A Study of Reality: Man’s Finite Response to God’s Infinite Revelation

A novel approach to understanding God’s revelation to man is to begin at the very beginning. That beginning for us is our condition at the moment of birth. At the moment we are born, we are incredibly ignorant. We do not consciously know anything.

It is our nature to slowly learn bit by tiny and often painful bit everything we ever come to know. Fortunately, we are born with an instinct to suck, to learn, and to enjoy puzzles. Among our first learning experiences in life is how to effectively suck to obtain the nourishment we need for continued life.

At birth, we cannot even roll over or consciously use the members of our body in an effective manner. The baby learns additional eating skills, how to roll over, to crawl, and finally how to walk. Initially, the instinct to cry and scream precedes the baby’s learning more effective methods of obtaining help. Learning to communicate by using words is a  much slower and extended process. We also learn about hazards in life that must be avoided and social skills that will improve our interactions with others.

A useful aid to learning is that we humans enjoy solving puzzles. This delight in solving puzzles begins early in life. One example is the child’s toy of three long blocks of wood, one triangular, one circular, and one rectangular in shape. Each of the three blocks will only fit into its correspondingly shaped hole in a wood template. Even that simple puzzle takes effort and time to solve.

For most of the things we learn during the first years of our lives, the natural pace of learning through experience is sufficient. With growing independence, some adult guidance about danger becomes essential. For example, the child first needs to learn never to enter a street alone. Immediately supplementing that prohibition with an exaggerated demonstration of why, followed by repeatedly having the child practice deciding whether it is or is not safe at each street crossing with an adult is an effective approach. Our parents are the first source of this type of learning through teaching and training.

Learning skills that are useful throughout life, while less urgent, are very important. So, we are off to school, an institution designed and intended to facilitate learning. In school, we are taught skills of reading, writing, arithmetic, and learning itself. These effective and useful lifetime tools were slowly developed by our ancestors. School is how we efficiently learn the treasures of humanly discovered useful things. Unfortunately, today, most school systems have been corrupted and diverted away from this fundamental purpose into tools of propaganda.

As we grow older, we progress to solving ever more complicated puzzles, such as riddles, jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, mystery stories, and Rubik’s cubes. Science, the effort to understand the puzzle of how the world works, and ultimately how the tangible reality that is available to our senses works, is an adult puzzle that is enjoyed by many. Understanding how reality works has proven to be incredibly useful and beneficial.

The most advanced and interesting puzzle of all is Religion. Religion begins with the effort to understand why the reality we inhabit even exists since every tangible thing we experience depends on some prior existing thing for its existence. This dependence for existence on some prior thing is called a contingency or more precisely being contingent.

As the wisdom expressed in a delightful song by Richard Rogers affirms: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”  This obvious fact is a foundational truth though, some experts in science deny it, forgetting that the successful field of scientific study is limited to what can be observed and measured. One simplified history of science that identifies the puzzling things that led to many scientific discoveries is:  “The Magic Furnace the Search for the Origins of Atoms” by Marcus Chown, Oxford University Press, 2001. This book was a delightful discovery by this retired Principal Design Engineer who writes to share his observations and discoveries with you.

The huge number of “observable” facts discovered and acknowledged by science leads us back to “The Big Bang” as the physically identifiable source of everything material in today’s world. But “The Big Bang” itself is an awesomely huge impossibility as the explanation of existence if the whole of reality consists only of the observable and measurable “contingent things” that are studied by science.

This is true because the existence of “The Big Bang”, without some prior and incredibly greater cause, stands in stark contradiction of everything we humans have experienced and discovered, including many laws of physics that have been solidly established by science. Reason assures us that eventually, for this world of contingent things to exist, there must ultimately exist some cause of an entirely different nature than the contingent nature of every tangible thing we have discovered in this world of material objects.

There must ultimately be some cause, the very nature of which is the reason why that causing agent itself inherently exists, in order for a universe of contingent things to exist. Men have named that inherently existing cause:  God.

The world is divided into two opposing viewpoints. Those who recognize the ultimate necessity of an uncaused cause, that men call God, which is the ultimate explanation and cause of every existing contingent thing that we observe, and those who deny that necessary cause. The deniers insist upon the absurdity that an observably contingent thing suddenly popped into existence out of absolutely nothing. These “deniers” of an uncaused cause ridicule those who pursue the religion puzzle for having made some really silly mistakes along their path of natural discovery.

These “deniers”  ignore the silly mistakes that “scientists”  have made along their path of natural discovery. A few of the mistakes that scientists have believed are the spontaneous generation of germs, phlogiston, the either, tiny particles called photons that somehow react differently based upon whether one or two slits are present that they can pass through, an unseen and unmeasured “ocean” of tiny matter and small quantities of energy that is continuously popping into and out of existence too quickly to be observed, and that reality itself isn’t determined until it is actually observed.

Those promoting some recent opinions have ventured outside the limits of “Science” by proposing the existence of totally unseen, unmeasured, and undetectable objects or events, whether particles, packets of energy, or whatever.

Support for the existence of “photons” is that “electromagnetic waves” exhibit a “discrete” characteristic. It seems fairly obvious that this “discreteness” just might be introduced by the fact that the nature of both the generator and the detector of these “waves” or “photons” are discrete in their action and in their response. And while scientists claim to have measured the effect of a single photon interacting with one atom, that “photon” or “electromagnetic wave” also would have interacted in an unmeasured way with a huge number of atoms before it measurably interacted with that single atom. This is a large number of variables whose effects have not been analyzed.

I believe that eventually, the explanation of today’s “paradoxes” that are at the root of the absurdity currently proposed by science will be recognized as a defective description or conclusion that hides something from our awareness, similar to the way that we now understand so many of the once troubling – and absurd – paradoxes of history.

Today, some even deny the “Big Bang” as the beginning of the universe that we “observe” with our senses. That claim does not eliminate the recognizable fact that there has to be a non-contingent cause that is the source and explanation of the existence of the chain of contingent objects that we observe. We can deny that fact, but such a denial merely avoids the issue of why contingent things exist. I.e., how something came into existence out of nothing.

The current theory regarding the nature of all matter is in part that electrons, protons, and neutrons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. My own limited knowledge of physics is inadequate to evaluate how likely it is that these short-lived bits of wreckage from high energy collisions between electrons or protons are real components, existing within electrons, protons, and neutrons; or just transient particles temporarily produced by a source of sufficiently high energy.

I’m not aware of any experiment that has created an electron, proton or neutron out of either various quarks or pure energy. So, within my limited knowledge, the following questions seem reasonable to me.

1) Are quarks actual sub-particles existing within protons, electrons, and neutrons that initially combined to form these various types of matter and then became much more stable and longer lasting when thus joined together? 2) Or, are quarks an intermediate step in the formation of matter that cease to exist once a proton, electron or neutron is formed? 3) Or, are quarks simply short-lived bits of matter that are only transiently formed out of energy and that have nothing to do with protons, electrons, or neutrons?

The physical world about us can and does reveal many things about the source of its creation. Paul affirms this truth in Romans 1: 18-23. Wisdom 13:1–9 is another awesome description of how much can be learned about this source of creation that men call God, by studying the material universe. This is because that which caused or created the universe could not include something in that creation not already possessed in greater fullness within itself.

The Religion puzzle is not limited to recognizing the necessary existence of an “uncaused cause” that inherently exists as part of its nature. The Religion puzzle seeks to discover and understand as much as possible about the nature of that “uncaused cause”, just as science seeks to understand as much as possible about the tangible universe.

What reason, applied to known facts, assures us is true is confirmed by numerous extraordinary events or facts that have been historically reported in and through the Jewish and Christian religions. These otherwise inexplicable events are accepted by many as miracles that God has provided to make Himself known to mankind, not only through creation itself but also through special acts of Revelation. The puzzle that religion seeks to solve at the natural level includes the examination and testing of the validity of these events that are presented to us as interventions by God. At the natural level, fallen human reason is adequate to determine, with a useful degree of accuracy, whether or not something is true or false.

Members of that original Christian community of believers through whom Jesus made His public teaching known to the world, that still exists today, believe that after natural human reason has done its proper God-given job, reasonable and appropriate faith, aided and empowered by God’s gift of grace, enable them to believe and respond to God’s Divine revelation in a way that is far beyond our natural human capability so that our grace empowered response is pleasing to God.

Concerning how God reveals Himself and His eternal plan to men, readers are invited to carefully read and compare Scripture’s explicitly stated way in which God makes His revelation known, stated in Ephesians 3: 10 to the Biblically unsupported but deeply ingrained and beloved human tradition of “The Bible alone”, that was introduced by those who chose to “Protest” against that historic Christian Church. Incidentally, Protestants in the 16^th century were not the first people to reject and leave the existing Divinely formed community of God (E.g., Hosea 9: 7-9) or the subsequently formed Christian community. (E.g., See Scripture’s example and verdict on these in 1 John 2: 19.)

A personal word of caution in regard to Scripture:  I am convinced that one should accept what is explicitly stated by Scripture, rather than making and depending upon appealing assumptions external to and not an explicit part of the text. This does not exclude making recognized tentative conclusions from some Scriptural facts, so long as one does not confuse such tentative speculations with solidly established revealed facts or use the speculations as grounds for rejecting other things stated in Scripture. No speculation that directly contradicts or denies explicit Scriptural lessons can be true.