Creation and The Big Bang
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We can also learn lessons from Paul’s utilizing the altar to the unknown God. In the sixth century BC, there was a plague in Athens and they called the Creton philosopher to come to help to stay this plague. And so what he did was he said, “Well, I want you to just let these sheep go out. And wherever they happen to lie down on the hills of Athens, go and set up an altar and offer it to this unknown God.” They had exhausted all the options of the deities in the city. And so he said, just offer these altars, these animals to the unknown God. And wouldn’t you know it, the plague was stayed. Athens was saved. So there was a remaining altar to this unknown God. And so what Paul does is he refers to that something out there and tries to bring clarity about the nature of this deity.
He tries to tell who this God is, that they’re worshiping an ignorance. So Paul does indeed, in a gracious spirit says, I can see that you all are really religious. You recognize that there is something beyond that. There is something out there, that there is a reality beyond who we are. And so Paul says, “And I want to give clarity to that.” And we live in a day in which a lot of people are taking a deistic understanding of reality. That there’s some power out there. Yeah, I know the universe got started. There’s something out there. But that being seems to be remote, seems to be detached, seems to be removed from everyday life. And in many ways, that is where you come in. Not only has God revealed himself in Jesus Christ in the four gospels, but you know what? You are the fifth gospel to people.
You are Jesus Christ to people. How are you representing him? The apostle Paul said to the Corinthians, “You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all people.” People are looking at your life. You are a place where the reality of God can be visibly seen. You are Jesus to people. You are to help restore that credibility that so many people have… God has lost credibility in their eyes. God seems remote. God seems distant. God seems nasty.
And so what we can do is we help bridge the gap between God and Jesus of the New Testament and to these people. We are standing in between to help restore trust, to restore credibility. And Jesus said in John 13:35, “By this all will know that you’re my disciples if you love one another, you are to be there to restore that trust, that credibility. You are to be that salt and light that people might see your good deeds and glorify our father, who is in heaven.” We see in Paul’s approach another lesson. We see that Paul is utilizing the tools available to him in the philosophical world of his day. These people don’t know the Old Testament scriptures. Unlike Peter at Pentecost, as we’ll see later, Paul is quoting not the scriptures, but he is quoting pagans, but yet speaking with a biblical worldview, a biblical outlook, as we have seen.
So Paul quotes. Paul utilizes philosophical tools so to speak. He quotes Arteritis, a stoic poet. In fact, Luke presents Paul as a Christian Socrates in Act 17. Paul is a Christian philosopher going to engage with the best that Athens has to offer. And it’s interesting that as you read Socrates and the apology that Plato wrote, not the playdoh you grow up with and make shapes, although Plato did talk about the forms. That’s interesting there, but Plato’s apology is being followed by Luke as is portraying Paul, who is, again, going into the marketplace. He is dialoguing. He is speaking about what they perceived be foreign deities. And so he is also teaching something new. All of these things were said of Socrates, just as they’re now being said of Paul in Athens.
And we as Christ’s witnesses in this world need to remember that not only do we have God’s special revelation in his word, and also in Jesus Christ, the word made flesh and living among us. But we also have general revelation that God has revealed himself through reason, through conscience, through creation, through human experience. And so we have tools on which to draw that go beyond yes, what everybody else has in this world. People who don’t believe in Jesus. Yes, we have special revelation that goes beyond, but we also have general revelation by which we can build bridges into the lives of people. And one of those bridges is a philosophical bridge that we can utilize.
As we said, Paul quoted that it says in him, we live and move and exist. He quoted the stoic poet, Arteritis, who said we are his offspring. And Paul is doing… Again, he’s appealing to certain truths that even pagans recognize. And it in the same way, \as you look at this chart that I’ve given you, I’m just comparing a couple of worldviews, namely theism and naturalism. Hail sneezer over there.
But what we are trying to do is compare the context that we take for granted. The people generally believe that the universe began to exist a finite time ago. You know, the big bang. They believe. We’ve seen that the universe is finally tuned for life. You know, we have seen that this remarkable phenomenon of consciousness, people take this for granted. We also take rationality or reasoning for granted, and we take human rights and dignity as kind of matter of everyday speech, we take these sorts of things for granted. Well, again, which sort of a context? And here we can compare naturalism and theism, which context offers us the better explanation for these things? And so we can say, well, does it make more sense to say account for the beginning of the universe, that it came into existence, uncaused out of nothing, or that something independent of the universe brought it about?
That something didn’t come from nothing but that something came from something. Or does it make better sense to say that the remarkable fine tuning of the universe, the Goldilocks effect. That everything is so precisely tuned for life, does it make better sense to say that this just happened through mindless non-purpose immaterial causes or that this came about through some intelligent planner? Now we’re not saying here that this is the God of the Bible, but what we are saying is that naturalism cannot account for this and that there is got to be something independent of the universe that is responsible for these things. You see, the universe came about a finite time ago, which means that the potential for science came about a finite time ago, but the very world itself had a beginning. Where did it come from? How did it get so finely tuned for life? What about consciousness? Does it make better sense to say that consciousness somehow emerged from non-conscious processes or that a conscious or supremely self-aware being brought about consciousness in this world?
What about rationality? The fact that we can use our minds, that we can rise above material influences. That we can say more than just my genes made me do it. We can actually think about things. Unlike animals, which are indeed conscious, we can think about our own consciousness. We can be aware of our own awareness. We can be self conscious beings. Well, whether it referred to animals or to human beings, how did consciousness emerge at all? How did rationality emerge at all? Animals typically respond to their environment and they have a genetic programming, but human beings are able to think about their environment to rise above. I was at a talk that Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading atheist gave. Not the world’s leading intellectual, but the world’s leading atheist. And he was speaking about the topic of the fact of evolution. I was at Nova Southeastern University a few years ago.
And during the question and answer time, I was the first one up to the microphone. And I asked Richard Dawkins this question. I said, “Professor Dawkins, if you are correct about what you say in your book River Out of Eden, that we are simply dancing to the music of our DNA and that there is no good or evil, nothing but blind pitiless indifference, why is it that you claim that naturalists or atheists are more rational than theists? Because the same non-rational forces are at work in both, such that they believe what they do on account of forces over which they have no control.” Well, his answer was a bit odd and totally off track. He said, “Well, because science works.”
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