Was The Universe Created By Itself?

Is God A Mind?
Human beings are bodies that have minds.
Stones and trees are bodies which do not have minds.
Men and women are bodies which do have minds.
Let us assume, with regard to God, that whatever else God may be, God is immaterial and infinite and unchanging.
Then knowledge, love, immateriality and infinity must be compatible with each other.
Then God’s ‘divine’ or ‘superhuman’ mind must be compatible with all other attributes of divinity.
In the divine case (God) there is no distinction between mind and body.
You and I have minds, but God is a mind.

Proofs Of The Existence Of God.
What is the difference between an atheist saying that the existence of the universe is a mystery to which we do not know the answer, and saying that the answer to the question about the existence of the universe is a God about whom we cannot know anything?
Proofs of the existence of God, if they are not to be mere appeals to ignorance and incomprehension, must not depend on particular features of the world which are yet unexplained.
Consider, for instance, the relationship of the argument from design to Darwinian explanation by evolution.
However successful explanation by natural selection may be in explaining the origin of particular species of life, it clearly cannot explain how there came to be such things as species at all.
That is to say, it cannot explain how there came to be true breeding populations, since the existence of such populations is one of the premises on which explanations in terms of natural selection rest as their starting point.
Whether God must be invoked as the author of life, or whether one of the explanations of life in terms of chance and necessity can be made intellectually satisfactory, one thing is clear, natural selection cannot explain the origin of species.
“I believe in God because the world is so bad” is as sound an argument as “I believe in God because the world is so good”.
It could not be so bad if it were not so good.
Since evil is the disease of the good.

Evidence Of The Resurrection.
After rising from the dead and ascending back into Heaven, Jesus was seen by hundreds of eye witnesses, many of whom died unflinchingly for their testimony.
Christ’s earliest followers were willing to suffer and die for their story.
All but one of the New Testament’s writers were executed for proclaiming and defending Christ’s resurrection.
John alone was spared, but forced into exile by the Roman emperor Titus Flavius Domitianius.
What makes the disciple’s martyrdom extraordinary is that these men were in a position to actually know whether or not what they were professing was true.
No one will knowingly suffer horribly and ultimately die a brutal death in order to defend something they know to be a lie.
For example, the September 11th suicide hijackers may have sincerely believed in what they died for, but they certainly weren’t in a position to know whether or not what they believed was true.
They put their faith in religious traditions passed down to them over many generations.
The New Testament’s martyrs either saw what they claimed to see or they didn’t, plain and simple.
Either they interacted with the resurrected Jesus or they didn’t.
Dramatically, these men clung to their testimonies even to their brutal deaths at the hands of their persecutors, and this despite being given every chance to recant and knowing full well whether their testimony was true or false.
Why would so many men knowingly die for a lie?
They had nothing to gain for lying and obviously everything to lose.
Most biblical scholars today agree that both Paul and James were sceptics and persecutors of the early Christian church prior to experiencing a post-resurrection appearance.
Paul and James both willingly suffered and died for their belief that Jesus was the messiah who had died and rose again.
No one suffers and dies for a known lie.
Maybe one lunatic, but not hundreds of eye-witnesses!

The Return Of Jesus?
Jesus made it crystal clear that he would once again break into human history, not as a helpless baby, but as supreme king of all creation.
Jesus said his return would be sudden.
He compared it to a flash of lightning, lighting up a dark sky.
He warned that the world would be unprepared.
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die”.

The Bible tells us.
Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.
( Leviticus 19:31 )
Let no-one be found among you who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead.
Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord.
( Deuteronomy 18:10-12 )
Do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your interpreters of dreams, your mediums or your sorcerers.
( Jeremiah 27:9 )
When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people enquire of their God?
Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
( Isaiah 8:19 )
Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you.
They fill you with false hopes.
They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.
( Jeremiah 23:16 )
I will set my face against the person who turns to mediums and spiritists to prostitute himself by following them, and I will cut him off from his people.
( Leviticus 20:6 )
Do not let prophets and diviners among you deceive you.
Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have.
They are prophesying lies to you in my name.
I have not sent them.
( Jeremiah 29:8-9 )

God Is Greater Than Can Be Thought.
Any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the ‘DNA-protein-replicating machine’ must have been at least as complex and organised as that machine itself.
To explain the origin of the DNA machine by invoking a supernatural designer is to explain nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the designer.
God is himself greater than can be conceived, therefore beyond the bounds of conception, and therefore literally inconceivable.
God is something greater than can be thought.

The One Who Alone Gives Life.
God is the name we give to the great and wonderful creator.
The one who made the whole universe.
The one who alone gives life.
By studying a book or a piece of music you can discover something about the person who wrote it.
By looking at creation and the world in which we live we can learn something of the creator.
We can see that the creator loves beauty and colour.
We can detect his care for the tiniest detail.
He is a master engineer and architect.
The working of the human body is a masterpiece of design and function.
We have been made in God’s likeness.
This does not mean God has a human body.
It means that, like God, we are able to love and choose,
To think and make rational decisions.
We have a mind and a will.
We have been made to care for the earth and all living creatures, to develop and use wisely its amazing resources.

Was The Universe Created By Itself?
Scientist Stephen Hawking says the universe was created by itself – not by God, and without any sense or purpose, and without the presence of any intelligence.
He insists there is no reason to attribute the beginning of everything to a supreme being.
In his new book “The Grand Design”, he writes: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Stephen Hawking needs to make his mind up.
In his book “A Brief History Of Time” he accepted God as the creator.

A Modern Day Atheist.
There is an assumption by some scientists that if you find laws to explain things then it does away with the need of a God.
Stephen Hawking has become one of the modern day atheists.
He thinks that suddenly science comes along and says here are the answers and explanations, so therefore we don’t need God.
Ask Hawking or any scientist to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which are controlling the universe, and they don’t have a clue.
Dark Matter is invisible, has a mass, and can pass through any material or substance known to mankind.
This puts all the ‘laws’ of physics back in the melting pot.
Ask Hawking or any scientist how the complex DNA molecule came into existence.
They don’t know!
The DNA molecule inside each cell contains a 3.4 billion genetic code, has the ability to store and carry information, and instructs amino acids to join up in the exact order to make proteins in our cells.
Smart Christians do not think that if you can explain things by laws of science then God does not exist.
They believe in the beauty and structure and order of the world.
And they believe that God created all this and sustains all this.

Conscience Implanted By God.
As with all atheists, they are their own chief opponent.
As long as they can convince themselves, nobody else will persuade them.
Their arguments are to some extent a sort of explanation, if not the best explanation, of the world and the universe.
They often assume that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience, which surely cannot be conscience if they are right, since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God.
If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.
Atheists are unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for their argument.
One of the problems atheists have is the unbeliever’s assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God.
They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.
On this misunderstanding is based their supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a godless one.
Like all such questions, this contains another question, what is good, and who is to decide what is good?
Left to himself, man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities, the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.
People who believe themselves to be good have defended all these things, and convince themselves as well as others.
Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigour.
For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source.
It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Take The Devil Seriously.
The Bible tells us to take the Devil seriously.
It tells us that far from being a comic figure, he was once a glorious angel in Heaven.
His name was then Lucifer which means “One who bears light”.
He became proud and jealous, wanting to be like God.
He was banished from God’s presence and now does all he can to turn men and women against God.
It is the Devil who has gone on tempting people away from God right from the very beginning.
We are all by nature self-centred rather than God-centred.
It is a disease we all have and it affects not just us, but everyone we come into contact with.
God gave us free will, the ability to choose and make decisions on how we lead our lives.
We are the only species on Earth that has this gift and responsibility.
We all have the choice to be good and kind like God, or be tempted into evil, greed and selfishness by the Devil.
The Bible says that all people will be judged.
The wicked and evil will perish.
The good and the kind will have eternal life.