It doesn’t do much when it comes to convincing people to believe in your faith(and I am not saying that you are doing this). The Holy Trinity is a very hard concept to get around if you haven’t been raised in the faith.
However, from the beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures, we DO have an “Image of God”- it’s unfallen humanity- Genesis 1:26-27.
While Christianity upholds Jesus as being The Logos/Word (John 1), The Eikon of the Invisible God (Colossians 1), and the Express Image of the Father Who existed before Creation and Himself was involved in the Creation, another aspect of Jesus being The Perfect Image of God was that He was The New Adam, the Ideal Human, Who did NOT Fall.
I agree completely, and I say that as a religious person. My religious experience is subjective in that I believe it’s “right” because it feels so to me; I believe I have made connection with a loving God, I have felt that connection through my religion, but I don’t pretend I could prove this to anyone else. I likewise acknowledge that millions of others may feel similarly about their own, different belief systems, and I have nothing “logical” to counter why I happen to be the guy who is right. I’m often not at all convinced that I am.
But I can’t see any flaw in the logical argument for an unmoved mover. The nature of such an entity, to the extent that logic seems to support one, needn’t suppose anything else about the entity. Said entity could have absolutely no interest in us at all, as least as far as this syllogism demands it. But I don’t see how the absence of such an entity could be explained, and in fact it never is, beyond something like, “But how do you know there isn’t some other explanation?” Because such an explanation would contradict what we know about the causality of our universe. “But maybe we don’t know enough yet to explain it.” That’s true. We only know what we know, and right now, I don’t see a logical counter to the notion of the prime mover.
Yes, it’s the miracle of life.
Right, or it could just be the limitations of how far we can see. So our definition of universe is based on the limits of what we can comprehend.
I agree, I was just reciting the dogma of the big bang/great crunch. The idea that the universe expands expands expands and collapses in on itself, and then bang, it expands again.
Of course not. I didn’t say it was. I’m just saying that maybe 100 years from now our knowledge will supersede the idea, and the notion of the Big Bang will appear quaint and primitive by the standards of the time.
I’m not going to go into specifics, that’s a tangent. I am more talking about specifics like for instance with nutrition where it is far more immediately observable and yet you have this cycle of conflicting theories where we were right before we were wrong before we were right again.
At the same time you’re basing your belief in particular theories off of consensus. There is no way to verify either the Big Bang or the age of the Earth, we believe it because the theories are elegant enough based upon the information we have at the time, so we accept them as valid.
Rubbish.
Only message board scholars come up with this kind of tripe. The OT makes it quite clear that the Jews had a clear image (if not literal) of God, his attributes, purposes, and expectations. They had a visceral relationship with God.
This relationship was forged through their prophets/ rulers, tradition and through their holy writings, which they copied from generation to generation with anal dedication to accuracy.
There is no biblical or historical basis to support that “God the Father is beyond our comprehension.”
What does Unfallen humanity look like?
Right, an Icon of the Invisible God, to impress upon the fallen humans what they should aspire toward.
Visceral and ‘image’ are two separate things.
My rebuttal is contained within your own post.
There is. Most certainly.
Yes, but the Christian faith isn’t about convincing people by reason. That’s the point of revelation. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t reveal itself to you, then it is pointless to try and convince you of anything. Certainly many Christians try, but that gets into angels dancing on the head of a pin territory and just wastes everyone’s time.
There seems to be a factual basis though, in that we still haven’t come to a consensus on in what form this comprehension might take place.
Well he stated it himself by pointing out that the relationship to God was carried out through the meticulous recitation and transcription of God’s word, and through the relationship to the prophets. He pointed out the layers of mediation between the Jews and their God, in his post.
Pray tell, in this context, what are those differences?
Why don’t you give it to me?
I see post after post after post after post in GD that are not supported by history or the bible. The fact is, neither the Jews or Christian Jews show any belief that God was ‘beyond [their] comprehension.’
Quite the contrary.
The OT Jews had a very clear image of their God’s qualities, his personality, his laws and expectations, his power, sense of justice, love, compassion, intolerance, and plans for the future. The history of the Jews is rich with these details, and that their relationship with God played a central role in their day to day life.
Fast forwarding to Christ, one can’t read any of the gospels without the plain realization that he was walking advocate for his Father Yahweh. He spoke extensively about God-------and as a Jew he was not talking about some new fangled God v2.0, but the same God they had been serving for millenia-----in rich detail, and even in “The Lord’s Prayer” he taught his followers to pray to God, not himself. (There isn’t one record in the gospels where Jesus taught anyone to pray to himself)
The fact is, both the OT Jews, and NT Jews had a rich history of having [what they perceived to be] an intimate relationship with their God.
This God ‘that’s beyond our comprehension’ is the God created by those who have never taken the time to have this relationship, and those who are ignorant of history.
I’m guessing that the nature of this venue affords you the cover of not having to prove that.
The argument that everything has a cause, therefore God, is simply bizarre.
If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause. Oh, God is in a category of entities that don’t require a cause? Well, how do we know then that God is the only member of the set of uncaused causes? Why couldn’t there be two? Or three, or a kabillion?
If we imagine that there can be uncaused causes, then labeling any uncaused causes “God” is an attempt to shoehorn in all sorts of attributes to those uncaused causes. Like as Stratocaster accidentally did earlier, when he imagined that an uncaused cause would be an “entity”. Why would whatever it was that started the Big Bang be an “entity”?
Fact is, we have no idea why the big bang occured, and it could very well be that we will eventually prove that finding out what caused the big bang will be impossible. Or maybe not.
It’s pretty clear that our Universe hasn’t always existed–it came into being at some point sometime estimated around 12-15 billion years ago. But our universe might not be the entire Universe, it might be part of a larger universe. Heck we even know that there are parts of our universe that we will never be able to learn about, because those parts of the universe are outside our light cone–we are expanding away from parts of the universe faster than the light from those parts can travel, and so light from those parts will never reach us. Unless we invent time travel or FTL, and if we do that our notion that there can be no uncaused causes will look as quaint as believing in a flat Earth.
More rubbish.
Surely you’re not [seriously] asserting that the only relationship that a penitent can have with his God is face to face. In the history of the Judeo Christian God it is believed that the means of having a relationship with God include,
- Prayer
- Fellowship
- The Church (both the OT and NT had a ‘governing structure’, authorized or selected by God)
- Their Holy Writings (said to be given by God)
Whether any of this is valid is irrelevant to your assertion. The fact is, both the bible and history refute your claim that [the Judeo Christian] God is beyond our comprehension.
That’s absolutely true.
Main Entry: vis·cer·al
Pronunciation: \ˈvi-sə-rəl, ˈvis-rəl
Function: adjective
Date: 1575
1 : felt in or as if in the viscera : deep <a visceral conviction>
2 : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning <visceral drives>
3 : dealing with crude or elemental emotions : earthy <a visceral novel>
4 : of, relating to, or located on or among the viscera : splanchnic <visceral organs>
— vis·cer·al·ly -rə-lē\ adverb
You said it yourself. They knew God through their meticulous record keeping, through the prophets and through their relationship to one another. They did not deal with God as an entity that they could see and identify with particular limits.
Quite the contrary.
Still not an image of God. Still a bunch of abstract qualities.
I guess that depends on whether or not you view Christ as a prophet or as God incarnate.
Which they argued about constantly and have never really had a consensus about.
Heh.
You’re doing a great job of it for me by pointing out specifically how the relationship of old testament jews was mediated by praxis.
Because it isn’t evidence of a creator. Why would it be?
“A” for effort, although I was looking for your thoughts.
Your ignorance of Christianity is clear here. Through all of these means----not the least of which was prayer------ the OT/NT Jews had what they perceived to be an intimate relationship with their God.
Here is one small sampling of how they perceived their relationship with their God.
It would make a difference if you were a Jew or Christian, but even then a firm understanding of history-----and specifically how these matters played out in the day to day life of these believers------and I’d think you’d give pause before making comments like these. I don’t believe you have this understanding, because history isn’t with you on this.
I just finished a comprehensive collection of Lincoln’s writings (including personal writings), speeches and debates. The qualities he displays are not abstract, and it has given me an image of the man.
I think you’re retreating to word games and minutia. If you’re chewing up perfectly good bandwidth trying to get me to admit that no Polaroid of God exists just say so. I concede the point.
But the notion that no ‘image’ of him can be drawn from prayer, his chosen prophets, his Son the Christ, and the bible is silly.
I don’t see why. Polycarp believes Christ is/was God. I don’t believe this, and see him as having been created; God’s Son.
That doesn’t hamper either of us in having [what we perceive to be] from having a clear inage of him, his qualities and an intimate relationship with him.
Not true.
The OT and NT Jews both believed in the same God. Both were in anticipation of the Messiah. A division took place between the Jews as to whether Jesus was the promised Messiah or not.
In any event, there was no disagreement about who Yahweh was, nor their relationship with him.
**Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (New International Version)
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. [a] 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.**
This text deserves its own post. It is one small sampling* of the relationship the Jews perceived they had with their God.
Does this seem like a God that was “beyond their comprehension”?
No.
*there are hundreds of cites like this in both the OT and NT
Were those words heard by all of Israel or were they spoken through some representative like Moses or Aaron?
This seems like an odd selection, since (to me) it doesn’t seem to particularly impart a close, or understandable, relationship with God. It doesn’t really seem to state much about the ability to comprehend God at all. Could you spell it out for me?