Religion doesn’t explain anything-you say God created the universe. Who or what created God? You’re trying to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery

This is a great question/objection to developing faith on purely rational grounds or arguments. I basically agree with it too...

Personally, I believe using God to explain our existence or to explain the "mystery" is always going to appear faulty and flawed. For a start, to do it we'd have to go through that messy process of trying to actually define the word "god" again, and as the question states we just end up where we started with the whole "who created God". Indeed, one of the biggest problems for many defenders of God's existence and the Christian Faith is that they try and fit their beliefs into a very rational and logical type of philosophy that is ultimately self defeating? Why?

For me the problem is that I believe the God of the bible is beyond our rational proof. If we could "prove" God, I believe God would cease to be God! The God who has expressed himself through the bible is far beyond our proofs, arguments and efforts to understand or pin him down (sorry to all the females out there, using "him" is just easier for me, i don't actually think God is a male...but thats for another topic). That’s exactly why he is the Creator and we are the creature, called to obey and trust him. It’s beyond us to try and do anything beyond that. As the question that began this blog stated, before there was anything there was God...which for us is indeed a great mystery.

However, this probably sounds like a great cop out. I could just be doing the old trick of telling everyone to "just believe and accept", or then coming out and telling people they needed to know God "subjectively" through experience. But again, I think the problem here is that we need to look at what we mean by "god" before we try to prove "god"(s) existence, and we need to look at how the God of the bible chooses to reveal himself to people.

Once again, the God of the bible reveals himself primarily through history...by "doing stuff" not by giving us rational arguments or proofs of himself. God's first chosen people, Israel, knew their God primarily because he was the one who had made a covenant (a sort of unbreakable agreement/bargain between people and God that has an ultimate purpose) with the people and then had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. The other people and nations were then to know who God was by looking at Israel; the people and community who were meant to act justly and reflect the character and image of their God.

For most of us non Jewish folk, it seems hard for us to know a God who hasn't dramatically rescued us, and we might feel little connection with some weird “god” of the Old Testament (the whole Israel-Palestinian situation makes things even more tricky and weird for us here). In fact, one of the problems was that by the time of Jesus, Israel hadn't done the best job of showing the world who the Creator God was. This was because they had tended to store up the blessings of the relationship for themselves; and at times they simply forgot the God who had rescued them completely. But God always intended for us to know who he was, and to reveal himself...and not just "subjectively" through personal experience, or "objectively" through logical argumentation.

The only way I know God and call myself a "Christian" or a "follower of Jesus” is because Jesus himself was God; the one who was the creator, who was the God of the Old Testament, of Abraham and the Jewish people. The bible claims Jesus was both the "the image of God", "the Word...who was God", the one through whom all things were created, but also one who was fully human. This is the only reason that most of us who aren't Jewish know who God is. The German theologian Yurgen Moltmann , a former Nazi soldier who became a christian in POW camp, profoundly remarked "Without Christ I personally would be an Atheist. I believe in God only for Christ’s sake, not in a general “higher being” or whatsoever”.

This is the claim I want to stake my trust in God in. The question that kicked off this blog made the claim that a belief in god(s) simply created a greater mystery. In fact the bible claims that in Christ Jesus "the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations has been revealed to his saints". (Colossians 1:26). Jesus himself was God's mystery, "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"(Colossians 2:2-3).

Because Jesus was a real human being doing "real stuff" and an actual figure of history, he is someone we can indeed study and really know about. This means knowing God is not a complete mystery, but has some sort of reality grounded in our real world. We might not be able to know everything this is to know Jesus, or know him "objectively" (surely we all know that no historian can ever present history truly objectively and "how it was"), but we can sketch a pretty good portrait.

So, before you write off God altogether as unproven and a mystery...have you considered who Jesus might have been, both as God and a historical figure? I will save such a topic for a future post.

"Where is God? In the sky? In me? In you? Why is God’s location always changing?”

"Where is God? In the sky? In me? In you? Why is God’s location always changing?”

For a start it is important to state that as Christians we believe God is the creator of the whole world and universe. We read that in the Bible that God created the whole world and universe as “very good”, and that he created the world from nothing. Before the universe, there simply was God. So then, we can’t simply talk about God as being located purely within our universe or world in the same way that we might say that oxygen, or light, or water and matter are. Nor can we say God and the universe are the same thing, as in the Pantheism of the new age movement mentioned in my last blog.

This presents us with the kind of problems posed by the other questions we received. In the chapter 40 of the Old Testament book of Isaiah we see the author pose similar questions in a more positive saying things like:


“12Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span,enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?” 13”15Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust.”

Or…

To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.” 2
Latter in Chapter 48 we perhaps get the best summary of this kind of description of God:

12Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called:I am He; I am the first, and I am the last. 13My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens;when I summon them, they stand at attention.


With such a picture of God as being the all powerful creator that we can’t ever hope to measure or nail down, it could be easy simply to take the Thomas Jefferson/Deist option and just say God was very powerful but otherwise distant and far away from the world. But the bible doesn’t simply present God as being “transcendent”, or “other” and beyond or comprehension. God is also active and present, heaven (and what might I mean by heaven you might wonder?) is not far away, and God has actually spent the entire span of history working and acting among us, even though we don’t often realise it.

Indeed the whole bible story is precisely about such a paradox, that the Creator God who is beyond comprehension is working in our world and making himself known by working in history. Originally, God was personally and specially present with us, as Genesis records God walking with humanity “in the cool of the day”. However, our rebellion and rejection of God as creator damaged the relationship and some sense of distance developed as we offended and neglected God. However, God was still present and working in the world. Indeed, the whole bible story is about the Creator working to redeem the whole earth and humanity from the problems they have got themselves into by rejecting his good and just rule as creator. He first did this by calling a special people, Israel, with which to make himself known.

This means that the Jews in the Old Testament and into Jesus’ time didn’t simply think of God as “the supreme being”, rather they identified him as the God who had delivered their ancestors…”the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob…”, the one who had a special personal name YHWH (meaning “The one who is”, or a mix between “I am who I am” and “I will be who I will be”…when you see the word LORD in capitals in your bible, that’s actually what it means).

Most importantly they remembered and knew God as the one who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt and led them into the promised land (where modern Palestine is), and had then put them into exile in Babylon (modern Iraq) when they disobeyed him, and hence would one day deliver them again. So God wasn’t distant, he was highly involved in the affairs of the world. God even made his direct presence specially available to the people of Israel by occupying the temple (when you hear the world temple don’t think church or religious place, but think of it as a palace where God, like a king, actually dwelt and was specially present).

For Christians, then we believe God was specially present and located in the historical person Jesus. Jesus himself was “the image of God” (Colossians 1:15-20), and indeed the creator God himself who had become a real flesh and blood human being, a first century Jewish carpenter (John 1). Jesus would make himself known by declaring that God’s special rule or kingdom was coming and that he was king, and in doing so would show us precisely who God is by dying, and then rising from the dead. By doing so he would achieve our salvation and create such a kingdom. Then, as of course recorded, he ascended to heaven, where he rules with authority over the whole earth…

But what is heaven? Isn’t it simply that God has gone away or been “beamed up” again out of our world of flesh and blood, dust and dirt, and into some other worldly paradise far away? Absolutely not!
When you hear the word heaven, don’t think people playing harps on clouds or immortal souls floating round vaguely. That’s not actually Christian, is what happened when Greek philosophy and Christianity got mixed together.

Heaven is actually the “control room” of God, the place where he rules from and exists. It is his dimension of reality, not a place a place in the sky. In fact, places like the temple were seen as places where Heaven and earth actually came together. For Christians today we believe that each of us who believe are "little temples", just as Jesus described his own body as a new temple, where God’s own Holy Spirit dwells within us. Furthermore, we don’t think God is far away…when we meet together with other Christians we believe God is actually present with us. We also believe that God is still really involved in history, really still working through us and making himself known. Indeed the ultimate end point or goal for Christians and the story of the bible isn’t actually “heaven”, but when heaven (God’s special place or dimension) and earth coming together as one place where those who trust and believe in God as the creator and Jesus as Lord will live together. Our current experience of God's presence and filling of his Spirit anticipates in the present what will one day happen in the future, when God will flood creation with his presence again.

So in a sense…nailing down God’s exact location is pretty difficult. We know God is not confined by our concepts of space and time, that God is “omnipresent” and intimately involved in what is going on in the world, yet many of us have a limited sense of his presence…But we do God makes himself known and his presence known through all of history. God also makes himself specially present in and with those who believe through his Holy Spirit, and will one day in the future be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), and he will eventually bring heaven and earth together under Jesus himself and be specially present with those who believed through the whole world. Have read of the last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22 to see how it ends.

So that’s the first blog. On such a massive topic its difficult I guess to nail down the whole question without writing far too much but I hope that can give a start to some discussion. You might want to raise questions, objections, problems or things you’re not sure about, tangents and related subjects…?

Hopefully from here I’ll be able to move onto the other couple of questions related to what we mean by “god” and how we believe in such a thing latter in a way that makes a bit more sense.

What the heck do we mean by "god"?

"Where is God? In the sky? In me? In you? Why is God’s location always changing?"

"Religion doesn’t explain anything – you say God created the universe. Who or what created God/ You’re trying to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery."

"Why do you believe in something which cannot be seen or measured in any way whatsoever?"

In many ways these questions are all getting at the same sort of problem so I thought I’d start by dealing with them each sort of together, then one by one. The problem as I see it is that in the western pluralistic society that we live we no longer really have anything close to a shared understanding of what someone means when they use the word ‘god’. For example, when Christians say the word ‘god’ in public most people assume they actually mean the god of an 18th Century philosophical movement called Deism, the god of people like Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and the “founding fathers”, or Voltaire. This is the “supreme being” or possible creator of the world that is otherwise distant and uninvolved in our lives as human beings, who might occasionally do something “supernatural” or “magic”. Such a god is so far away, abstract and irrelevant that there is little need to have any such belief. Just have a look at Richard Dawkins’ recent critique of such belief for an example.

When people talk of “god” publicly they might otherwise mean something like “life force” or the thing that underlies everything rather than some sort of personal creator. This is “pantheism”, where god and our world are basically the same thing, or “panentheism” where rather confusingly “all is in god”. Just listen to some in the new age movement, or half the “lifestyle and spirituality” section in Whitcoulls or Borders to hear or read these kinds of perspectives.

Of course, then there are multiple other religious options and choices and variations. This leaves me, at least, very confused by what people mean when they say “god”.

So then…in the next few days I’ll do blogs on each of these questions, and at least my attempt to sketch out what Christians (should) mean when they say the word “God”…