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'Newton showed his Orrery to Halley the atheist, who was charmed with the contrivance, and asked the name of the maker: Nobody, was the ad hominem retort'
The implication being that if Halley could believe that no one had made the Solar System, then why would he find it hard to believe that no one had made the Orrery, which was a poor model of the Solar System, vastly inferior in design?
Putting this another way: If Halley the atheist, knew for a fact that someone had made the Orrery, the naive model of the universe in Isaac Newton's room, then why did he not know that someone had made the Solar System itself, something which was a lot more complicated and involved a lot more design work than the model?
The answer of course is that Halley would have known that someone had made the Solar System if his heart had allowed his brain to think as freely in the case of the reality as it obviously did in the case of the model.
But Halley's heart was not without fear of the implications and the ramifications that the existence of a God might have on him personally. For atheists do not allow themselves to think freely because they fear the consequences. And actually the same is true of many believers, who make themselves idolaters of their chosen belief system out of fear of the implications of what may be the truth. Mankind just throws his reason away when it comes to God and the bible. This book/website will hopefully show the reader what happens if one retains at least some of ones power of reason in these matters. Newton for his part very rarely threw away his reason. Perhaps he read and understood this verse of the bible:
30 You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind and with your whole strength (Mark 12:30).
And perhaps now the reader can truly understand the meaning of the famous words of Jesus Christ:
8 Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8).
The existence of order in the universe implies the existence of an orderer. Random chance cannot create sustained order. An orderer is an intelligence with power. We know that mankind did not create the ordered universe. So we can deduce that there is a powerful non human intelligence that created it. This is a matter of logic. So we know that there is a creator. In fact the second law of thermodynamics which basically states that whatever you do you create more chaos, or that chaos always increases, proves that there was an orderer to start with. Which means there was a creator, a God, this orderer. The big bang was perfect order in some sense, it must have been a seed with all of the information necessary for the entire universe, the most ordered creation ever.
Descartes said: I think therefore I am
The intelligent man says: I think therefore I was created by an intelligence
How many computers, devices with some limited intelligence, did random chance ever create?
There was a BBC2 Learning Zone program "After the Genome" on mapping the whole human genome, shown on Friday 24th October from 1:30-2:20 am 2003, wherein a Professor from a London university (Queen Mary) said that knowing the whole genome is like knowing every word in a Shakespearian sonnet, but the trouble he had was that he did not know the grammar of the genome which gives him the order of the words, so he could not read or write the sonnet of life. But his very words show that there must be a genetic poet, a greater Shakespeare, whose poetry we are.
In fact modern genetics acknowledges that there is a grammar to the genetic code with certain genes controlling macro body part positioning etc. So much so that humans have over 50% of the genetic material of a Banana, and the same genes control the same thing in entirely different animals. Geneticists describe this phenomenon as nature being 'lazy'. But it is nothing of the sort, a random process cannot possibly be lazy, it has to try every possible combination all the time. Evolution cannot have a grammar, and can never be lazy, it is merely the application of random chance to a vocabulary and the discarding of all the failures. So the existence of a universal genetic grammar of life that defines the way the genetic vocabulary is always put together necessitates an intelligent poet or a creator. Random processes cannot have grammar which is a structure for an intelligence to build with.
The other obvious clue is that the Genetic Code is digital and mankind now processes nearly all information digitally. So we are using the same techniques as nature. But mankind did not stumble across the digital age by random chance, we invented it using our intelligence. So how can we believe that nature has no designer for her digital exuberance?
Man's grasp of genetics has now advanced to the stage where we can download bacterial software DNA modules from the internet, design our own micro-organism, press print and a nice laboratory will produce a little cell which will turn sugar into alcohol, corn into BioDeisel, sea weed into petrol etc. Software is written. It is written for an intelligence to use. How can we sit using using the software of the very building blocks of life, create new life forms with these building blocks using our intelligence and then say that these building blocks evolved without an intelligence and were not supposed to be used by an intelligence but rather were supposed to wait for random chance to use them? Why can we not see that we are simply using the angelic bio design toolkit? If one finds a toolkit and uses it successfully then one says - Someone designed these to be used a tools by an intelligence. One does not say these tools evolved by random chance to be used by random chance. A tool is of no advantage to random chance. Random chance would not know how to use it.
The Sun is 400x larger than the moon and is 400x further away from the earth than the moon. This is the statistically incedible coincidence that causes a lunar and solar eclipse. Why do these two critical heavenly bodies fit over each other from our standpoint?
Galileo Galilei first discovered and proposed that the earth revolved around the sun, so that the sun was the centre of the solar system rather than the earth. He was of course condemned by the pope for being a heretic. But how amazing is it that the word 'Galilee' in Hebrew means a circuit or an orbit? How did his father know, when he named his son that he would discover something that was unknown to man at the time of his birth? This must be a heavenly sign. Of course Jesus represents the light of the world, the sun and we revolve around him, he does not revolved around us. We look to him for light and life he does not look to us to anything other than to help us and to love us.
Every animal with a heart has a lifespan of near enough 1 billions beats, no matter how fast their heart beats. So much so that biologists have incorporated this feature in a formula...
Life expectancy = 1902.6 / heart rate (beat per minute)
Here are some well known examples...
| Creation | Heart Rate Beat Per Minute | Life Expectancy |
| Pig | 60 | 31.71 |
| Whale | 9 | 211.4 |
| Elephant | 25 | 76.1 |
| Humming Bird | 1220 | 1.56 |
| Shrew | 835 | 2.28 |
| Large Fish | 20 | 95.2 |
This debate is covered more fully in section [221].
God name is written in the scriptures as the 4 Hebrew Consonants hwhy. It comes from the root hwh , meaning 'to be', to exist. The name itself means he who causes to become according to some translators. And According to Ben Davidson (AHCL) it combines the present and the future form of the verb 'to be' and so means 'I am and I will be', or 'he that is and will be'. So perhaps the best way to translate it is an eternally present creator. Seems like a good name for God!
That was the relatively easy part. The pronunciation of his name is more difficult. The most widely accepted form of God's name is Jehovah. Gesenius and Ben Davidson write it with the vowel pointing for Jehovah. This pronounciation was even used in the Indiana Jones movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'. It is an Germanicisation of Yehowah, which is formed by giving the 4 Hebrew consonants hwhy, which are known as the tetragrammaton, the vowels of the Hebrew word for Lord, which is ynda, a word which also has 4 consonants. This fix was invented by early bible copiers to avoid correct pronunciation of the divine name. The biblical names such as Jehoram, Jehoshaphat, Jehonadab and Jehoshua (Joshua) are all subject to this accepted euphemism for God's name. So one cannot deduce the correct vowels in God's name from their names. The same even is true of Elijah and Hallelujah. There would be little point in changing the divine name so that it was pronounced incorrectly and then writing names of kings which included parts of that name correctly pronounced. So Jehovah cannot be the answer since the particular vowels used in that pronunciation were invented in order to obscure the true pronunciation.
Now Josephus, the first century Jewish Historian, wrote in Book 5 Chapter 5 of the Wars of the Jews, that the high priest had God's name on his turban, 'it consists of 4 vowels' (not 4 consonants). Furthermore he wrote that the Jews called on God's name when they were being attacked by the Romans, and he was a powerful Jew, being the head of the army of Israel after Cestius' defeat until he surrendered to Vespasian at Gamala. So he would most likely have known the correct pronunciation of God's name.
The entire Old Testament originally had no vowel pointing at all (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah). In fact the letter Aleph was originally related to a, Hey was related to e, Yod was related to i, and vuv to o or oo or u. It is interesting therefore to note that the Tetragrammaton (the 4 letters which make Jehovah's name) YHWH hwhy are also vowels. So this may be what Josephus meant when he called the Tetragrammaton written on the high priest's turban - "4 vowels".
So let's use the 4 vowels of the Tetragrammaton as the vowels in God's name.
We then get Yiheyvoohey. This pronounciation results from vowelizing the 4 consonants.
In any event the original lettering of the language had 4 vowels which doubled as consonants (typical Hebrew) - not sure about
Ayin. Then the
Masoretes
introduced umpteen other vowels in the form of vowel pointing. But not satisfied with that, a whole bunch more of accents were introduced. So that in the end there were more vowel points and accents than there were letters in the original alphabet (alpha beta - aleph
beth). This is the path to phariseeism. You end up with a word so covered in vowel points and accents that you can hardly see it, read it, or understand it.
But then going back to the true
construction of hwhy, which Ben Davidson
has as a concatenation and condensation of why
and hw, the vowel pointing of Jehovah
would appear to be correct. But surely Jospehus was closer to the mark since he
actually knew the pronounciation!
Both the old and the new testaments bear witness to making God's name, Jehovah, known...
2 And God went on to speak to Moses and to say to him:
I am Jehovah.
3 And I used to appear to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God
Almighty, but as respects my name, Jehovah, I did not make myself known to
them.
4 And I also established my covenant with them to give them the
land of Canaan, the land of their alien residences in which they resided as
aliens.
5 And I, even I, have heard the groaning of the sons of
Israel, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I remember my covenant (Exodus 6).
25 Righteous Father, the world has, indeed, not come to know
you; but I have come to know you, and these have come to know that you sent me
forth.
26 And I have made your name known to them and will make it
known, in order that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in union with
them (John 17).
Metaphorically God's name stand for his character, his authority etc. It is apparent that Moses did not know God's name at first since he said...
13 Nevertheless, Moses said to the [true] God:
Suppose I am now come to the sons of Israel and I do say to them, 'The God of
your forefathers has sent me to you,' and they do say to me, 'What is his name?' What shall I say to
them?
14 At this God said to Moses: "I shall prove to be what
I shall prove to be' (or I am what I am). And he added: This is what you are to say to the
sons of Israel, 'I shall prove to be' (or I am) has sent me to you (Exodus 3).
So the physical sons of Israel got to know a physical pronunciation of God's name. But the spiritual sons of Israel, the sons of the JAC, the sons by covenant of Jacob, the saints, might get to know his love and his real character more than just a pronunciation of some letters. That would be of a far greater value.
24 God is a Spirit, and those worshipping him must worship with spirit and truth (John 4).
God is a spirit, but not necessarily a spirit creature, for he was not necessarily created. The above scripture implies that God's will existed before all creation occurred, which could logically imply that God himself was not created, we ourselves do not know. But what we do know is that God created space and time. He is the creator of everything:
11 You are worthy, Lord, even our God, to receive the glory and the honour and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they existed and were created (Revelation 4).
He has a character like the angels do and like humans do, he gets happy and sad, angry and relaxed:
11 According to the glorious good news of the happy God, with which I was entrusted (1 Timothy 1).
6 And Jehovah felt regrets that he had made men in the earth, and he felt hurt at his heart (Genesis 6).
13 Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah has said: I will also cause a blast of windstorms to burst forth in my rage, and in my anger there will occur a flooding downpour, and in rage there will be hailstones for an extermination (Ezekiel 13).
21 And Jehovah began to smell a restful odor, and so Jehovah said in his heart: Never again shall I call down evil upon the ground on man's account, because the inclination of the heart of man is bad from his youth up; and never again shall I deal every living thing a blow just as I have done (Genesis 8).
He has a character like ours, like that of Jesus to be precise, this is a meaning of:
26 Let us make man in our image according to our likeness (Genesis 1).
We do not want to oversimplify things here. If God was not created then how did he come into existence? Well one answer is that he has always been in existence. The sense in which this is meant is not that given any amount of time in the past he was always around before that time. It is rather that he himself created time. So the question: Was there anything before God? has the answer: No, because there was actually no 'before', since God created time. We cannot pretend to understand this very much but it is the best we can do right now.
This much we do know: Humans are limited both by space and by time. Angels are limited by time alone and not by space, and God is limited by neither. All humans who are saved by God, through Jesus, will eventually become angels and escape the confines of space. It is conceivable that some or all of us may also escape the confines of time at some point. This could only happen if we had developed a character good enough for this purpose, and perhaps we can never do this, we do not know. Actually it is more likely that we will always need God so we will never get such a character. Perhaps being outside time defines God in some way?
One can also deduce the existence of God from knowledge that appears in the bible that no human could have had at the time:
22 There is one who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers, the one who is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell (Isaiah 40).
7 He is stretching out the north over the empty place, Hanging the earth upon nothing (Job 26).
12 He is the Maker of the earth by his power, the One firmly establishing the productive land by his wisdom, and the One who by his understanding stretched out the heavens. (Jeremiah 10 NWT)
So we have a circle of the earth hung upon nothing in an expanding universe. Pretty good seeing as the earth was believed flat for 2,000 years after Isaiah and gravity was discovered 3,000 years after Job and Edward Hubble only discovered that the universe was expanding in 1929.
One can also deduce his existence, or at least the existence of non human intelligence, from the prophecies and fulfilments in the bible. For example:
[a] Daniel 8 prophesied the rise of the Greek world power through Alexander the Great (see Daniel 8)
[b] Both Revelation and Daniel prophesy that the UN will have world wide power in the last ten years of this system, from 1998 to 2008 ( see Daniel 7, Daniel 8, Revelation 13, Revelation 14). This is already fulfilled.
[c] Jeremiah in chapter 51 prophesied before 586AD when Jerusalem fell, how the city of Babylon would fall to the Medes, who would damn up the rivers to gain access to the city. They did this in 539AD. He also prophesied that it would eventually become piles of stones which would never be inhabited again, which it is today.
38 There is a devastation upon her waters and they must be dried up (Jeremiah 50).
39 Therefore the haunters of the waterless regions will dwell with the howling animals, and in her ostriches must dwell. And she will never more be dwelt in, nor will she reside for generation after generation (Jeremiah 50).
11 Jehovah has aroused the spirit of the kings of the Medes, because it is against Babylon that his idea is, in order to bring her to ruin (Jeremiah 51).
7 And Babylon must become piles of stones (Jeremiah 51).
Saddam Hussein was reported to have desired to rebuild Babylon, which is in modern Iraq, just before the Gulf War. He was stopped from doing this fairly comprehensively.
[d] Jesus prophesied in 33 AD about the temple in Jerusalem that not a stone would be left upon a stone. This is precisely the destruction that occurred in 70 AD under the Roman general Titus.
2 However, Jesus said to him: Do you behold these great buildings? By no means will a stone be left here upon a stone and not be thrown down (Mark 13).
There are around 300 prophecies which Jesus fulfilled personally as a human in his first century ministry. Someone somewhere has calculated that the chances of his doing this if there were no God are basically zero. Here are a few of the more famous ones with their fulfillments:
Prophecy: My God, my God, why have you left me?
[Why are you] far from saving
me, [From] the words of my roaring? (Psalm 22:1).
Fulfillment: About the ninth hour Jesus called out with a loud voice, saying:
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is: My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me? (Matthew 27:46).
Prophecy: He committed himself to Jehovah. Let him provide him with
escape! Let him deliver him, since he has taken delight in him! (Psalm
22:8)
Fulfillment: He has put his trust in God; let him now rescue him if
he wants
him, for he said: I am God's Son (Matthew 27:43).
Prophecy: They apportion my garments among
themselves, And upon my clothing they cast lots (Psalm 22:18).
Fulfillment: Therefore they said to one another: Let us not tear it, but let
us determine by lots over it whose it will be. This was that the scripture might be fulfilled:
They apportioned my outer garments among themselves, and upon my apparel they cast
lots. And so the soldiers really did these things (John 19:24).
Prophecy: And you, O Bethlehem of Ephrata, the one too little to get to
be among the thousands of Judah, from you there will come out to me the one who is to become ruler in
Israel, whose origin is from early times, from the days of time indefinite
(Micah 5:2).
Fulfillment: After Jesus had been born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of
Herod the king, look! astrologers from eastern parts came to Jerusalem
(Matthew 2:1).
Prophecy: Therefore Jehovah himself will give you men a sign: Look! The
maiden (virgin/unmarried woman) herself will actually become pregnant, and she is giving
birth to a son, and she will certainly call his name Immanuel (Isaiah
7:14).
Fulfillment: But after he had thought these things over, look!
Jehovah's angel appeared to him in a dream, saying: Joseph, son of David, do
not be afraid to take Mary your wife home, for that which has been begotten in her is by holy
spirit.
She will give birth to a son, and you must call his name Jesus, for he will
save his people from their sins.
All this actually came about for that to be fulfilled which was spoken by
the Lord through his prophet, saying:
Look! The virgin will become pregnant and will give birth to a son, and they will call his name
Immanuel, which means, when translated, 'With Us Is God' (Matthew
1:20-23).