The Blog Of Dysfunction

I am sure that everyone has gone through the question of God’s existence (or non existence) at one time or another. I also have reasons to suspects that many theists harbor more doubts about their position that non-theists and atheists at least from the twentieth century onwards. So powerful are the arguments of a atheistic establishment.

For me the voyage started when I was in school. Having been brought up in a God-fearing family, the belief in God was simply a “given” which none in the family questioned — at least openly. But then I was different. I read all kinds of radical literature. One casualty, among the uncountable ones, was the belief in God. To Be or Not To Be became the question for me by the time I was in the ninth standard. The dysfunction and schizophrenia cannot be explained. Like tasting a piece of mango, you have to pass through it, as a born-again believer, to know what it is. No amount (or intensity) of verbal explanation can really explain it to the outsider. And then someone gave me Does God Exist and Seven Proofs God Exists. It was “divine providence” I was sure.

The arguments appealed much to my curious mind. The Law of Causality made a lot of sense when the write said we need to look for the Ultimate Uncaused Cause. What appealed most to me was the Teleological Proof, the proof from design. I was a hobbyist, and used to put together electronic circuits, scientific experiments, and even table tricks. It was obvious to me that a design (plan), a designer, and a mechanism (or person) to execute the plan was needed. No question about that. The more complex the design, the greater was the intelligence needed.

Many moons from that it hit me again, and with greater force this time. I read a philosopher (or was he a magician) who with a simple hand-wave destroyed all these arguments. He said none of these these arguments were valid because none of them revealed anything about God’s nature. And great was my depression when I found a couple of Christians repeating the same argument. Here was someone who in an instant dismantled with CTRL-ALT-DEL what I had been nurturing for years. Why does God allow philosophers to exist ??

Then one day I was writing about the “Tools of Science and Logic” and wrote down a sentence, among many others. But it kept coming back to me, as though telling me that I was not listening properly to it. And suddenly, it was there! I had written that

A tool created for one purpose cannot be faulted it it fails to do things for which it is not designed. What is more, just because it cannot do what it was not designed to do, it does not mean that it fails to do what it was designed to do. Just because a hammer is not a plier, it does not mean that it cannot (or did not) drive nails into a piece of wood.

That was some revelation. The logical reasoning that talks about God is a tool designed to deduce or proof the EXISTENCE of God and not to deduce anything about His attributes. So if the logical arguments for God’s existence do not talk about the nature of God, those arguments are not useless or false! Wow, did I thank God for that insight. I had fallen for a rhetoric of the philosopher, thinking that it was ‘logic’. The logical arguments for the existence of God became all the more clear to me. They do prove the existence, and do it beautifully (read, logically). They continue to be logically valid if they are unable to do anything for which they have not been designed.

Why did God allow philosophers. Inter alia, it was to keep people like me on their toes so they do not become too smug in their faith — and forget the need for divine help.

Guest Posting By: Johnson C. Philip
http://www.ApologeticsWiki.Com