Re: Rationale Method for identifying supernatural
George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Tue, 12 Jan 1999 16:10:21 -0500
Moorad Alexanian wrote:
>
> At 03:50 PM 1/12/99 -0500, George Murphy wrote:
> >David Campbell wrote:
> > .............................
> >> However,
> >> although everyone should be aware of God from both the evidence of creation
> >> (not gaps) and conscience (Rm. 1:18ff), trying to reach useful conclusions
> >> about God apart from His self-revelation in Scripture is unlikely to be
> >> very productive.
> >
> > What Paul says here is indeed that people "should" be able to know God from
> >creation, but they don't. _Everybody_ doesn't. Paul makes it clear that
> the problem
> >isn't atheism but idolatries. People make up their own deities (such as
> The Intelligent
> >Designer). This attempt to know about God from nature & reason alone is not
> only
> >"unlikely to be very productive" but is very likely to be
> counterproductive. This is
> >NOT a text promoting natural theology. After Paul has stated in detail the
> universal
> >problem of Sin, the refusal to acknowledge the true God and its
> consequences, he does
> >not say, "OK, now let's do natural theology correctly." Instead, he begins
> to speak
> >(3:20 ff) about what God has done in Christ.
> >
> >George L. Murphy
> >gmurphy@raex.com
> >http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
> I recall reading somewhere that Christianity is not a religion. A religion
> is man seeking God. Christianity is God seeking man. We use words like God,
> Creator so readily that we do not comprehend the depth that such terms
> convey. If one were to sit in a quiet room for several hours trying to truly
> comprehend the meaning of those terms, I can assure you that the result will
> be humility, fear, and a desire to know more about God the Creator.
OK if by "trying to truly comprehend" you mean something like fides quaerens
intellectum or at least being open to the possibility of faith. But there are plenty of
merely intelligent people who, after such an exercise, will have concluded that "God"
and "Creator" are vacuous, or will have attached to them concepts incompatible with
Christian faith in the God who is revealed in Christ.
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/