determinative laws cannot. If I jump off a building, I can't respond to God's physical laws by choosing not to fall. I can, however, choose not to jump off in the first place. Normative laws are generally what most people mean by morality, but they also include things like whether we decide to use good arguments or bad arguments while thinking.
What really piqued my interest though is this statement:
I claim that we should take the same view with regards to all of the laws that God has created. This is a more controversial claim, especially if we were to include the laws of logic in with the laws that God has created (which I do).
You know a person by their actions more than any way they look or anything they say. I believe the logic of God, when it comes to the redemption of man, says much about what kind of God we have and how he thinks.
There was a chasm between imperfect man and perfect God in relation to his laws. Man was utterly cut-off from God's glory with no hope of renewal. How did God bridge this? He did what seems illogical. He went through the process of taking human form, living among the cut-off, and then finally dying a most miserable death in order to pay a ransom for our souls.
Why didn't he just forgive us and be done with it? There had to be a penalty paid for breaking his law. Then why didn't he just destroy us and be done with it? Because there was a way to pay that penalty. God could no more break his law by not applying the penalty for our transgressing it, as he could give up on man while there was still a chance to redeem us to the law.
To man this doesn't make sense. To see victory in what appears to be failure, hope in the doom of a cross. None of what I'm typing is new revelation, but to me it proves the existence of God. Only a God could think this way. No man, or group of men, could've come up with that kind of logic.
# posted by Joe Florida @ 11:45 AM 
