Inquiry Begins...
After all the long explanation about hypothetical approach,
some of you may think that the chain of thoughts will lead to: God can only be
proven if you believe the religious scriptures. This
is not entirely wrong. Since we hypothetically believe that there is God, we
have to believe in the authority of God, and His revelation. And since the revelation says that there is a
God, we have to believe that there is a God. If God exists, since he is the
omnipotent creator, He should be the judge of everything. We have to put his
revelation as the highest authority of truth. Only the Creator have the
ultimate rights to explain to humanity of how the universe was created, what is
the purpose of man, what is right, what is just, what sort of God is He, and
how humanity should live their lives.
But many of you would argue that believing religious
scriptures would be like believing the existence of fairies by reading fairy
tales. Many would argue that such scriptures are nothing more than a
self-serving claim, like a person saying “I always tell the truth”. However, there
is a huge different between believing a fairy tale and believing something true. Not only that fairy tales are not aligned
with our historical reality, fairy tales, myths and legends are usually passed
down as stories for the purpose of its moral values. True events however are
aligned with our history and it is being passed to another people because of it
is significant truth.
How do we differentiate a claim saying “Medusa was real” and
the claim saying “Hitler was real”? Yep, you may think it’s funny, but nowadays
some people even question whether Cleopatra was imaginary. So how do we
differentiate them? We have never seen both them personally. We are only told
about these stories about them. Can we
judge them simply based on which stories are making sense to us?
Do you believe your history book? Do you believe that the past
wars listed in the history really did happen? Do you believe that Socrates was
real? Do you believe that Gautama Buddha was real? Do you believe the story of
Napoleon as real historical fact? How do you know if Hercules, the demi God,
was real? How do you know that in the past organism “evolved” from one sort of
animal to another? Do you believe that the story of Abraham was real historical
fact? Was the French revolution a fact instead of simply as an exciting fiction
that teaches us something about morality? How do you prove these things as
genuine?
In determining this history, often, we are not being fair.
We tend to have the bias towards history based on our “worldview”. For example,
Richard Dawkins during one of his interview (with Al Jazeera) laughs at the idea that hundreds of
years ago, Mohammed rode a flying donkey.
For someone who believes in evolution, dinosaurs and also that mankind come
from worms, why is it so hard for Richard Dawkins to believe in the existence
of flying donkey? The reason is most likely, none other than his bias towards
flying donkey or religion, which results in the unfair dismissal of probable information. Otherwise, without the bias, he could have assumed that the flying donkey was a result of evolution. We
too might unconsciously filters information and accept only certain truth that
we feel comfortable with.
Now, I initially want to approach this scientifically, but
seems like we arrive at a cross road. Should I examine further the existence of
God through historical approach or scientific approach? Both approaches need
thorough observation. And as a Christian, I need to try as much as I can to be
objective about this….
Continue to Part 4
Btw this is interesting... sorry just have to link this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Xn60Zw03A
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