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