Creator of Heaven and Earth

God is a non-physical entity causally influencing the cosmos in non-physical ways. God’s mode of causal influence is more likely to be beyond the governance of natural law, and therefore that influence is not measurable, predictable, or publicly observable.

An impression of the big bang. It should be clear, Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes, that nothing cannot give birth to something

To the extent that the sciences describe regular, measurable, predictable, controllable and repeatable behaviour, acts of God will be outside the scientific remit. But that does not mean they do not occur.

There is great naiveté in the atheist assumption that our presence in the universe is self-explanatory, and does not require an answer. Because to reject God is to imply that reasons for the existence of an orderly natural world are not crucial and need not be sought.

This view implies that laws of nature exist simply because they are, or because we find ourselves in one of countless “multiverses” in which ours happens to be hospitable to life. And there’s no need to ask why this should be so, or to inquire about the mechanism that generates so many worlds.

It is absurd to assume that where there once was nothing now there’s something—and there’s no need to ask why. Yet it should be clear to any scientist that nothing, by definition, cannot give birth/rise to something.

But the curiosity of the theist who embraces science is greater, not less, because he seeks an explanation that is deeper than what science can provide—an explanation that includes science, but then seeks the ultimate reason why the logic of science should work so well.

The hypothesis of God comes not from a rejection of science, but from a penetrating curiosity that asks why science is even possible, and why the laws of nature exist for us to discover.

It is true, of course, that organised religions do not point to a single, coherent view of the nature of God. But to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organised religion would be akin to rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity.

Science, all of science, is necessarily incomplete—this is, in fact, the reason why many find science to be such an invigorating and fulfilling calling. Why, then, should we be surprised that religion is incomplete and contradictory as well? We do not abandon science because our human efforts to approach the great truths of nature are occasionally hampered by error, greed, dishonesty, and even fraud. Why then should we declare faith a “delusion” because belief in God is subject to exactly the same failings?

So when we believe in God, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, it is no cardinal sin of ignorance that we do not state, or understand it, in terms which would satisfy scientists.

Those whose curiosity compels them to investigate how God created the universe, and decipher that it was done through what they call a Big Bang theory are in their right because they are using God-given powers to investigate these things. But it does not necessarily mean their findings or speculations are above religious Revelation. In fact, it is God’s kind mercy that allows both Revelation and science. God chose not to leave us in total darkness about our origins.

Worshipping the idea of self-sufficiency tends to lead many to unprecedented irrationality when that idea attacks the reality of God as the ground of existence. These are the ones who have brought us to the stage Socrates feared most whereupon we are “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom”.

This to me is more or less the satanic attitude depicted poetically by Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. In rebelling against the Creator of the Universe, Satan is compelled by his position to deny that he was even created by God and to tell his followers: “We know no time when we were not as now.”