Video Transcript: Equally Real

We're going to continue now talking about this way of getting at the nature of the thing by noticing the kinds of properties. It has each kind, having its own sort of  laws. So we had plant, rock, plant animal, and this was human human beings,  being active in every aspect. And I said, there's more to a human being than just the functions in the aspect. So for a human being, there is the heart. In the  biblical sense, this is a metaphor does not mean the organ that beats inside  your chest, but from the heart, come all the issues of life says the scripture. So  the heart is a central unity of the human being, with all these other functions,  such as thought, and will, perception and emotion and biotic life, linguistic ability, and social awareness, aesthetic appreciation, and all the rest, it all centers in  the heart. And there, this is where there is that about the heart, which is more  than anything subjected to any laws, so that there is real freedom, not just free  will, but free, rational, free judgment, free action. There's real freedom at the  heart of human existence. Now, that's just a first approximation of the nature of  things. But already, it has some real differences with all the traditional theories of reality. First of all, we're regarding all these aspects as equally real. They're all  real. From the moment of creation, from the very instance that God called the  universe into being. It potentially had every one of these, and the laws for them  already existed. That's part of the theory on the law side of an aspect. There  might not yet be things that have all the properties. Although maybe there were,  I mean, if you say, well, at least we have some, something exploded at the Big  Bang, we have at least plasma even if we don't have organized atoms and  molecules yet, but there's something there. And the something has all these  aspects. Some people think that sounds pretty strange. But listen, folks, the  guys that tell us about all this stuff, the astrophysicist form concepts of them,  don't they? They form concept of the Big Bang, they form a concept of what a  plasma is, of what space is. And it's it's rapid inflation, so that the universe  becomes huge, and matter spread out through it. They conceive of that, so  whatever that is, it's logically conceivable. It may not be able to be perceived,  centrally, because it's an it's an event that's over. But we certainly can perceive  what's left of it, we can perceive the objects near us, Moon, the other planets,  stars, galaxies, were able to observe. On the law side, the laws already exist.  God's law for creation is built into creation, God's the law giver, to creation. So  whether it's the laws of thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics, whatever it is,  God has built in to the into his creation, the orderliness that we find, and it  includes those laws. So once again, we reject the necklace metaphor for a  theory of reality. It's not that some one of what appear to be the beads on the  necklace are really the string that makes all the rest. We already saw why that  was biblically objectionable. Scripture actually rules that out. So we don't take  that kind of a point of view at all. So we're saying now that on the law side of  each of these aspects, they name a kind of properties and laws, the laws come  into being with the universe with space and time, the kinds of properties get 

differentiated in an ongoing process. And yet, potentially, they're there. That's  why, in that sense, tese are all equally real, potentially there. If they weren't  potentially there. You couldn't conceive of it. You couldn't imagine it. You couldn't speak of it. No discovery concerning it would be this person's discovery rather  than that one's so that if the other one stole it, it would be theft. It has a  tyrannical aspect. It has a social aspect. It has a logical so all the stuff the  people or some people like to say, well, at the beginning of the Big Bang, there  was no organization whatsoever. It's total Chaos, there are no laws, there are no properties. And that's a concept. That's a logical concept. So it was least passive logically right? And wasn't it passes spatially . And wasn't it passive numerically,  you arrived at that theory by mathematical calculation. So math applies to it, you arrived at it by logical concepts. See my point. There's no way to get out from  these, these are the ways that we experience and think of everything, and  therefore there the ways we can explain things. So I hope I've made this clear  and made it contrast with the other ways of doing theory of reality. Because  without God to be the origin of everything, some one of these has to be the  nature of what's the origin of everything. And we've never found any good,  plausible candidates. And I'm saying that none of these are plausible candidates for the nature of something you want to regard is the divine origin of all the rest.  If you feel like objecting to this by saying, You keep talking about God is  transcendent God called all these into existence, and therefore none of those  are his nature. But wait a minute, is that right? I mean, isn't it the case, that the  Christian God is one God in three persons is everywhere in space? can move  from one place to another, can impact us physically? Is God physical, among  other things? Yes, he speaks of His power. He's the living God. He's the God  who should be the object of our love, our strong feeling, but God has feelings for us. God is depicted in Scripture as grieving over people who reject His love, and incur on themselves punishment. Is God logical? God? Created the laws of  logic, but he knows things. In fact, one text says God knows everything. Can  God form things he formed the whole universe? Is God, linguistic Can God  speak? Scripture is full of instances in which God encountered humans and  spoke. We sit we speak of the Scripture as his word. The word comes from God, the Word of love and salvation and forgiveness. That message is in words. It's in language. Is God social? What about the relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit,  economic, God says to the people who have great wealth, you remember that  that whole the whole world is mine. You're just allows use it for a while. There's  no such thing in the Christian view, as absolute ownership. God really owns it  all. This is why in ancient Israel, he imposed on them a law that said that if  people got so hard up, they had to sell their farmland, that in 50 years, they got  it back. Every 50th year, all land reverts to the original owner. So that does not  end up with a small class of people owning everything, and all the rest of having  to work for them. God prevents that as an injustice. We worship God in the 

beauty of holiness. And ethically, we exercise love to our fellow human beings,  because they're in the image of God. Love your neighbor as yourself. And we  put all our trust in God, because God is the one reality that can never let us  down. So what do you mean? God transcends them all? God created them all,  but they're all in some way true of him aren't they? And the answer to that is yes. The Christian view is that God has created space time and all these kinds of  properties and the laws that go along with them, and has taken some of them  into himself. Do you remember that that schema had on the board before? That  for Christianity, the scheme is not just that there's God, there's creation. It's that  God also enters creation and takes creation into himself. He takes into himself  these created properties that constitute the nature in which he is pleased to  manifest himself that's quote, John Kelvin, the nature in which he's pleased not  the nature in which he cannot be otherwise and stuck with and this is what He  didn't create it. No, it's the nature in which he is pleased to manifest himself.  Because he has taken this properties into himself, I'm calling you that to your  remembrance, so that you understand my point here. Well, God has a nature  that can be understood, he also transcends it there is more to it than that. And  the more we cannot know we cannot conceptualize. That is deep and  permanent mystery. So we've rejected the metaphor of the necklace. We've  shown as a start, how things get qualified by different aspects. That humans are  the only realities we know of in the universe that have no qualifying function. But for other things, we could locate where they go and in this, the once again, the  aspects that qualifies their nature is the one that is the highest in which they  have their properties actively, and the laws of which govern the internal  organization and functioning of the thing. Now we're going to take it a little  further next time