The Functions of Deity: Ontology (The Source of Life & Being)

A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, 11 April 2010, 21 April 2024

Scripture from Isa., Matt. and 1 Cor. translated by Nate; the rest were modified by Nate from the ASV.

Existence

After Epistemology (the study of truth) comes ontology (the study of being). That is why the first book of the Bible tells us about how we and our world came into existence. So, after considering what is true in the realm of ideas, we must consider the existence of things and persons.

The 17^th century French philosopher Rene Descartes is generally acknowledged as the “father of modern philosophy.” Although Descartes assumed the existence of a divine God who gives certainty of knowledge¹, Decartes formulated a Humanistic epistemology, claiming that whatever he was certain of was truth².

• In 1637, he wrote the now-famous statement in his Discourse on Method « ...puisque je doute, je pense; puisque je pense, j'existe.» (“Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” - popularly quoted as “I think therefore I am.”) Since Descartes was certain that he could think, he was certain of his existence. And, as a result, many of Descartes’ followers attribute their existence to themselves rather than to God.

• By the way, did you hear about what happened when Descartes lost his temper in a noisy restaurant? He yelled, “Everybody shut up; you are all being so loud, I can’t think!” Nobody has seen him since! (You can laugh; that was supposed to be a joke!)

Anyway, once a philosopher establishes that he exists, he has to figure out how to prove whether or not anything else outside of him exists.

• 20^th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, taught that things must be able to exist if they can be hidden and then uncovered. “Being should be displayed in the mode of its Entborgenheit [that is, its ‘uncoveredness’]³,” wrote Heidegger. By this he meant that when an observer sees and hears and feels an object, that becomes, to the observer, that object’s reality.

• Now, it is true, at a limited, existential level, human beings operate that way practically. (You feel firm ground under your feet, and you accept that as reality, and so you walk on it.) But the danger is in extrapolating its practical use into a way of explaining all of knowledge and existence.

• Heidegger’s philosophy brought about a huge shift away from the Biblical and Platonic philosophies that God and Ideals exist independent of human observation and carry authority over man, and it ushered in the postmodern age where autonomous man seeks to create reality for himself without reference to God.

  • It enabled Heidegger to support the Nazis in his day.

  • These days we see the application of it when someone perceives a new gender in themselves and believes that their perception of it brings that new gender into existence for them and becomes just as existentially real as any other person’s reality.

In contrast to man-centered ontology, God made a profound statement about existence to Moses at the burning bush. There, God called Himself the ultimate being.

• Exodus 3:14-15 “I AM THAT I AM… This is what you must say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ And God said moreover to Moses, ‘This is what you must say to the children of Israel, “Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you; this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.”’”

• The name “Jehovah/Yahweh/LORD” (in capital letters) that God uses as a proper name for Himself in the Old Testament is based upon the Hebrew verb of being, and is translated by standard Hebrew lexicographers as “the existing one” – the One who will be what He will be.

• This God whose name means “existence” is self-existent and dependent upon no one else. (Acts 17:25 “…He is not served by men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He Himself gives to all life, and breath, and all things.”)

• The “Let there be ____” of the creation week was founded upon the prior eternal existence of God. The Bible teaches that the existence of God is the foundation of all existence.

Origin Of The Universe

I do not want to spend a lot of time on the philosophy of existence, however. Rather I want to address the particular ontological question of origins: Where did everything come from? From there, I want to look at the practical ramifications of positing God as the source of all being (and of life) versus the practical ramifications of believing that the material universe (and life) originated itself.

Setting aside the self-refuting hypothesis that everything is just an illusion – that nothing actually exists, there are basically two alternatives left to explain the world around us:

1. Either “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” (as Carl Sagan taught) or,

2. the cosmos/material world is not eternal but rather was made by God.

Those who do not believe in the truth of a supernatural God, ascribe the functions of deity to matter, energy, or to persons (usually themselves) – made out of matter and energy. This materialistic world­view is the main belief system in American culture. Let’s look at some examples of option #1: Materialism:

1. Here’s a recent quote by Albrecht Moritz, a scientist in the field of cellular biology, currently working on cures for cancer. Notice how he starts with the laws of nature rather than with God: “Since we know that the laws of nature are so self-sufficient that, based on them, the complexity of the entire physical universe evolved from fundamental particles, and further, complex life forms from simpler ones during biological evolution, we can reasonably extrapolate that they would also allow life itself to originate spontaneously, by evolution of complex structures – regardless if we believe these laws are designed or un-designed. Therefore, we should expect an origin of life by natural causes…⁴” If that isn’t the fallacy of circular reasoning, I don’t know what is: “Since the laws of nature are so self-sufficient... we should expect an origin of life by natural causes.”

2. But the more scientists learn, the more impossibly difficult it is becoming to explain with integrity the origin of life by natural causes. Robert Shapiro, in his article “A Simpler Origin for Life,” published in the February 2007 issue of Scientific American, wrote of the impossibility of DNA (and even of the simpler RNA) to be formed from inanimate matter: “[C]hemists have invoked freezing glacial lakes, mountainside freshwater ponds, flowing streams, beaches, dry deserts, volcanic aquifers and the entire global ocean (frozen or warm as needed) to support their requirement that the ‘nucleotide soup’ necessary for RNA synthesis would somehow have come into existence on the early Earth… I calculated that a large lagoon would have to be evaporated to the size of a puddle, without loss of its contents, to achieve that concentration. No such feature exists on Earth today… The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who, having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the sug­gestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (impli­citly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck… Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothe­sis as if it were a building on fire…”⁵ However, instead of admitting a designer, Dr. Shapiro sug­gested another hypothesis (which he had not tested scientifically), consisting of large quantities of simpler organizations of matter functioning together to store and replicate information without RNA. He would rather grasp at straws than admit God’s revealed truth.

3. Reaching further back into the modern age, Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of the Species, the same year that Louis Pasteur entered his now-famous experiment at the French Academy of Science Fair, disproving spontaneous generation. Darwin was part of a generation that thought that flies came into being out of non-living trash. So Darwin had no qualms publish­ing a hypothesis that all of life evolved out of non-living material, because he had forsaken div­ine revelation in the Bible, which tells us the truth that life came from God, not from non-living material. Apologist Greg Outlaw commented on this that, “The sadly comical result is that some modern-day textbooks devote a chapter to the work of Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur, and their success in disproving Spontaneous Generation. Then, a few chapters later, school kids are taught that Spontaneous Generation is the Origin of Life.”⁶

4. A few years ago, I went to hear a distinguished guest lecturer speak at Kansas State University about new developments in the field of chemistry. The professor was a brilliant speaker and scientist, but I noticed a couple of comments he made which were out-of-keeping with scientific method. He stated that a certain number of chemical compounds had been found to exist in space outside of the earth, but no protein has been discovered outside of earth. Now that is a scientific statement, but the next statement he made was religious, “Don’t worry,” he said, “proteins will be found; it’s only a matter of time before we find them and figure out where life came from.” The assumption that life came from proteins in space is a faith statement, just as religious as the hypo­thesis that aliens brought life to earth, and just as religious as the Christian claim that a personal, transcendent God created the universe out of nothing by His spoken word.

5. Modern scientists, in rebellion against God, want to place the origin of life anywhere but God, because they don’t want to face the ramifications of being accountable to that creator-God. Anyone who rejects God as the origin of life (and of the universe) will go to absurd and irrational lengths to find some alternative explanation for the origin of things.

6. Now, they may accuse us Christians of using God as a cop-out for our ignorance about nature. They say that God was made up by men to explain what we could not explain scientifically. Thus, whenever there is a “gap” in our knowledge, we conveniently fill it by saying, “God did it.” The argument goes that, since the universe is nothing more than material, any supernatural explanation is false because a natural, materialistic explanation eventually will be found to explain that process which Christians thought to be supernatural. Do you see how this argument smuggles its conclu­sion into its starting premise? The naturalist who believes that a scientific explanation will eventually be found to explain everything is just as guilty of a “god in the gaps” theology as Christians are; he just substitutes his god of nature for our God.

• Furthermore, scientists, in rebellion against God, claim that embracing supernatural explanations for origins is anti-science – retreating back into the Dark Ages. That is pure historical fancy! It was scientists who were Christians who brought science out of the Dark Ages (which maybe weren’t so dark after all, but that’s another discussion). Men like Galileo, Pasteur, Pascal, Bacon, Newton, and Faraday, were all Christians who made scientific investigations precisely because they believed in a God who created order which could be discovered in the universe!

Let us then turn to consider the second worldview: the Biblical worldview that the cosmos was created by a personal God.

• Genesis 1:1 – “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

• Psalm 90:2 “Before the mountains were brought forth, or even [before] You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”

• Nehemiah 9:6 “You are Jehovah, yes You alone; You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and You preserve them all; and the host of heaven worships You.”

• John 1:1-3 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him; and without Him nothing was made that has been made.”

• Colossians 1:16 “in Him [Jesus Christ] were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and to Him.”

• Revelation 4:11 “You are worthy, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power: for You created all things, and because of Your will they came into being and were created.”
  There is really no question where the Scriptures stand on the origin of the universe! And it should be clear that the human response to our creator-God should be to worship God and His Son Jesus.

• Listen to a more extended passage of scripture in which Paul uses Biblical ontology to make disciples when he made a trip to Macedonia (Greece):Acts 17:22-31 Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus, and said, “Men of Athens, in all things, I perceive that y’all are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore, what y’all worship in ignorance, this I set forth to you: The God that made the world and all things in it, He, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is he served by men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing He Himself gives to all life, and breath, and all things. And He made out of one, every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having deter­mined their appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their habitation, in order that they might seek God, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by art and device of man. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked; but now He commands men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained, concerning whom He has given assurance to all men, in that He raised Him from the dead.”
  Our response to this great truth should be to repent of valuing material things and seek God!

Ontology (the study of being) covers many subjects. We have looked at the contrast between the claim of materialism (that the universe has always existed) and the Biblical doctrine (that God created every­thing, including man and woman). Another topic of ontology is the question of the nature of humans in particular. What is a person made of and why?

Human Ontology

1. The secular materialist says that humans came from eternal matter and energy and are therefore merely a temporary arrangement of physical atoms.

   • Therefore, thinking is nothing more than the arrangement of chemicals, and is no different from muscle movement,

   • and death is merely the ceasing of the chemicals of your body to act in an organized manner.

   • John Dewey, one of the greatest minds behind America’s public education system, put it this way, “mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations [of observation, recollection, foresight, and judgment] is a myth… Knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles.⁷”

   • And, of course, if everything is reduced to chemistry, then there can be no right or wrong, any more than Sodium Chloride can be more right or wrong than Sodium Nitrate.

   • U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from the early 20^th century, is quoted as saying, “When one thinks coldly, I can see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand.” In another place he wrote, “I am so skeptical as to our knowledge about the goodness and badness of laws that I have no practical criterion except what the crowd wants.⁸” No wonder his successors in government allow the destruction of unborn children when pressured to do so!

2. The Biblical Christian, on the other hand, says that the personal, transcendent God of the Bible made man in the image of God, thus humans are more than physical atoms – we also have a non-physical spirit or soul. There can, therefore, be life after physical death, in which the soul lives on.

• There are some in-between who believe that life came from some other personal source:

  • such as a demigod (which is ultimately an imperfect reflection of the Biblical God),

  • or that life came from aliens (begging the question of where the aliens came from, and I suspect that if you nailed most of these people to the wall, they’d admit the aliens must have had a material origin of some sort),

  • so I believe the supposedly middle-ground positions can fairly be pressed back to one of the two basic positions – either God created man, or man is an accident of the material universe.

  • What does the Bible say about human ontology?
    Genesis 2:7 “Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

There are within Christian circles further debates regarding the nature of man,

• such as the debate over what exactly is the “image of God,”

• and the debate between dichotomy and trichotomy (are humans made up of “soul and body” or is there a third component of “spirit” which is separate from the soul?).
  There are plenty of good theology books you can read if you want to delve into those issues.

• Let me briefly enter into just one of these debates – the debate over the origin of the human soul. (I chose this one to demonstrate some further comparison and contrast between the Biblical Christian and Secular Humanist worldviews.)

There are basically two non-Christian views on the human soul,

1. That there is no such thing as a non-physical soul. You are just a clump of Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Carbon atoms. That is the materialist position.

2. That the human soul itself is God and exists eternally in some fashion,

   1. perhaps as the Hindu Atman that unites with the “universal soul,”

   2. or as the Mormon view of the soul, originating from a human couple who became gods over our planet and who populated the earth with human souls.

• If you have accepted the Bible as the authority for truth, you will, however, dismiss these views because they are not taught in the Bible.

But there are 2 other views on the origin of the human soul which I think can be supported Biblically:

1. The Creationist view: that God created a unique, new soul for each one of us at the moment of our conception, thus each human life is immediately created by God.

• This is the view most commonly held in Reformed circles, and I currently lean towards it.

• Other proponents include Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, John Gill, Louis Berkhof, and Charles Hodge.

2. The Traducian view says that God created Adam and Eve immediately, but made them in such a way that they could impart human life to their offspring, thus each of our souls, while ultimately created by God, came most immediately from our parents.

• Key theologians who held this view include: Tertullian, Franz Delitzsch, William Shedd, A.H. Strong, and Gordon Clark.

1. Creationists point to statements in the Bible that God is the origin of human hearts/souls/spirits.

• Psalm 33:15 “He who fashions the hearts of all…”

• Eccl. 12:7 When you die, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto God who gave it.”

• Isaiah 57:16 “For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always angry; for the spirit would faint before me, and the souls that I have made.”

• Zech. 12:1b “…Thus says the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him” (cf. Num. 16:22, Ps .104:30, Jer 38:16, Heb 12:9).

2. Traducionists point to other verses which seem to indicate that souls came from parents, such as:

• Gen. 46:26 “All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, that came out of his loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were sixty-six.” (cf. Heb 7:9-10)

• Acts 17:26a “…He made out of one man every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth…”

• Traducianists also point to the statement in Genesis 2:2-3 that God rested from His work of crea­tion, and question whether God kept on creating souls⁹ after His work of creation was finished.

• Part of the reason for the differences of opinion among faithful Christians stems from the fact that the Bible uses the words “heart,” “soul,” and “spirit” with different meanings in different passages.

• And both positions face challenges in navigating the effect of sin on human nature and its effect on the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb. For instance:

  • If parents can’t pass anything on to their children but physical genetics, and if God is not the author of sin, then how do we explain how we get our sin nature?¹⁰

  • Yet, if the sin nature is passed down from the parents as part of the soul, how do we explain how Jesus didn’t get a sin nature from his human mother?¹¹

  • I think it’s valid to just say that the Bible teaches that we have a sin nature and that Jesus didn’t. We don’t have to be able to explain all the why’s and wherefore’s, although there may be value in researching them.

• This rabbit trail on Traducianism vs. Creationism to explain the origin of the human soul probably should not be belabored, but here are some things we can learn from taking this excursion:

• You owe your existence to God, the creator of your soul.

• You can’t blame God for your sin nature, however.

• Jesus was born without sin, and His sinlessness qualified Him uniquely to be the perfect sacrifice to atone for your sin.

• What we believe about where we came from has consequences in a lot of areas, so it is important to form our views carefully according to God’s word.

How can the existence of God define your existence?

• Understanding where we came from makes a big difference as to who we believe we are and what we will do, because we will tend to act like the forces we believe brought us into being.

• If we believe that a personal God created us, we will tend to function in an interpersonal way,

• but if we believe that we are the product of impersonal forces, we will act in a more impersonal way.

• Take, for example, Adolf Hitler. Sir Arthur Keith, in his book, Evolution and Ethics, wrote, “The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.¹²” Hitler believed that humans are merely a species of animal, therefore we have no intrinsic value and are not exempt from “the war of nature.” Thus, he figured, “should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?¹³” And he murdered more than six million Jews, whom he deemed to be inferior members of the human species.

• If love is not a major theme in your life, then perhaps you are buying into materialism more than you thought.

• Understanding where we came from also makes a difference in what we value.

• People who believe that they came from eternal matter will value material things and spend their lives ignoring spiritual things in order to accumulate material wealth.

• On the other hand, people who believe they came from the God of the Bible will value spiritual things and focus on the expansion of the kingdom of Christ. In Matthew 6:25 Jesus said, “…be not anxious for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor yet for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the clothing?”

Materialism is a bankrupt philosophy for the origin of life. The only viable alternative is the Biblical explanation of existence that Yahweh, the personal, transcendent God who existed from eternity, created the world and human life – and the human soul in particular.

Application:

1. If God made you, then you are not God, and you cannot become God.

So don’t play God in other people’s lives. Don’t treat other people like dirt. Instead, “treat other people as more important than yourself.” Phil. 2:3-7 “do nothing through dissention or through vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let each count another better than himself; not looking each of you to his own, but each of you also to the concerns of others. Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

2. If God made the world, then we should respect His creation and preserve the life God made.

   1. This applies to the environment – not destroying plants and animals and their habitat needlessly, but rather studying and appreciating the marvelous design and handiwork of our creator and taking care of His creations.

   2. And it applies especially to our fellow human beings: If God gave them life and being, we should preserve their lives rather than destroy them.

      1. This has applications to war in practices like not killing non-combatants.

      2. It also prohibits abortion and euthanasia, since the unborn and the aged have both been given life and existence by God, so man does not have authority to take life without God’s permission¹⁴.
         
         

3. If God made the world, He is sovereign over it and you must submit to His Lordship.

   1. Matthew 10:28 “…be not afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

   2. The God who made us is the God to whom we should bow and give reverent worship.

   3. You do not have the authority to decide what to do with your body. It belongs to God, and you need to look for instructions in the Bible as to how to steward the body He has given you.
      
      

4. If God created the world and created you, He can also give you new spiritual life:

   1. When King David of old broke down and confessed his sin before God in Psalm 51, he begged God, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

   2. This is consistent with what the Apostle Paul wrote in Titus 3:5 “God saved us, not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to His mercy through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit.” It is God who changes us and gives us eternal life through the work of His Son Jesus!

   3. 2 Cor. 5:15-18 “He died for all, that those who live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again... Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new. But all things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ...”