Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Why we think that our God is the only true God

What about the God of the Bible?

On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, a friend wrote:
> 1. Why we think that our God is the only true God ?
> 2. Why God create Evil in the beginning ?

Dear Friend,

The answer to your two questions gets to a philosophical issue: How do we know what is true?

Because of our nature, i.e., we are born into the world as infants, we necessarily must know truth by learning truth. There may be some things we innately know, e.g., instinct and genetic modeling, but propositional truth must be learned.

We can learn things that are true, but we can also learn things that are false, even though we think they are true. How do we discern what is true from what is false?

Ultimately, we learn things like this by induction, i.e., by experimentation, or experience. This is where the scientific method of investigation is useful. We experiment, make hypotheses, experiment more and make theories, experiment more, and call what we have learned, Laws, e.g., the Law of gravity.

Unfortunately, we sometimes find outliers or events that don't fit the paradigm or law. Sometimes we throw them out as bad experimental results, but sometimes, these lead us to greater knowledge, e.g., quantum physics as opposed to Newtonian physics.

Sometimes, there is no way to handle the non-fitting observation. People deal with this in various ways. Some throw the result out. Some say it is a miracle, and allow for one-time, unique, observations.

But, the problem is, there is no way by the scientific method of
investigation, to determine what is true in an instance such as this.

Take, for example, the virgin birth of Christ. Did it really happen?
There is a lot of evidence that it did. Can I prove that it happened? Not by the scientific method. It requires multiple occurrences of the
phenomenon in order to establish the law, but this, by definition, is a unique occurrence. It is, therefore, outside the realm of science, but that does not mean it is outside the realm of truth. It may be true. It cannot be disproved and it cannot be proved.

What that all means is there is a category of truth that is outside of
science. How can we know what is true if we cannot verify it my the scientific method? One way we learn truths like this is by the testimony of witnesses. For example, is it true that George Washington was the first president of the United States? This kind of historical question is also outside the realm of the scientific method of investigation. But we readilty accept that George Washington was the first president. The reason is that we have the evidence of witnesses, i.e., we have documents that confirm the truth of the statement.

This is a whole category of things we believe to be true, i.e., things
that are witnessed by others and reported by them to be true. Even in courtrooms, this method is used to establish what is true. A jury will listen to the testimony of witnesses and look at the physical evidence, and establish what is true.

The Bible is a book of testimonies of witnesses. But, you may be saying, even in a courtroom, some of the witnesses may be lying. How do we know that the Bible's witnesses are telling the truth? It is a good and honest question, and the answer is that you do it the same way the jury does in a courtroom. You establish the credibility of the witnesses. If the lawyer can discredit the witness, he can get the jury to disregard the testimony of that witness.

What about the people who wrote the Bible: Can they be trusted? The short answer is, Yes! Some of the apostles faced torture and death unless they recanted their stories; yet, they stood by them until death. Many of the stories presented accounts of their own weaknesses and failures, not something liars are prone to do. And many of their accounts were written while other eye-witnesses to the stories were still alive who could have come forth and contradicted the Bible accounts.

Back to our original question. How can we know what is true? If the people who wrote the Bible are telling the truth, then we can know what is true by reading the Bible.

The Bible says our God is the only true God, so that is how we know it is true. The Bible does not say why God allowed Evil, so we don't know why. That is how I answer your questions.

Your friend,

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