No Christian that I know of has ever claimed that God "created himself out of nothing". The Christian position would be that God has always existed. He then created a world in which there are certain rules or laws that govern it. The laws which we observe in this world don't apply to God like they do to us. God is over and above and outside of the physical laws that govern our existence. Just because we observe nature and see that things don't just pop into being doesn't mean that the same rules that prevent this from happening also apply to the Creator. The fact that I cannot understand everything about God and can't wrap my mind around how God could have always been in existence doesn't scare me. If there is a truly omnipotent, all powerful, all knowing Creator such as the God described in the Bible then it would follow that there will be many things about him that I am unable to comprehend.

I don't know what "living life as though it were meaningless would look like" and since you are the one that posed the question, I'm assuming you don't either. Perhaps the reason we can't even visualize this is because no one who's ever lived has truly lived as if life were meaningless, and in my opinion that is even more evidence that we were created by God. The concepts of meaning and purpose are so deep inside of us that we cannot even fathom someone taking an atheist at his word and genuinely living as if we are all here by chance and nothing that we do matters in the slightest. You and I both think "everybody makes their own 'meaning' in life" and I think it is more plausible to assume that we do that because that is the way God made us because if we are just a product of chance and evolutionary processes then the concepts of love and honesty and fairness do not matter and we should only be concerned with our own survival.

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Posted by drm185

Member since Mar 2017

8 posts

Posted on 3/10/17 at 1:35 pm to AshLSU

AshLSU,

I agree that it is egocentric to think that we can fully understand an omnipotent, omniscient God as described in the Bible. But when it comes to Christianity in particular--we believe that we can understand thing about God for the following reasons.

1. We believe Jesus existed. Almost all reputable scholars agree that Jesus was an actual person that actually lived and breathed and walked on this earth

2. We know that Jesus affirmed the veracity and authenticity of Old Testament scriptures. We also know jesus claimed to be God and taught various things about God.

3. So, if we know Jesus was an actual person we have to decide for ourselves in light of all the evidence that we have if he is who he said he is and if what he (and scripture) has told us about God are true and factual. As C.S. Lewis put it:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

I spoke to your question about what created God in my previous post.

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