Video Transcript: Lesson 13

What about the entire project of trying to prove God's existence? I remind you  again that when we talked about God as creator in their in our earlier sessions, I reminded you of Colossians 1 saying that God has created everything visible or  invisible. Now everything's visible or it's not. That's called a tautology in logic,  and it means everything, and that would include the laws by which we prove  things, the laws of logic and mathematics, which are used to construct proofs  and arguments. If God created those laws, then using those laws, applying them to God and trying to prove his existence, demotes God from being the creator of the laws to being another creature governed by the laws. I'm letting that sink in a bit. If God created the laws of proof, they don't apply to him, and if you apply  them to God, you're demoting him to being just like all the other creatures  governed by those laws which he created and built into the universe. So my  objection is, whatever can be proven would thereby not be God. Whatever we  can prove using logical thought or mathematical or both would not be the creator of the laws of logic or mathematics. So it won't do it's a misguided project. The  people who engage in it mean well, they're believers, and they would like to  show unbelievers that it's true, that God's real, but they do it in a way that  undermines the teaching of Scripture about God having created everything,  even the laws of proof, the invisible laws. We don't see them sitting around in a  room, but God created everything, not only the visible world, but everything  that's invisible, and that includes the laws that govern it. And there is a tradition  in Christian philosophy, thank God, that has made this point for a long time. The  Orthodox theology has made this point, and John Calvin repeated it very clearly, God is not subject to laws, but isn't arbitrary either in his dealings with us. Think  about this again from another standpoint, if we construct a proof and we then  say, Okay, I accept it. I believe God exists, what is our trust? Really? Primarily in God or the laws by which we've proven God exists, I think it would be the laws in which we've proven God we're called on to have an entire faith and our whole  being dedicated and love to God not the laws of logic, and now God has passed our logical credit check so we can believe he's there. No, we can't put our trust  even in logic above trusting God. God's the creator of those laws, and we think  that they're reliable and can lead us to truth because He created them and built  his his creation subject to them. That's one objection. Another objection is that  offering proofs to have have people come to faith in God is at odds with what the Scriptures themselves say about how people come to faith in God. They don't  say, Well, you look around the universe and you can just see that God made it  all. They say things such as we've been talking about before. They say, This is  what the gospel is, what we believe, and know that it's repeated over and over in the New Testament. We have faith. We believe it and we know it. It's not mere  belief. It's belief that is also knowledge, because it's based on experiencing God. It's based on experiencing God, and we're going to talk about that some more.  We already introduced the topic of religious experience, we looked at some 

types of it, and we I ended by focusing on another type hearing God speak  through His Word. And we're going to talk about that now in my. Much greater  detail in our next session.