God is Just All

For my Systematic Theology class I had an assignment where I read about the existence of God and about different ways of trying to prove He exists. This is what I wrote about it. It's all out of the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology and written like a paper, so it's a bit more formal than my usual posts. Enjoy!

It is a funny thing when we small humans decide that it is our purpose to argue for the existence of the God of the Universe. It is not our job nor our right to prove that He exists, neither is it necessary. For whether or not we think we have managed to prove Him, He is there. In the process of trying to prove that which is already certain, man has created three specific approaches thereto.

            The first is called the “A Priori” approach. This deals with the ultimate reality that God does exist, and that no matter what man does to try and prove otherwise, He will remain constant. Personally, I find this the most agreeable of the bunch. Anselm creates a foundation for this argument when he describes God as “infinite, perfect, and necessary.” He explains that God is a being that none can be greater than. Even the greatest fool knows to whom he is ultimately referring when saying “God.”

            “A Posteriori” is the next in the lineup of common beliefs about the existence of God. This is taken from the idea that God exists because the world says so, creations lends necessity to God. This has nothing to do with emotion or belief, rather everything relies on the physical to prove that He exists. Aquinas explained that each thing that moves must be moved by something. He reasons that God is the Unmoved Mover who sees over all creation and the motion thereof. Another philosopher who deals with this theory is Epicurus who says that God is obviously in existence because something never came from nothing (which is furthered by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music); everything must have been created. This seemingly scientific point is made clearly moot by way of science itself in the category of Thermodynamics as it pertains to the earth as a whole. What is shown about the earth, according to Thermodynamics, is that the world is cooling off, that the energy that the earth has stored is slowly and surely being used up, and it cannot replenish it. In order for the heat to be dying down, it must have been at its pinnacle at some point in the past. In order for it to have had so much energy, that it is mind you, putting off and not taking in, it must have been set into motion at some point. The earth must have been created.

            I believe that each person has Eternity set in their hearts, that we all have a thirst for the Kingdom that can only be quenched by the blood of Christ.  The shame is that there are those who work endlessly to fill their void with something that is not of Christ, something that does not even remotely reflect God. In a poor effort to appease both sides of the argument over the existence of God, some have made a compromise saying that God designed the universe, but that He was more of an architect than an engineer. To say that God is anything less than the divine, omniscient, ubiquitous God that the Bible claims He is, is to say that He is nothing at all. God is all of those things and more; to remove any of those attributes would be to make Him less God, and God is all or nothing. Really, though, He is just all.