God is the creator and author of life.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life…” ~Jesus, John 14:6
After Epistemology (the study of truth) comes ontology (the study of being). That is why the first book of the Bible tells us about how we and our world came into existence. So, after considering what is true in the realm of ideas, we must consider the existence of things and persons.
“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” ~ Rene Descartes, father of modern philosophy, 1637.
Although Descartes assumed the existence of a divine God, he started with a humanistic Epistemology, making himself the measure of truth, claiming that truth was whatever he was certain of[1]. He wrote, “First of all, as soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced that it is true. Now if this conviction is so firm that it is impossible for us ever to have any reason for doubting what we are convinced of, then there are no further questions for us to ask: we have everything that we could reasonably want. … For the supposition which we are making here is of a conviction so firm that it is quite incapable of being destroyed; and such a conviction is clearly the same as the most perfect certainty.[2]”
Since Descartes was certain that he could think, he was certain of his existence. Now, Descartes may not have attributed his existence to man[3], but many of his followers have attributed their existence to man.
Now, once a philosopher establishes that he exists, he has to figure out how to prove whether or not anything else outside of him exists. This ties the poor guys up on knots. I’ll just mention one theory, that of Martin Heidegger, who said things must be able to exist if they can be hidden or uncovered. “Being should be displayed in the mode of its uncoveredness[4],” wrote Heidegger.
Being or Existence, is, however, a slippery term. What does it mean that something exists? Many philosophers assert that existence is a meaningless thing to assert. Does it make any difference whether or not something can be thought about?
Did you hear about what happened when the philosopher Descartes lost his temper in a noisy restaurant? He finally yelled, “Everybody shut up; it’s so loud in here, I can’t think!” And since he couldn’t think anymore, he disappeared!
However, for most practical people, we don’t worry about whether we exist or whether the ground we’re standing on exists. Our senses tell us that we have a body and that there is earth under our feet, and we accept that.
On the other hand, God makes a profound statement about existence to Moses at the burning bush. There, God called Himself the ultimate being:
Ex. 3:14-15 God said to Moses, “I AM THAT I AM,”: and He said, “This is what you must say to the children of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you.” And God said moreover to Moses, “This is what you must say to the children of Israel, “Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you; this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”
The name “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “LORD” (in capital letters) that God uses as a proper name for Himself in the Old Testament is based upon the Hebrew verb of being, and is translated by the most renowned Hebrew lexicographers[5] as “the existing one” - the One who will be what He will be. This God whose name means “existence,” is self-existent and dependent upon no one else. (Acts 17:25 “…He is not served by men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things.”) The Bible claims that the existence of God is the foundation of all existence. The “Let there be ______” of the creation week was founded upon the prior existence of God.
I do not want to spend a lot of time in the philosophy of existence, however. Rather I want to address the particular ontological question of origins: Where did everything come from? From there, I want to look at the practical ramifications of positing God as the source of all being and life versus the practical ramifications of believing that the material universe and life originated itself.
Setting aside the hypothesis that nothing exists, there are basically two alternatives left to explain the world around us:
Those who do not believe in the truth of a supernatural God, ascribe the functions of deity to matter, energy, or to persons (usually themselves) made out of matter and energy. This materialistic worldview (listed as #1 above) is the main belief system in American culture. Let’s look at some examples of Materialism:
Here’s a recent quote by Albrecht Moritz demonstrating his belief in materialism. Notice how he starts with a theory of knowledge based upon the laws of nature rather than upon God. He wrote,
“Since we know that the laws of nature are so self-sufficient that, based on them, the complexity of the entire physical universe evolved from fundamental particles, and further, complex life forms from simpler ones during biological evolution, we can reasonably extrapolate that they would also allow life itself to originate spontaneously, by evolution of complex structures – regardless if we believe these laws are designed or un-designed. Therefore, we should expect an origin of life by natural causes…[6]”
But organic chemists are finding that explaining the origin of life by natural causes may be more difficult than they thought. Robert Shapiro, in his article “A Simpler Origin for Life,” published in the Feb 2007 issue of Scientific American, wrote of the impossibility of DNA and even of the simpler RNA to be formed from inanimate matter:
"chemists have invoked freezing glacial lakes, mountainside freshwater ponds, flowing streams, beaches, dry deserts, volcanic aquifers and the entire global ocean (frozen or warm as needed) to support their requirement that the ‘nucleotide soup’ necessary for RNA synthesis would somehow have come into existence on the early Earth… I calculated that a large lagoon would have to be evaporated to the size of a puddle, without loss of its contents, to achieve that concentration. No such feature exists on Earth today… The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who, having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck… Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire…”[7]
However, instead of admitting a designer, Dr. Shapiro suggested another hypothesis which he had not tested scientifically, consisting of large quantities of simpler organizations of matter functioning together to store and replicate information. He would rather grasp at straws than admit God’s revealed truth.
Reaching further back into the modern age, Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of the Species, the same year that Louis Pasteur entered his now-famous experiment in a Science fair sponsored by the French Academy of Science, disproving spontaneous generation. Darwin was part of a generation that had no idea how living things came into being; they thought that flies came into being out of non-living trash. Darwin had no qualms about publishing a hypothesis that all of life evolved out of non-living material because. He had forsaken divine revelation in the Bible which told mankind that life did not come from non-living material, and secular science was not advanced enough to set him straight. The sadly comical result is that some modern day textbooks devote a chapter to the work of Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur and their success in disproving Spontaneous Generation, then, a few chapters later, school kids are taught that Darwin’s Spontaneous Generation is the Origin of Life. [8]
Recently, I had the opportunity to hear a fascinating lecture on chemistry at our local university. The distinguished professor was a brilliant speaker, but I noticed a couple of comments that were out-of-keeping with his scientific method. He stated that a certain number of chemical compounds had been found to exist in space outside of the earth, but no protein has been discovered yet. Now that is a scientific statement, but the next statement he made was a religious statement, “Don’t worry, he said, “proteins will be found; it’s only a matter of time before we find them and figure out where life came from.” The assumption that life came from proteins in space is a religious assumption, just as religious as the hypothesis that aliens brought life to earth, and just as religious as the Christian claim that a personal, transcendent God created the universe out of nothing by His spoken word. Modern scientists, in rebellion against God want to place the origin anywhere but God, because they don’t want to face the ramifications of such a truth.
Anyone who rejects God as the origin of life and the universe will go to absurd and irrational lengths to find some alternative explanation for the origin of things. Now, they may accuse us Christians of using God as a cop-out for knowledge about nature. They say that the concept of a God was made up by men to explain what we could not explain scientifically. Thus whenever there is a “gap” in our knowledge we can conveniently fill it by saying, “God did it.” The argument goes that since the universe is nothing more than material, any supernatural explanation is false because a natural, materialistic explanation will eventually be found to explain that process which was previously thought to be supernatural. This argument, however, is illogical, because it assumes as a premise the conclusion it is trying to prove. There is not way to scientifically prove that the universe is nothing more than material or that there is no God.
Furthermore, scientists in rebellion against God claim that embracing supernatural explanations for origins is retreating back into the Dark Ages. This is pure historical fancy. It was scientists who were Christians who brought science out of the Dark Ages (which maybe weren’t so dark after all, but that’s another discussion). Men like Galileo, Pasteur, Pascal, Bacon, Newton, and Faraday, were all Christians who made scientific investigations precisely because they believed in a God who created order in the universe to be discovered.
Let us then turn to consider the second worldview, that of Biblical Christianity. The Holy Bible teaches that the cosmos was created by a personal God:
§ Gen. 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
§ Psalm 90:2 “Before the mountains were brought forth, or even [before] You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”
§ Nehemiah 9:6 “You are Jehovah, yes You alone; You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and You preserve them all; and the host of heaven worships You.”
§ John 1:1-3 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him; and without Him nothing was made that has been made.”
§ Col. 1:16 “in Him [Jesus Christ] were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and to Him.”
§ Rev. 4:11 “You are worthy, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for You created all things, and because of Your will they came into being and were created.”
There is really no question where the Scriptures stand on the origin of the universe! The human response to our creator-God therefore should be to worship God and His Son Jesus. Consider a more extended passage of scripture in which Paul uses Biblical ontology to make disciples when he made a trip to Macedonia (now called Greece):
Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, “Men of Athens, in all things, I perceive that y’all are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, what y’all worship in ignorance, this I set forth to you: The God that made the world and all things in it, He, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is he served by men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing He Himself gives to all life, and breath, and all things. And He made out of one, every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their habitation, in order that they might seek God, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by art and device of man. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked; but now He commands men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained, concerning whom He has given assurance to all men, in that He raised Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:22-31)
Speaking to a Greek audience that did not embrace the Biblical teaching about
origins, Paul started with the statement that God made the heavens and the
earth as well as the people on the earth. He exhorted his audience therefore to
repent of valuing material things and to seek God. This exhortation still
stands for us today.
Ontology (the study of being) covers many subjects. We have looked at the contrast between the claim of materialism that the universe has always existed and the Biblical doctrine that God created everything – including man and woman. Another topic of ontology is the question of the nature of humans in particular. What is a person made of and why?
The secular materialist says that humans came from matter and energy and are therefore merely an arrangement of physical atoms. Therefore, thinking is nothing more than the arrangement of chemicals, and is no different from muscle movement, and death is merely the ceasing of the chemicals of your body to act in an organized manner. John Dewey, one of the greatest minds behind our country’s present educational system put it this way, “mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations [of observation, recollection, foresight, and judgment] is a myth… Knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles.[9]”
And, of course, if everything is reduced to chemistry, then there can be no right or wrong, any more than Sodium Chloride can be more right or wrong than Sodium Nitrate. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way, “When one thinks coldly, I can see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.” In another place he wrote, “I am so skeptical as to our knowledge about the goodness and badness of laws that I have no practical criterion except what the crowd wants.[10]” No wonder his successors in our government approve of the destruction of unborn children when pressured to do so.
The Biblical Christian, on the other hand, says that the personal, transcendent God of the Bible made man in the image of God, and thus humans are more than physical atoms, we also have a non-physical spirit or soul. There can therefore be life after physical death in which the soul lives on.
What does the Bible say about human ontology? “Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen. 2:7)
There are some who believe that life came from some other personal source, such as a demigod (which is ultimately an imperfect reflection of God), or that life came from aliens (begging the question of where the aliens came from, and I suspect that if you nailed most of these people to the wall, they’d admit the aliens must have had a material origin of some sort), so I believe the middle ground positions can be fairly pressed back to one of the two basic positions – either God made man, or man is an accident of the material universe.
There are within Christian circles many debates regarding the nature of man, such as the debate over what exactly is the image of God, and the debate between dichotomy and trichotomy (are humans made up of soul and body or is there a third component of spirit which is separate from the soul?). I believe that it is fine for Christians to debate positions on these things based on what the Bible says. There are plenty of good theology books you can read if you want to delve into those issues. I would like to briefly enter into only one of these debates, and that is the debate over the origin of the human soul. I choose this one to demonstrate some further comparison and contrast between the Biblical Christian and Secular Humanist worldviews.
There are basically two non-Christian views on the human soul,
1. That there is no such thing as a non-physical soul. This is the materialist position.
2. That the human soul itself is God and exists eternally in some fashion, perhaps as the Hindu Atman that unites with the universal soul, or as the Mormon view of the soul originating from a human couple who became gods over our particular planet.
Anyone who has accepted the Bible as the authority for truth, however, will dismiss these views because they are not taught in the Bible. But there are two other views on the origin of the human soul which I think can be supported Biblically:
1. The Creationist view of the origin of our souls is that God created a unique, new soul for each one of us at the moment of our conception. Thus each human life is immediately created by God. This is the view most commonly held in Reformed circles. (Proponents include Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, Berkhof, Hodge, and Gill.)
2. The Traducian view says that God created Adam and Eve immediately, but made them in such a way that they could impart human life to their offspring. Thus each of our souls, while ultimately created by God, came most immediately from our parents. (Key theologians who held this view include: Tertullian, Delitzsch, Shedd, Strong, and Gordon Clark.)
Creationists point to the obvious statements in the Bible that God is the origin of souls:
o Psalm 33:15 “He who fashions the hearts of all…”
o Eccl. 12:7 When you die, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto God who gave it.”
o Isa 57:16 “For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always angry; for the spirit would faint before me, and the souls that I have made.”
o Zachariah 12:1b “…Thus says the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him,”
o (See also Num. 16:22, Psalm 104:30, Jer. 38:16, and Heb. 12:9.)
In his Systematic Theology[11], Luis Berkhof adds that there are also some philosophical difficulties with traducianism, such as the ability of a soul to divide or combine with another to give birth to a child, the confusion of soul and body if both have the same origin, the philosophical questions of whether one soul can be realistically different from another, and the issue of whether Christ could get a sinless soul from his human mother.
Berkhoff, however, notes that there are Biblical bases for traducianism, including: the fact that God breathed the breath of life into Adam making him a living soul, then created Eve out of Adam, not mentioning her soul, and left them to propagate the species (Gen 1:28, 2:7, 1 Cor 11:8). He also mentions Bible passages that attribute the soul to the parents:
o Gen 46:26 “All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, that came out of his loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were sixty-six.” (cf. Heb 7:9-10)
o Rom. 1:3 Jesus is God’s “Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh”
o Acts 17:26a “…He made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth…”
In his excellent book, The Biblical Doctrine of Man, Dr. Gordon Clark took Berkhof’s arguments and expanded upon them, arguing for Traducianism[12] from Genesis 2:2-3, which teaches us that God rested from His work of creation. Clark argued that continuing to create souls would not be a rest from His creative work. Furthermore, if Psalm 104:30 is interpreted as saying that God is the immediate creator of every living thing, then He is the immediate source of every tree and fish as well as every human, thus the work of creation could hardly be said to be complete. However, if God created the first souls such that they could give birth to other souls in subsequent generations, God can still be said to have created all our souls since His act at creation is the origin of all our souls.
A second point that Clark argued in favor of traducianism is the scriptural teaching that since Adam sinned, all our souls are tainted by sin (“conceived in sin”). The Scriptures also teach us that God cannot be the author of sin (James 1), so we should not say that God is the creator of fallen souls. Clark does not, however say that the sin nature is carried through the human soul, because this would cause a problem with the conception of Jesus, “who knew no sin” yet came from a human mother. So a Traducianism cannot claim that the sin nature is mechanically carried through human conception.
This rabbit trail on traducianism and creationism to explain the origin of man’s soul probably should not be belabored, but here are two things we can learn from taking this excursion:
1. Believing that your soul came from your parents doesn’t necessarily place you outside of orthodoxy as long as you believe God is the ultimate creator of our souls.
2. What you believe about where you came from has consequences in a lot of other areas, like the nature of our savior and the work of God at the present time, so it is important to form our foundational views carefully according to God’s word and live consistently by them.
Understanding where we came from makes a big difference as to who we believe we are and what we will do, because we will tend to act like the forces we believe brought us into being. If we believe that a personal God created us, we will tend to function in an interpersonal way, but if we believe that we are the product of impersonal forces, we will act in a more impersonal way.
Take, for example, Adolf Hitler. Sir Arthur Keith, in his book, Evolution and Ethics, wrote, "The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.[13]" Hitler believed that humans are merely a species of animal, so we have no intrinsic value and can be killed like any other animal. Thus, he said, "[S]hould I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?[14]" And he murdered more than 6,000,000 Jews, all of whom he deemed to be animals inferior to him.
On the other hand, the Holy Bible teaches us that “God is love,” therefore He commands us to “love one another.” If love is not a major theme in your life, then perhaps you are buying more into materialism than you thought.
Understanding where we came from also makes a difference in what we value. People who believe that they came from eternal matter will value material things and spend their lives ignoring spiritual things in order to accumulate material wealth. On the other hand, people who believe they came from the God of the Bible will value spiritual things and focus on the expansion of the kingdom of Christ. In Matthew 6:25 Jesus said, “…be not anxious for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor yet for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the clothing?” This doesn’t mean that there is no importance to clothing and food, but that they are infinitely less important than the human beings who need them and who were made in the personal image of God.
Materialism, as an explanation for the origin of life, is a bankrupt philosophy. The only viable alternative is the Biblical explanation of existence that Jehovah, the personal, transcendent God who existed from eternity, created the world and human life.
1) If God made you, you are not God and you cannot become God. So don’t play God in other people’s lives. Don’t treat other people like dirt. Instead, “treat other people as more important than yourself.”
“Do nothing through dissention or through vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let each count another better than himself – not looking each of you to his own, but each of you also to the concerns of others. Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:3-7)
2) If God made the world, we should respect His creation and preserve the life God made. This applies to the environment – not destroying plants and animals and their habitat needlessly, but rather studying and appreciating the marvelous design and handiwork of our creator. And it applies especially to our fellow human beings: If God gave them life and being, we should preserve their lives rather than destroy them. This has applications to war in practices like not taking the lives of non-combatants. It prohibits Abortion and Euthanasia, for the unborn and the aged have both been given life and existence by God, and only God has the prerogative to give and take life, not man.
We should therefore support civil laws which define life and civil rights to begin with conception. Gordon Clark, in his article entitled, “The Ethics of Abortion,” quipped: “Abortion is legal because the Supreme Court in Washington DC said so. A majority of nine men… negated the legal right of innocent persons to live. Having rejected God, they wish to assume His prerogatives. One argument abortionists frequently use to defend themselves against the charge of murder is the claim that the baby is not a human being. But if the baby in the womb is not human, what is it? Is it canine? Is it feline” I think that some babies born [60 to 70] years ago have turned out to be asinine.”
3) If God made the world, He is sovereign over it and you must submit to His Lordship. The God who made us is the God to whom we should bow and give reverent worship. “[B]e not afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Mat 10:28b) Also consider this: If God made you, you do not have the authority to decide what to do with your body. It belongs to God.
4) If God created the world and created you, He can also give you new spiritual life. When King David of old broke down and confessed his sin before God in Psalm 51, he begged God to “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” This is consistent with what the Apostle Paul wrote in Titus 3:5: “God saved us, not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to His mercy through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.” It is God who changes us and gives us eternal life through the work of His Son Jesus.
“He died for all, that those who live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again... Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. But all things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ...” (2 Cor. 5:15-18)
[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology
[2] Replies 2, AT 7:144-45
[3] “I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge about anything else until I became aware of him.” (Med. 5, AT 7:71)
[4] http://www.formalontology.it
[5] Brown Driver, and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament
[6] “The Origin of Life” by Albrecht Moritz, 2006 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html
[7] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-simpler-origin-for-life&page=5
[8] http://www.allaboutscience.org/origin-of-life.htm
[9] Clark, The Biblical Doctrine of Man, p.27.
[10] ibid, p.32
[11] Pages 197-201
[12] pages 52-53
[13] Sir Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics, 1947, p. 230
[14] Joachim Fest, Hitler, 1974, p. 679-680