MESSAGE INTRODUCTION
Have you ever thought about an idea so much that it made your head hurt? Concepts like eternity and the way the Trinity works and how God is thinking about you and sustaining you this very moment . . . these are ideas so large, they leave us mentally breathless before too long.
Some ideas leave us breathless because they are so fundamentally wrong. The self-creation of the universe is one of those. Like a thousand-pound weight on the shoulders, not everything that strains human capacity is good exercise.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. To critically consider the idea that the universe is self-created.
2. To analyze the common use of the word "chance."
3. To be able to show through illustration the irrationality of self-creation if ascribed to the universe.
QUOTATIONS AND THOUGHTS
When we think of anything that has origin, we are not thinking of God. God is self-existent, while all created things necessarily originate somewhere at some time.
(A.W. Tozer)
The wisdom of the flesh is always exclaiming against the mysteries of God. (John Calvin)
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Creation by Chance: Not a Chance
a) Caveat: I am not a physicist. But the inferences that they draw from their data are often stated irrationally.
b) Arthur Koestler: "As long as chance rules, God is an anachronism." But it is necessary for chance only to exist for God to be destroyed; chance does not need to rule, only to exist, to eliminate God from our equations.
II. Physics by Illustration
a) Illustration: A Quarter and a Harvard Professor
b) Illustration: R.C., Al, and a Train
III. What is chance?
a) Modern jargon has elevated the term "chance" beyond the definition of mathematical odds. It has been colloquially given some kind of power and ontology.
b) Ontology is the study of being. Chance has no being. It is only conceptual.
c) Chance is no-thing.
d) Niels Bohr: Contraria un Complementaria or "Contrary Complementarity."
Contradictions are complementary.
e) Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty: We can't explain the behavior of some subatomic particles. But to move from this lack of explanation to inferring that nothing is producing the effect is irrational.
f) Nonsense and bad science are the result of self-existence theories.
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