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Since we apparently have a thread count limit (who knew?), here's a thread for all things relating to the existence of God. So pretty much everything.
I came across this CS Lewis quote this morning doing some reading and found it interesting:
Curious to hear people's reactions--on both sides.
I came across this CS Lewis quote this morning doing some reading and found it interesting:
This may be put in the form that the Laws of Nature explain everything except the source of events. But this is rather a formidable exception. The laws, in one sense, cover the whole of reality except - well, except that continuous cataract of real events which makes up the actual universe. They explain everything except what we should ordinarily call "everything." The only thing they omit is-the whole universe. I do not mean that a knowledge of these laws is useless. Provided we can take over the actual universe as a going concern, such knowledge is useful and indeed indispensable for manipulating it; just as, if only you have some money arithmetic is indispensable for managing it. But the events themselves, the money itself- that is quite another affair.
Where, then, do actual events come from? In one sense the answer is easy. Each event comes from a previous event. But what happens if you trace this process backwards? To ask this is not exactly the same as to ask where things come from- how there came to be space and time and matter at all. Our present problem is not about things but about events; not, for example, about particles of matter but about this particle colliding with that. The mind can perhaps acquiesce in the idea that the "properties" of the universal drama somehow "just happen to be there": but whence comes the play, the story?
Either the stream of events had a beginning or it had not. If it had, then we are faced with something like creation. If it had not (a supposition, by the way, which some physicists find difficult), then we are faced with an everlasting impulse which, by its very nature, is opaque to scientific thought. Science, when it becomes perfect, will have explained the connection between each link in the chain and the link before it. But the actual existence of the chain will remain wholly unaccountable. We learn more and more about the pattern. We learn nothing about that which "feeds" real events into the pattern. If it is not God, we must at the very least call it destiny - the immaterial, ultimate, one-way pressure which keeps the universe on the move.
The smallest event, then, if we face the fact that it occurs (instead of concentrating on the pattern into which, if it can be persuaded to occur, it must fit), leads us back to a mystery which lies outside natural science. It is certainly a possible supposition that behind this mystery some mighty will and life is at work. If so, any contrast between His acts and the Laws of Nature is out of the question. It is His act alone that gives the laws any events to apply to. The laws are an empty frame; it is He who fills that frame-not now and then on specially "providential" occasions, but at every moment. And He, from His vantage point above time, can, if He pleases, take all prayers into account in ordaining that vast complex event which is the history of the universe. For what we call "future" prayers have always been present to Him. In Hamlet a branch breaks and Ophelia is drowned. Did she die because the branch broke or because Shakespeare wanted her to die at that point in the play? Either- both-whichever you please. The alternative suggested by the question is not a real alternative at all-once you have grasped that Shakespeare is making the whole play.
Where, then, do actual events come from? In one sense the answer is easy. Each event comes from a previous event. But what happens if you trace this process backwards? To ask this is not exactly the same as to ask where things come from- how there came to be space and time and matter at all. Our present problem is not about things but about events; not, for example, about particles of matter but about this particle colliding with that. The mind can perhaps acquiesce in the idea that the "properties" of the universal drama somehow "just happen to be there": but whence comes the play, the story?
Either the stream of events had a beginning or it had not. If it had, then we are faced with something like creation. If it had not (a supposition, by the way, which some physicists find difficult), then we are faced with an everlasting impulse which, by its very nature, is opaque to scientific thought. Science, when it becomes perfect, will have explained the connection between each link in the chain and the link before it. But the actual existence of the chain will remain wholly unaccountable. We learn more and more about the pattern. We learn nothing about that which "feeds" real events into the pattern. If it is not God, we must at the very least call it destiny - the immaterial, ultimate, one-way pressure which keeps the universe on the move.
The smallest event, then, if we face the fact that it occurs (instead of concentrating on the pattern into which, if it can be persuaded to occur, it must fit), leads us back to a mystery which lies outside natural science. It is certainly a possible supposition that behind this mystery some mighty will and life is at work. If so, any contrast between His acts and the Laws of Nature is out of the question. It is His act alone that gives the laws any events to apply to. The laws are an empty frame; it is He who fills that frame-not now and then on specially "providential" occasions, but at every moment. And He, from His vantage point above time, can, if He pleases, take all prayers into account in ordaining that vast complex event which is the history of the universe. For what we call "future" prayers have always been present to Him. In Hamlet a branch breaks and Ophelia is drowned. Did she die because the branch broke or because Shakespeare wanted her to die at that point in the play? Either- both-whichever you please. The alternative suggested by the question is not a real alternative at all-once you have grasped that Shakespeare is making the whole play.
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